How the Heck Can You Know Who You Are

My personal attempt at the science of self

By MARTIN REZNY

An excellent question again:

How is anyone supposed to know who they actually are, from within, on the basis of their internal identity, and not external definition?

I guess that without offering any answer to this, I’m not really helping anyone defend themselves against the corrupting influence of others when I suggest that self-knowledge is necessary to accomplish that. I must admit I have not read Camus’s Rebel at all, though upon a superficial review of its themes, I do see fundamental similarities in where me and Camus come from. I agree that individual rebellion is an appropriate response to an unjust order, within reason and certain limits.

Reinvent the Wheel, Because Maybe Wheels Are Stupid

I feel I should also attempt to explain how I actually come up with the things that I write, especially explanations of how people work. Much like I have not read Camus and I’m neither responding to his arguments, nor repeating them, I don’t do what philosophers usually do — debate other philosophers. I always intentionally try to come up with ideas on my own, based on my own thoughts and experience, and only afterwards look for who else have thought them.

You may begin to see that my method already is a part of the explanation of how I think that people can figure themselves out. Unlike most people, I don’t think it’s important who thought of any particular thought or when that happened, much like I don’t give any significance to the “FIRST!!!” comments under videos. Realistically, all ideas were first thought before recorded history anyway. I also don’t care about what happened in the one history we’ve had.

I see history and all tradition as accidental, a single iteration among many other ones that potentially could have happened, may have really happened in parallel universes or realities, and still probably will happen at some other point in time somewhere in the universe. If you’ve ever played a computer game, this understanding of reality should not be unfamiliar to you. Similarly, I also barely care about what science, or “science”, has been conducted so far.

It’s not that I don’t value the contributions of various thinkers or think that I must be somehow smarter than them, the problem is that being stuck in any particular tradition of thought is extremely limiting. Who’s to say that we have embarked in the right direction of thought at all? Compared to all that is possible, maybe we are among the more misguided civilizations. Beyond that, there’s also the issue of figuring out which thoughts are legitimately mine.

With all that said, we can begin by definition of self via process of elimination.

The Things That You Are Not

You are not a product of history or a subject of tradition, as well as you don’t exist by a decree from on high. You are no one’s resource. Authorities are the easiest purely external source of identity to identify, and that includes the familial ones. Whether it is your emperor, your teacher, your boss, or your parent, what all of them have in common is that they are not you. These are most of the “other people” who will be infringing upon your sense of self.

More specifically, these will be the people with the greatest tendency to actively try to dictate to you who you are, which also makes this kind of interference obvious. Even assuming you have no option to disobey their dictates, that only really applies to behaviors, not your sense of self that exists entirely in your thoughts. Which brings me to the next thing you’re not, you’re not a collection of behaviors. Sorry Batman, what you do doesn’t define you.

It’s precisely because a behavior can be forced, or, as a habit or urge, not be a product of your conscious intention. It’s another definition of self that makes sense only from an external perspective. It is who you are to other people, because they experience you as a collection of behaviors, but that’s all that is, and it’s not much. If you are a beggar in the streets, or someone who has killed a person, it by itself says nothing about who you are inside of your own mind.

It may come to have something in common, if you let it, but that is an example of the corruption by others. They may decide to make you into a clown or a villain and expect you to internalize it, burden you with guilt or quell your ambitions. Of course, you may be an evil person or an idiot internally, again, as I said in the previous article, you’re not a great person by default. My point is that whoever you are, it’s not defined by decrees or your, or any, history.

Now let’s try looking for positive answers, the key word being “try”.

The Problem with Science of Personality

To be frank, science will not help you figure out who you are internally, at least not the science that we currently have. It is beause you will not be able to get an objective answer to who you are inside, meaning an answer that multiple independent observers would agree upon, with our current technologies and methodologies. Our material neuroscience is great in answering the questions of how our body works, but subjectivity is beyond it.

The best it can do (maybe) is tell you which part of your brain corresponds to which part of your thoughts, but that is patently useless to someone on a quest to learn who they are without anyone else having to tell them. As for psychology, the current issues with the lack of replicability in social sciences set aside, the two dominant approaches are equally useless in opposite ways. First is behavioral psychology, believing that people are defined by behaviors.

Yup, we’ve already covered that. In contrast to peer pressure bias, behavioral psychology produces much more precise wrong answers to who you are, which are making you internalize nonsense too, just unintentionally. Statistics, by the way, are inherently a measure of the collective, not of the individual, even if behaviors were actually encapturing one’s essence. You are not a type, or a trend, or an average, or any kind of mathematical artifact.

The opposite approach to psychology is psychoanalysis, which substitutes precise mathematical reduction of identity into nonsense for a baseless speculation about who you are, conducted by someone who still does not actually see into your head. It can be meaningful in the same way in which art is, but in this case, you are the work of art, and the psychologist is trying to interpret your meaning. As any such effort, it says more about the interpreter.

You may begin to notice a trend: No one and nothing else is going to tell you.

Stepping Outside of Your Mind

Even while acknowledging that everyone’s perceptions are flawed and thinking about self biased, you are by far the best qualified person to figure yourself out. Why? You can observe yourself inside of your own head. You can know far better than any outside observer what you actually think or feel. There is no one else who can see into your head in exactly the same way, and that is why you can immediately forget about the interpersonality of science.

I have mentioned it a number of times before, but zen is actually a method that can help you tremendously here. Zen is all about disciplining yourself as an unbiased observer, increasing your (self)awareness. Step one of any effort to learn who you are has to be acquiring the ability to clear you mind of clutter and observe clearly what is happening inside of it. It’s the ability to step outside of yourself temporarily, gaining distance from your biases and feels.

The most basic method is meditation, when you focus on silencing your inner monologue, that nagging voice in your head in which you are talking to yourself. That voice is not you, you are the observer, and that is something that you should read about in Eckhart Tolle’s work, really. The point is, it is possible to observe yourself as if you were someone else, it is possible to know with scientific reliability what makes you think, or feel, or do what exactly.

It doesn’t matter that no one else can corroborate it. You are not doing it to prove anything to others. It is a science of you for you. You can fail yourself in that regard by being a bad observer, lacking in necessary mental discipline, but it is a skill that can be mastered. Of course, it will always be a matter of degree of mastery, perfection is never achievable, but becoming a very good observer is certainly possible, and enough. The really hard part is judgement.

It’s one thing to see your inner workings, it’s another to make sense of them.

A Puzzle Trying to Solve Itself

The problem with just observing how you work internally is that it doesn’t mean anything by itself. Let’s say that you learn by observing yourself carefully what it is that makes you angry. Is it a righteous anger? Is it merely a senseless lashing out? Is it constructive, or destructive, and to whom under what circumstances? After all, are you really just a collection of emotional reactions and habits of thought? How to tell the internal from the learned?

Again, don’t expect science to give any of your findings personal meaning. It sees no place for free choice or personal essence, only internal dictate of material biology (genetics), or behaviors or patterns learned from the outside (memetics). If you don’t want to accept that you are a philosophical zombie, a biological machine, the “inside” that you are trying to discover is not your genetic code or the contents of your memory banks, it must be your chaos.

What I mean by chaos is that which science can only explain as random chance — a statisticial representation free will would have, if it exists. Anything that is demonstrably determined is not coming from inside of you. Whether it is a genetic predisposition or environmental influence, it is an external force controlling your thoughts, feelings, and actions. Only the things that you have chosen are you, only your original thoughts are truly yours.

It’s like the difference between regular and lucid dreaming. Most of the time, most of us have dreams which retread some thoughts or events that we have experienced in the recent past. But every once in a while, some of us can realize that they are dreaming and take control of the dream. While you’re observing yourself, spotting which parts of the occurences in your mind come from inside of your personality is like knowing when you control the dream.

The (Lack of) Ultimate Answer

Given all these complications and the ethereal nature of self, many thinkers and scientists would say that free will and self are only illusions, that there’s nothing you truly originate or control. And you are free to believe it (or predetermined to believe it, or whatever). Being yourself and learning what that means unsurprisingly requires a belief that something like your true inner self exists. This is thus not a problem to be concerned with too much.

The problem still lies in finding out the standards by which to judge things, if they are not supposed to be what you learn or what your genes command. First of all, learning exists, but it is not a passive process. You may not have a choice of which information you come into contact with, but you are choosing what is more or less important, and you have an inherent critical position. That’s why you need to start by studying the nature of your focus and insight.

Another words for what I’m talking about could be instinct or intuition. You have those. It is only when you are conditioned to absorb information un-critically and perform tasks mechanically when you circumvent them, or to be more precise, when you circumvent yourself. That which is right or wrong by your own standard would be that which feels right or wrong to you intuitively upon first impression, especially if that sense only escalates after reflection.

It will likely start as a subtle, abstract sensation that is hard to put into words, a sign of it not being conditioned response drilled into you or a base urge. It should also be something that has always been there, and is not going away no matter how much rationalization or punishment you throw at it. It perhaps can be imperfectly described as a disposition, temperament, or attitude, but how exactly it manifests is contextual. Personality is a very complex animal.

Trying to Provide Some Answers Anyway

But let’s attempt being specific. The way I came to see it after long years of studying myself and other people, internal identity is a potential, certain parts of which are activated throughout the course of one’s life. In other words, what you are trying to figure out are your limits, not a set of traits. The activation itself is mostly not a deterministic process, it’s more like events presenting people with a set of choices limited by their individual potential.

You never have to respond in any single way, but you never have a truly unlimited range of responses from which you can realistically choose. Sometimes, some options are locked for material, external reasons, but more importantly, oftentimes the limits are purely those of your internal identity and not material/external at all. For instance, you virtually always have the options to commit suicide or kill someone else, but rarely ever can one do it.

It is precisely what one will not do, even if they have every chance and seemingly also every reason to, that is one of the most revealing things about who they are. A person stuck in a mode of saying yes to everything will not have much opportunity to find out who they are. In (not only) my experience, it usually takes a crisis or something very painful to stimulate people to become more themselves in their actions. It’s not the pain, it’s the adversity.

Before you jump to any crazy conclusions, you will not learn someone’s true self by torturing them. They might, for themselves, but not if they are not free to act in response to the tragedy that is befalling them. In other words, maybe you will learn more about who you are when you try to do something very difficult, or put yourself in a dangerous situation with high stakes. Challenge yourself and you will learn what you are capable of, again, your potential.

You can also learn something about who you are by studying the people with whom you choose to have relationships. For example, what are you looking for in a partner? Your equal? Then you internally value equality. Your inferior? Then you internally value your superiority. Your opposite? Then you value that which you are not. If you psychoanalyze yourself or others in reference to you, it no longer is baseless, because you see your own mind.

Maybe you will learn that you value excellence, maybe kindness, maybe understanding, maybe darkness, maybe humor, maybe million other things. If you, the subject, are also the observer and the psychologist, and if you have a compelling enough reason to be rigorous and disciplined in all of that, with an urgency that a challenge or a tragedy would present, you can learn who you are, however imperfectly, independently of any outside force’s influence.

There’s much more to that, obviously, but I think that’s enough for now.

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