Incoming Links

• February 28th, 2021

  Here's a ridiculous comparison: a Person is like an extremely advanced robot hooked up to an artificial general intelligence. It's ridiculous because robots and AIs are just our attempts to make things similar to us, so there's almost no information content in the analogy.

• March 24th, 2021

  My own working definition of a Subpersonality is a semipermanent and semi-autonomous region of the personality capable of acting as a Person. *

• March 6th, 2021

  Simler's article has this simple diagram of a brain topology, where we see an Addiction as a nexus that's almost but not quite an independent living agent inside the Person.

  I would agree with this, but as I'm writing this I'm starting to see differently what it means for a part of me to be Person-like, and to see that inner multiplicity is nothing strange or unusual. It's like the water I swim in.

• March 7th, 2021

  In yesterday's 📝 More Weird Fishes: Gods, Languages, Addictions I started thinking about the human Person as a kind of aquarium of what I'm borrowing a Radiohead lyric to call "weird fishes."

  Today I'm thinking about this as a way to approach MacIntyre's 📙 After Virtue, which is not just about what it means to be a good Person but also about what it means to be a person at all.

• Thread on Self and World and Exiting 2020

  so Erich Fromm in "The Art of Loving" says: "If I truly love one Person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to somebody else, 'I love you', I must be able to say 'I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself.'"

• Uses of Disorder

  As Denis de Rougemont has so wisely remarked, the sharing that occurs in deep relations of intimacy grows out of loving the distinctiveness, the uniqueness of the other Person, not in the merging of selves into one homogenized being. But in the purification of a coherent community image, fear rather than love of men’s “otherness” prevails.

• 📰 A Creative Multiplicity

  No matter how communal the initial struggle, sooner or later the collective will dissolved into a competition between individual desires – with one Person eventually emerging as the leader, at the expense of the others. Why do collaborations always collapse into hierarchies, he asked himself? Why does the group get atomised, rather than retaining a unified voice?

  In fact, what appears to us in experience as an individual – be it a single stone or an individual Person – gains its identity only as an effect of diverse forces that are in constant tension with one another.

• 📰 AGNES CALLARD — What Is It Like to Be a Philosopher?

  The book argues that aspiration comes into view when we acknowledge the possibility of proleptic rationality (the rationality of activities that are essentially extended over time); intrinsic conflict (deliberative questions that are not only undecidable but unposeable from the point of view of the agent); and teleological normative guidance (“creating oneself” by subjecting oneself to the governance of the Person one will be).

• 📰 Andras Angyal, a Theoretical Model for Personality Studies

  Without such an implicit orientation all interests of a Person would be centered in himself alone as an individual. He, as an isolated entity, would be facing an alien world and his reaching beyond himself would be only to possess, master, and govern the surrounding world. He would compete with other people or he would calculatingly cooperate with them, but he would not love them.

• 📰 Angelus, 30 June 2013

  Jesus does not want selfish Christians who follow their own ego, who do not talk to God. Nor does he want weak Christians, Christians who have no will of their own, “remote-controlled” Christians incapable of creativity, who always seek to connect with the will of someone else and are not free. Jesus wants us free. And where is this freedom created? It is created in dialogue with God in the Person’s own Conscience. If a Christian is unable to speak with God, if he cannot hear God in his own Conscience, he is not free, he is not free.

• 📰 Building Up to an Internal Family Systems Model

  In the book Richard Schwartz, the developer of IFS, notes that if a Person’s subagents play well together, then that Person is likely to feel mostly internally unified. On the other hand, if a Person has lots of internal conflict, then they are more likely to experience themselves as having multiple parts with conflicting Desires.

  I’ve frequently been very dysfunctional, and have always found very intuitive the notion of the mind being split into very parts. Yet I mostly still don’t seem to experience my subagents anywhere near as Person-like as some others clearly do.

• 📰 Faq - Tulpas

  In terms of personhood, an alter is not "less" than a tulpa, nor is a tulpa "less" than an alter. While there do exist alters who are fragmentary in nature, who consider themselves parts of a whole, this does not mean that all alters are "just fragments" or consider themselves parts--many are their own Person as much as any host is. Treat any alter you encounter--including those who are fragmentary and/or consider themselves parts--with the same decency and respect as you would any tulpa, host, or other individual.

• 📰 George Herbert Mead and the Unity of the Self

  The phenomenon of dissociation of personality is caused by a breaking up of the complete, unitary self into the component selves of which it is composed, and which respectively correspond to different aspects of the social process in which the Person is involved, and within which his complete or unitary self has arisen; these aspects being the different social groups to which he belongs within that process.

• 📰 Interiority of Human Persons

  Only the exploration of interiority that begins with St. Augustine discloses the mystery of each human being as Person.

• 📰 Letters to a Young Poet - #7

  Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another Person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances.

• 📰 Morality for Exploded Minds

  My not-so-hidden agenda is to battle against the everyday notion of the self, the idea that at the core of a Person is something simple and unitary.

  Morality is tightly linked to the set of values defined by sacralization, with the consequence that persons are the definitionally the most important thing there is, with a transcendent value over the everyday. Theistic religion performs this elevation of personhood by means of a divine Person that humans are images of; secular humanism performs it more directly, but they both take the idea of personhood as both fixed and of basically infinite value.

• 📰 Neurons Gone Wild

  Most normal human brains, in normal environments, will naturally grow a single agent (the self) at the top of their agent hierarchy. But what if the brain or the environment isn't quite normal? Are we capable of growing other selves or Person-like agents — even multiple ones in a single brain?

• 📰 Pattern | Meaningness

  Pattern is what makes the world interpretable—what makes it make sense. Perceiving pattern is needed for all effective action—whether you are a Person or a bug.

• 📰 The Government Within

  A Person, like a society, is composed of parts with their own private agendas, all taking part in a continuously renegotiated dance of conflict, cooperation, and compromise. Our disparate motivations are like politicians trying to advance a faction, and the self, such as it is, is something like a prime minister – not powerful in its own right, but because it has managed to become the public face for the most powerful faction. Our inner life is a noisy parliament.

  So you and every Person you interact with are each a whole society of separate agents, with an internal economy, government, and politics. Some people may be organized like monarchies with a strong central self, others may be more anarchic bundles of disparate impulses, others may be flexibly improvising democracies of interest. A kind of mental anarchy is probably the infantile ground state, with structures of governance emerging over time. We all probably are familiar with people who have either too much or too little governance over their impulses. Personal interactions are like diplomatic missions between countries, and our social selves the ambassadors, forced to represent a complex system in a simple, polished, and understandable form.

• 📰 The Politics of Experience

  Whether or not all, or some, or no human beings are persons, I wish to define a Person in a twofold way: in terms of experience, as a centre of orientation of the objective universe; and in terms of behaviour, as the origin of actions.

  It is tempting and facile to regard "Person" as only separate objects in space, who can be studied as any other natural objects can be studied. But just as Kierkegaard remarked that one will never find consciousness by looking down a microscope at brain cells or anything else, so one will never find persons by studying persons as though they were only objects.

  The relevance of Freud to our time is largely his insight and, to a very considerable extent, his demonstration that the ordinary person is a shrivelled, desiccated fragment of what a Person can be.

  Can human beings be Persons today? Can a man be his actual self with another man or woman? Before we can ask such an optimistic question as "What is a personal relationship?", we have to ask if a personal relationship is possible, or, are persons possible in our present situation? We are concerned with the possibility of man. This question can be asked only through its facets. Is love possible? Is freedom possible?

• 📰 The Unity of Consciousness

  In the history of European philosophy at least since Locke, diachronic unified consciousness has been closely linked to personal identity in the philosopher’s sense, i.e., continuing to be a single Person, one and the same person, across time.

• 📙 After Virtue

  Just as a history is not a sequence of actions, but the concept of an action is that of a moment in an actual or possible history abstracted for some purpose from that history, so the characters in a history are not a collection of persons, but the concept of a Person is that of a character abstracted from a history.

• 📙 Being Ecological

  Isn’t being a Person a little bit about being paranoid that you might not be a Person?

• 📙 Being-In-The-World

  In sum, the practices containing an interpretation of what it is to be a Person, an object, and a society fit together. They are all aspects of what Heidegger calls an understanding of being.

  The world is what we directly understand and in terms of which one can see how Nature, Equipment, Persons, etc. fit together and make sense. Thus worldliness and Dasein's correlative understanding of being are the proper themes for Ontology.

• 📙 Finding Our Sea-Legs

  It is not that we encounter others and that then ethics is somehow ‘added on’ to this encounter; but it is instead that our relationship with others is, as Levinas writes, ‘straightaway ethical.’ When I encounter another Person, I find myself responsible for them—I find myself unable to do anything other than respond to them as another Person—whether I like it or not.

  Our responsibilities have the habit of increasing even more rapidly than we can assume them. We are, Levinas claims, infinitely responsible for the other Person.

  For here Levinas, with considerable acuity, sees that there is a kind of freedom in this idea of infinite responsibility. In my encounter with the other Person, I am freed for a moment from my self-concern, from the dreariness of the same old thing to which I am accustomed.

• 📙 Improvisation

  Virtue ethics has become a shorthand term for all the writers in the field who have grown tired of the conventional emphasis on decision and the neglect of the character of the Person or “agent” making the decision. The emphasis on Virtue in Christian ethics has shifted attention from the deed to the doer. It is the agent who matters, more than the action: ethics is about forming the life of the agent more than it is about judging the appropriateness of the action.

• 📙 Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics

  We experience our world as calling us to action at every level from the minimally practical, as when we experience the handrail as calling from our grip, to the maximally ethical, as when we experience another Person in distress as commanding our compassion and support.

• 📙 Prayer

  Beyond these principles, I learned from Psalms to converse with God as I would converse with my employer, my friend, my wife – in short, to treat God as a Person in every sense of the word. I had seen prayer as a kind of duty, not as a safe outlet for whatever I was thinking or feeling. Psalms freed me to go deeper.

  When I am with my wife or a close friend, naturally I talk about whatever is on my mind, not follow a formal agenda. Likewise, apparent distractions may become the substance of my encounter with God. Prayer expresses a relationship between two Persons, one of whom happens to be God.

• 📙 Reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue

  If I were to formulate the moral question that Aristotle answers in the Nicomachean Ethics, it would be, “How can I become the kind of a Person who has the practical wisdom to recognize what is good and best to do and who also has the moral freedom to act on that judgment?” Thus understood, ethics is about developing a rich, natural understanding of living well. This ceases to be the case when morality is reduced to rule-following.

  Any movement from is to ought presupposes a “functional concept” which is defined “in terms of the purpose or function which . . . [it is] characteristically expected to serve” (p. 58). MacIntyre presents the examples of a watch and a farmer; the watch is good if it keeps time accurately and the farmer is good if he farms well. But the modern concept of the human Person is not a functional concept, because Modernity abstracts the Person from all roles, relationships, and responsibilities (p.

• 📙 Reasons and Persons

  Full Title: Reasons and Persons

  We are particular people. I have my life to live, you have yours. What do these facts involve? What makes me the same Person throughout my life, and a different Person from you? And what is the importance of these facts? What is the importance of the unity of each life, and of the distinction between different lives, and different Persons?

  Locke claimed that someone cannot have committed some crime unless he now remembers doing so. We can understand a reluctance to punish people for crimes that they cannot remember. But, taken as a view about what is involved in a Person’s continued existence, Locke’s claim is clearly false. If it was true, it would not be possible for someone to forget any of the things that he once did, or any of the experiences that he once had. But this is possible. I cannot now remember putting on my shirt this morning.

  There are two unities to be explained: the unity of consciousness at any time, and the unity of a whole life. These two unities cannot be explained by claiming that different experiences are had by the same Person. These unities must be explained by describing the relations between these many experiences, and their relations to this Person’s brain. And we can refer to these experiences, and fully describe the relations between them, without claiming that these experiences are had by a Person.

  This effect was revealed by various psychological tests. These made use of two facts. We control our right arms with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. And what is in the right halves of our visual fields we see with our left hemispheres, and vice versa. When someone’s hemispheres have been disconnected, psychologists can thus present to this Person two different written questions in the two halves of his visual field, and can receive two different answers written by this Person’s two hands.

  We can come to believe that a Person’s mental history need not be like a canal, with only one channel, but could be like a river, occasionally having separate streams.

• 📙 The Book of Disquiet

  The presence of another Person – of any Person whatsoever – instantly slows down my thinking, and while for a normal man contact with others is a stimulus to spoken expression and wit, for me it is a counterstimulus, if this compound word be linguistically permissible.