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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32935 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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MPD makes sense to me. People already engage in various forms of "mask-wearing": if you're a performer, you're consciously putting on a very elaborate mask of the character you're portraying. But even outside the world of theatre, consciously or unconsciously, you're wearing one mask in front of your parents, the other in front of your partner, the third one in front of your friends, the fourth one in front of your coworkers, the fifth one in front of a cop, the sixth one on The Motte and so on. Some people narrate their internal monologue as a dialogue.

It's not a huge leap to get from putting a mask on unconsciously, to putting one on consciously, to deliberately crafting and enhancing such a mask, to treating an advanced mask as a person, especially when you have learned that treating masks as separate people is something people do.

That's not what MPD is though. Like, the way I talk on this site vs 4chan are wildly different, and it's sorta plausible to say they're different "masks" or "personalities", even though they both come from the same goals / values / etc. But that's just 'purposeful action that depends on context and conditions', not 'different people'. Your 'thinking' or 'ideas' aren't fixed into one mask or context, you can remember something that happened in a seriouspost and make a joke about it later. And sometimes you make a seriouspost on rdrama, sometimes you tell a joke here. (And I'd personally prefer a motte where bizzare enraging shitposts are mixed with the seriousposts, but am aware it wouldn't work, both because they don't want to see the shitposts and they'd bait them away from making interesting posts.)

But someone with MPD claims to have 'fully separate' personalities that they 'can't control' - you'll switch semi-uncontrollably between one and another, you can't remember things on one personality that another can. They'll have different 'traits' in the same contexts, depending on what "person" they claim is fronting at the moment. This isn't just - sometimes you act silly and other times serious - which is entirely normal and unremarkable. It's saying that "Serious You" is "Joe" and joe is extraverted and likes doing math and watching cartoons, but "Silly You" is "Sally" and sally is introverted and likes moodboards and Harry Potter. This is just weird. Why not be ""extraverted"" about harry potter or ""introverted"" about math, depending on the circumstance? (and it really is that dumb - 'Having DID is wild [...] or a certain song will come on and suddenly I'm wearing different clothes and it's two hours later and I'm like "oh right"'). There's no use for that - each of those things can be engaged in independently. And the 'can't remember stuff from one personality in another one' isn't at all biologically plausible. They're just larping.

There’s a bit of motte and bailey going on. Or maybe sanewashing, I don’t know.

The defensible example is what you’re saying—everyone does social adaptation, some probably do it via dialogue, the long tails of that distribution could look like multiple personalities. There’s long-standing rationalist blogposts about having such dialogue, fiction with characters who use it, along with a general credulousness when talking about weird mental states. It’s also what Scott defends in his post:

For example, the person might be kind of a pushover, and then one time after they watched Star Wars ten times in a row, someone bossed them around particularly badly, and they imagined Darth Vader telling them to give into their anger and fight back…They emphasize that it really feels like Vader is in their head giving them advice, or that they sometimes “become” Vader - and in particular they emphasize that this is different from just asking themselves “what would Darth Vader do in this situation?”. They understand that most people learning about their situation would expect that they’re exaggerating a much more boring “just ask yourself what Vader would do” situation, and they’re fine with people believing that if they want, but insist that it’s actually something different and more interesting than that.

Something weird but comprehensible, plausibly an exaggeration, plausibly as “real” as anything else going on in one’s head. More importantly, it’s easy to empathize if one can relate it to the very normal dynamics of acting, role playing, whatever.

Now start adding accommodations.

This is the spicier claim: that the other personalities are, on their own, valid persons. That they may (or should) be addressed separately. That memories may not be shared, and any inconsistencies are framed as personality differences rather than a mercurial disposition. Perhaps that different pronouns are appropriate, since communities which buy into this dynamic are much, much more likely to be deeply and passionately aware of gender.

I don’t mean this as an attack. I’m really conflicted about the phenomenon, in part because it has such a reasonable motte. Also in part because one of my best friends has been diving headfirst into this community, and I’m worried about her. There is clearly a complex of social obligations which entangles the community with trans issues and transhumanist issues alike.

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