The Dialogic Nature of Self and the Limitations of Rational Therapies

This is about my self.

It's about how I relate to it—to my self. I've gotten somewhat better at that, over many years. You may have a self too, in which case my experience may be interesting.

This is an unusually personal, and unusually concrete, piece.

That is motivated by reader feedback. I did a post about Ultraspeaking recently, which some people said they liked because it was more personal than usual. That was partly because I originally intended it to be an audio piece, like this one. I failed in my attempt to record it, so I reworked it as a text essay. Now I'm trying again!

If you are reading this, and missed that it’s also a podcast, you can listen to it by clicking the start button in the box at the top of the post. Or you may prefer reading!

Another thing I've learned from reader feedback is that my writing is often too abstract. Examples can make it easier to understand, more vivid, more memorable. Personal examples are better because they seem closer, more real. Actually, I've realized all this about eleventy nine times, but it's somehow hard for me to put into practice. Now I'm trying again!

So. This is about my self and how I understand and relate to it. If your self is something like my self, maybe you will find it useful. I'm still pretty confused about selves, but I've been trying to figure it out for sixty-something years, and maybe I've learned something.

The word "self" is not well-defined. We have a strong sense that we know what it is, but the many theories about it seem to have wildly different understandings. Or perhaps they're talking about quite different things using the same word. What is included and not included in "the self" varies dramatically, and so do ideas about what sort of thing it is, and how it works. And also, recommendations for what you should do with it are all over the map.

Although: nearly everyone agrees that selves don't work well. So you need to improve or fix or replace or get rid of yours. I'm now somewhat of an exception, as will become apparent toward the end of this recording.

I'll describe four different ways I've related to my self. I'll describe each with an analogy: with engineering inanimate machines; with organizational leadership; with internal conversations; and finally, letting go of trying to understand and control my self, and allowing curiosity and playfulness instead. To make them memorable, I've given each a symbolic representation: a steam engine for understanding my self as a machine; a tech startup company for managing my life; a podcast for internal conversations; and a dust devil for the fourth, playful approach.

Each approach, each model of what a self is, offers particular benefits, and has particular limitations, risks, and downsides. Depending on the situation and my purposes, one may seem most appropriate.

I learned these four approaches in sequence, after discovering limitations in the first, and then the second and third. I've pretty much abandoned the first, the self-as-machine view, but I've retained all the other three as often-useful ways of being.

I suspect this particular sequence is common, at least for people like me who have a pragmatic, engineering-like outlook on life.

You'll recognize the first three approaches, which come from engineering, management, and psychotherapy. However, I apply them in a somewhat unusual way. I emphasize perception and action over mental contents such as thoughts and emotions. I'll explain how that works in the different approaches separately, but it's the same shift in emphasis in each case.

I find this reframing works better, for me at least. It's also in accord with my theoretical understanding of how we work, how our selves work. I won't go into that much here, but if you know a little about my work in AI and cognitive science, you'll recognize the influence or similarity of views.

The fourth approach is influenced by Dzogchen, an unusual branch of Buddhist theory and practice; by ethnomethodology, an unusual branch of sociology; and by phenomenology, an unusual branch of philosophy. Concepts in those fields may not be familiar. So this fourth approach may not sound like anything you have heard before. I may not be able to explain it well enough to make sense. Or, it may come as unusually useful news.

I think it's the most factually accurate understanding of selfing, but it's often not easy for me to put into practice. I would like to say "This is the answer! Do this!" but I can't say that with complete confidence; not from personal experience. Sometimes it's great, though!

The steam engine: self as machine

The first approach starts by saying "I know how to engineer machines to work better; I can apply engineering understanding to fix malfunctioning ones—so why not do that with my self?"

We don't think, feel, or do the things we want our selves to, so how can we intervene? Like why do I keep doing this stupid thing, I know it's stupid, how is my mind or brain broken? Why do I eat too much? Why do I freeze up and stammer on dates? Why do I pretend to agree when people at work say crazy, wrong things. Surely better understanding of why my self insists on betraying me will let me fix it so I get better control!

I chose the steam engine as a symbol for this, because that's the key invention that set off the Industrial Revolution, which was the most important event in human history. Steam engines were the focus of engineering practice for a century of the field's development. It's natural that analogies between selves and complicated steam engines, with boilers and condensers and gears and valves and pressure governors, were common in psychology during that period. Nowadays, analogies with computers or computer programs are more common.

Anyway, you can consider your self as a machine whose mechanisms you can learn or discover, and that will empower you to improve it. This is a science-y and engineering approach. You try to introspect about how your mind operates. You may also draw on theories from neuroscience and cognitive science.

This is tempting especially for STEM people: I mean "science, technology, engineering, and math," the acronym: STEM. It's tempting because of the three rationalist, eternalist promises: that you can gain certainty, understanding, and control. You can just make a machine behave.

It certainly was tempting for me! So I gave in to temptation whole-heartedly! This is a big part of how I got interested in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. I hoped for a significant synergy between my attempts to solve my personal problems and my intellectual interests. It's much of how I tried to make sense of my self, and to fix myself, in my teens and early twenties.

I eventually got a PhD in the field. Somewhere half way through graduate school, I realized that we have absolutely no idea how either the brain or the mind work, much less how they relate to each other. And the kinds of models people were using in AI and cognitive science couldn't possibly be true, a priori. This made me extremely angry. I made a huge nuisance of my self by going around saying that these fields are all made-up nonsense. I'm still angry, and still doing that, and people are still annoyed!

Running out of steam

The self-as-machine metaphor is limited and can be harmfully misleading. Because: we don't work like machines; at least not at the level of description we care about. I don't mean we run on some kind of non-physical woo. It's that we don't work like steam engines, or other mechanical devices, and we don't work like computers or computer programs either. Also not like the algorithms that, for publicity purposes, get called "neural networks," although how they work is almost perfectly dissimilar to brains.

In terms of personal application, the self-as-machine approach usually doesn't work well, because we have quite limited introspective access to our mental mechanisms, or possibly none at all. We can only guess at what they are doing by looking for patterns in their outputs. Also, the models from neuroscience and cognitive science are either at the wrong abstraction level—knowing about neurons is unhelpful—or too inaccurate to provide useful guidance. Engineering works only when it's based on solid science, and the science of people is not solid at all. In fact, it seems to be mostly wrong.

As a computer science student, specializing in AI, it was natural for me to think about trying to fix my self when it did dumb things, or when it got emotionally stuck and refused to do anything at all, as "debugging." This didn't work. The methods I could use to debug a computer program don't have good analogs when I was trying to change my self. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get access to my own code, the way I could read the code of a program. I mostly also couldn't get access to intermediate results or the details of my runtime state, the way I could with a software debugger or just print statements. All I could find with introspection was that somehow thoughts popped out of nowhere. I could often force them in particular directions, on a moment by moment basis, but that's not the same as debugging the underlying machinery.

More seriously, the "debugging" metaphor suggests that if your self isn't working the way you want, it's because of "bugs": meaning localized functional defects. That rarely seems to be the case. Trying to find them often led to analysis paralysis. I spent the second half of my undergraduate sophomore year, and then again the whole second year of graduate school, ignoring what I was supposed to be learning and obsessing instead over my supposed self and what the heck was wrong with it.

I knew what I ought to be doing, but applying more force to my self backfired. I don't believe in "willpower," at least not when dealing with my self. All it did was generate resentment and even greater unwillingness to work. Maybe your self is better behaved!

For some people, this failure of rationality for self-understanding can lead to losing faith in rationality itself, and into post-rationalist nihilism. I was dumb enough that it wasn't until my fourth year of graduate school that I finally realized rationalism is wrong, and had my post-rationalist nihilistic crisis. That's a different story.

Anyway, contra the "debugging" metaphor, I think unsatisfactory selves are usually better addressed globally. Dare I say: "holistically," although that's a word I usually shun. An overall improvement in the texture of your way of being seems better to aim for. And that's what the fourth approach, at the end of this recording, is about.

What you can change locally are your routines, your habitual ways of doing specific things. You can debug those. I find that usually the best way is with external aids. I need something to remind me to do differently whatever it is. A yellow sticky note telling me to turn off the stove when taking dinner out of it, for example. Or, my to-do software reminding me to lift weights once every few days.

Startup: self as system

This is a good transition point! I've mostly given up on trying to understand how internal mental processes work. Instead, I aim to improve what I do. I mainly use external aids for that, instead of thought. Thinking is difficult. I'm bad at it. It's unreliable. External tools are better.

You can systematize your activities so that your self operates like an understandable machine, even though its underlying mechanisms are unknown and quite different. Or maybe it's better to think of it as rational organizational management. You can use your self as a smoothly-operating bureaucracy.

So this is what I'll call the "startup company leadership" approach.

This is similar to the steam engine approach, in being rational and systematic and aiming for predictability and control. It's different in that it completely lets go of trying to understand the underlying mechanisms.

It also lets go of trying for complete predictability and control. It's a "startup" rather than a big bureaucratic corporation, because in reality your personal life is always going to involve fairly frequent, significant events that are out of your control. Unpredictable chaos. That includes both unexpected disasters and unlooked-for opportunities. You need to ride the wave, or shoot the rapids. You need to be willing to constantly improvise and innovate in response to changing circumstances.

But, in this approach, you are also constantly putting rational systems in place, to manage what can be managed, so you get some predictability; and your attention is freed up to deal with the big, unexpected, difficult stuff, so you don't get bogged down in trivia and routine hassles.

In following this approach, I structure my life. I choose to act according to principles, policies, plans, procedures. I delegate routine decision making to machines—literal ones, computers, but also personal policies that I can carry out almost mindlessly.

This approach includes the domain of "productivity hacking." For example, I use a task management app, inspired by the book Getting Things Done, called Things.app. It runs on all Apple devices. It's great! I recommend it! I keep an awful lot of balls in the air, and rarely drop any, because Things.app tells me what I need to do.

I make spreadsheets to figure out what I want to do, and to track what I have done. I use a pomodoro timer app to keep my thoughts focused. I automate lots of chores using software—some that I've written, but I also use many cloud services to take care of tedious stuff like paying bills and scheduling meetings. I make plans, using software tools or just writing in a text file; and I execute on them. Sometimes, I do explicit expected value calculations to make decisions.

This is called "rationality," and it's better than sliced bread! I am a true believer! This works much better for me than the steam engine approach, and it seems to work better for most other people I know, or read first-hand reports from.

I shifted from trying to fix my broken mental machinery to engineering my life: the ways I do things. That often means thinking somewhat differently, like "how do I automate this so the world can't throw problems like it at me again," instead of "how do I deal with this particular breakdown here." But the main thing is not thinking but action. The thinking just fits around and supports that.

Rationalism and system failure modes

I'm a true believer in rationality; but—as you may know—I'm down on rational-ism. By rationalism, I mean not just thinking that rationality is great. I mean overestimating its power and importance, and claiming that it's always fully adequate, and the only good way to be.

In the domain of selfing, rationalism is mistaking systematizing your self, turning it into a smoothly-running institution, for the whole story. It's a good thing to do, it's efficient, but it has limitations.

The world is nebulous: unboundedly complex; largely unknown, incomprehensible, and uncontrollable. Systems can work only by excluding and ignoring almost everything. We make systems work by putting them in a box. Inside the box, we force everything to work according to some simple formal model, some idealization of certain aspects of the world. We wall off this little domain, and shield it from the chaotic weirdness of reality, so inside we can more-or-less get the certainty, understanding, and control that rationality promises.

Systematizing has some typical failure modes. One is that events not included in the formal idealization can break through the shielding and interfere with smooth functioning; or in extreme cases wreck the system entirely. On a small scale, my schedule often gets disrupted by an unexpected obligation landing. Major life events can be more dramatic. I had things going pretty well a decade ago, and then, roughly simultaneously, my father, mother, and sister got slow but terminal diseases, and I spent years taking care of them pretty much full time. The plans I had made for my own life, for my writing work, became suddenly irrelevant; and the stress left my self in a state of long-term disrepair once the crises were over.

The shielding around a system keeps unwanted influences out. If you are operating inside it, the walls of the box also prevent you from seeing out. Anything that doesn't fit the system's form becomes effectively invisible. This can lead to missing out on significant, unexpected opportunities. On a small scale, I periodically find that I have become a slave to my task management app. I've turned into a robot, executing the tasks it says I have to do today, oblivious to the burgeoning life that surrounds me. Sometimes it's best to revolt and spontaneously make art, or wander around a botanical arboretum. To-do list be damned!

On a larger scale, I wasted most of my effort for a few years helping a religious organization grow, because I was sticking to a plan that was increasingly obviously going to fail. I was only vaguely aware, during that period, of several other things I could have been doing, missed opportunities that in retrospect would have been better for me and for the world.

What I call "meta-rationality" involves stepping outside a system, to get a view of it from above and around, to better see how it relates to its context, and how its operation is going overall. It's the antidote to these failure modes.

Podcast: self as talk

OK, enough of that, let's go on to the third way I relate to my self. I'm going to symbolize this approach as a podcast. I'll explain specifically why in a bit, but a podcast is a conversation; it's talk, and my self is somewhat that.

This general approach is shared with many psychotherapeutic theories, which understand self in terms of self-talk; as internal dialog. This is at least partly true; more true than the analogies with machines. Silent language is much of what thinking is, for most people. (Supposedly there are exceptions.) And thinking is at least part of what "self" is usually taken to include.

Psychotherapeutic practice is similar to the steam engineering approach in hoping that discoveries about processes will give us control over our selves. In most current psychotherapy systems, though, there's been a shift from trying to understand the mechanisms that generate thoughts and emotions to their content. This is good because we have nearly zero access to the mechanisms, but we have pretty good access to mental contents. So the information we're working with is significantly more reliable.

Not perfect, though. Mechanistic mind models are clear-cut, whereas thoughts and especially emotions are pretty squishy, or as I say, "nebulous." So the amount of understanding and predictability and control that we can hope for is much less. Still, this view of self as internal talk is not only partly true, it's also often helpful.

There's approximately sixteen billion different theories of psychotherapy. I'll discuss two of the currently most popular approaches: rationalist, cognitive ones, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, called CBT for short; and ones that describe the self as a collection of "parts," such as internal family systems, or IFS.

I don't have any official experience with either. The small amount of therapy I've had personally was back in the paleolithic era. It was "eclectic," meaning the therapists were just making things up as they went along and hoping something would work. It didn't, not for me.

So instead, I read a bunch of psychotherapeutic theory, and did some graduate-level coursework in it, even. I did get a lot of insight into my self that way. That insight helped, and made my life better.

So I do believe that using psychotherapeutic models of mind to try to understand yourself, with or without the involvement of a therapist, can be valuable. That's true even if the theory itself is not especially true. It could be valuable as a practice, even if its model is completely false.

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In fact, I think the psychotherapeutic models are all quite wrong, factually. They are not how things work, at all. But treating your self as if it worked these ways can generate accurate, actionable insights that lead to positive changes. Psychotherapeutic models of self can also generate harmful distortions and outright delusions, and wind up making everything much worse. I've seen botched courses of psychotherapy actually making victims crazy and wind up hospitalized.

Rational psychotherapy and its limitations

Therapy styles such as CBT inherit from rationalist cognitive science the idea that actions are caused by thoughts. It adds the idea that emotions are mostly also caused by thoughts, not by external circumstances. These ideas are partly wrong, which matters, as I'll explain. But they're also somewhat true, and often useful.

People go to therapy mostly because they have emotions they don't want, or keep taking actions they know are harmful. So in cognitive therapy styles, you check to see whether your thoughts are true. It turns out lots of them aren't. The theory says that is due to what it calls "irrationality." If you replace your irrational, false thoughts with true thoughts, then you'll get the emotions and actions you want to have, instead of the bad ones you get now.

This has sometimes worked for me! In my twenties, I often thought "I will never get a girlfriend," which was extremely depressing. It also wasn't true. And there was lots of evidence it wasn't true, like, you know, a series of girlfriends. Nevertheless, I stubbornly persisted in this belief. For years. Until I gave in and admitted it wasn't true. And that was partly due to reading about CBT. And then I did the things you do to get a girlfriend. Then I was depressed much less often, yay!

CBT is straight-up rationalism, imported from the rationalism of mainstream cognitive science. It's appealing to STEM-ish people, like me, for the same reason as the "self as steam engine" approach. It's the comfortable rationalist idea that if we can get true knowledge, we'll get control—over our selves, in this case.

We aren't steam engines, but we also don't run on rational logic, and we shouldn't. And the ways we aren't rational are often not irrational at all. We are non-rational in other ways, which often work better than rationality. I discuss some of them in my meta-rationality book.

A main error of rationalism is treating "the mind" as a closed container full of mental things: thoughts and emotions and beliefs and desires and stuff like that. Implicitly, "the mind" is treated as connecting with the world only rarely and briefly. In the extreme, in psychotherapeutic theorizing, you had some childhood experiences, and that is what formed your self, as a set of beliefs, fixed thoughts, and you've been stuck with it.

Psychotherapeutic models lead you to take thoughts and emotions more seriously than you already do. Taking them as your self, taking them too seriously, believing that they are what matter most, is often what causes your trouble in the first place.

I find that what I do matters more than what I think or feel. It's not actually true that thoughts determine actions. Most of what you do is a straightforward response to what you perceive. You can see what to do, and you do it.

The rationalist view admits in passing that you get inputs sometimes, and you output actions sometimes, but the theories are mostly about what happens "inside your mind," effectively in isolation. That's where all the action is. It's about internal processes. The self sorts thoughts and emotions from one drawer into another, or rubs two together to make new ones. So if you keep doing things that don't work, rationalism says it's because the machinery is malfunctioning—not because you are in a situation that doesn't support you in doing what does work.

Taking mental contents too seriously is harmful if it obscures reality, if directs effort and attention away from just looking and seeing what you are doing and what sorts of situations lead you to do that. It risks your coming to believe what you think. You shouldn't believe what you think... much of it is wrong. CBT is right about that! But it's usually better to look and see than to think harder.

For example, I have often used rational analysis of my thinking to explain to my self why am stuck. Sometimes that causal explanation has been compelling enough to dissuade me from attempting to change. I lost the second half of my sophomore year to agonizing about not being smart enough to do serious mathematics. But I wanted to do serious mathematics! But I was not smart enough! But I really really wanted that, so I was not going to do anything else! I was paralyzed! But I couldn't get un-paralyzed because, rationally speaking, this was an unsolvable conundrum! Rationally, I should be paralyzed!

Man, that was a miserable waste of time.

Another thing. Obsessing with your mental contents is called "rumination" in psychotherapeutic jargon. It's found to be counter-productive, especially in depression.

Rumination makes you think you are figuring yourself out and working toward solutions, but it's actually making things worse. Rumination, by focusing inward, and by emphasizing what isn't working, is inherently depressing. I'm very familiar with this. Going over and over my thoughts and feelings, trying to make sense of them, literally makes me stupid. It has a cognitive dampening effect; my reasoning gets slower and slower, and increasingly faulty. Gradually it grinds to a halt, without my noticing, and then I really am stuck! Turning inwards to try to solve problems inhibits the accurate perception and effective actions that actually help.

Ruminating, as an approach to trying to fix my self, comes from an implicit belief that the self's machinery is made out of thoughts and emotions too. That suggests that it has to fix itself by doing the same things it always does. But if you are stuck in a deep hole, the first thing is to stop digging. A completely different approach is required.

What I find works, instead of trying to figure my self out, is to turn my attention outward, to open my self to the concrete specifics of my situation, and to take practical action. Doing anything is better than ruminating. Figuring out the best thing to do just prompts more rumination, which may never end. Doing a sub-optimal, or ineffective, or even counter-productive thing at least gets me out of my head.

The CBT theory of emotions is that they are caused by thoughts. This violates common sense, which says that you feel bad when something bad happens, and good when something good happens. I think that's more nearly true. And that's good news, because it suggests that if you make good things happen, you will feel better. I'm still an engineer, you see! We engineers are in the business of making good things happen! I believe in this!

Improving the situation is likely to improve feelings more than trying to bully emotions into better behavior through understanding and controlling. For example. The one time I had something vaguely like a Real Job, I came into conflict with my boss, who I thought was treating me unfairly. He demoted and side-lined me. To be fair to him, I had behaved badly, due to uncontrolled emotions. To be fair to me, he was narcissistic and probably psychopathic. I spent another year at that company, stewing over it, trying to understand my bad emotions and his, and to fix mine up somehow. It made me miserable. Then I decided I wasn't cut out for jobs, and started my own company instead, which was a great improvement. Not everyone can do that, but if your working environment is making you miserable, changing jobs is probably a better move than psychologizing.

Irrational emotions, ones that don't respond accurately to good or bad things happening, can sometimes cause trouble, but they're mostly not meaningful other than as momentary energy. They are like the weather: they come and go, often for no discernable reason. Maybe a butterfly flapped its wings wrong in Patagonia. Strong emotions can make you do stupid things, so it's good to know what emotions you have, or may have soon, so you can choose not to act on them.

I have irrationally strong feelings of duty to others. I feel compelled to prioritize other people’s desires and tasks over my own. This is dysfunctional. I keep rediscovering this, and then somehow forgetting it. Rereading my diary a few years ago was eye-opening, because I found that this had come as a revelation, a massive new insight into my self, about once a year.

Since then, what has helped significantly is translating the insight into my external self management system. Stuff I actually want to do goes into my planning documents and Things.app with high priority. Too often I ignore that anyway, but it's helping. Again I think what matters is action, and external supports for action like Things.app, more than theories about how my self works. Apparently I'm incapable of changing my self, but I can change what I do.

Parts of my self

Thinking in language is often called an "internal dialog." A dialog involves at least two people. CBT doesn't include that in its model, as far as I know, not of how your self works, although of course therapy sessions themselves are dialogs.

My experience of thinking is that it's usually talking at someone. Usually they are ghostly, not fully formed, barely there other than as a vague listening presence.

Often, I'm talking at my self. But it's not my same self. It might be my Bad Self. I'm reprimanding Bad Self for doing stupid things and having unworthy desires and unhelpful emotions. That means "I" am Good Self. I can't be Good Self without Bad Self to yell at.

Nowadays, I try to observe the attitude that motivates the style of talk. Following the details of what I say to my self may be less significant than asking "is this a good way of interacting with someone who is acting like that?"

So... this is another turn. First, we had a turn from mechanism to content; this turn is from content to texture. I ask "actually, who am I talking at here? why them? what I am I trying to get them to do, and how would they respond?"

There's usually an audience for my internal dialog. Much of my thinking is lecturing, delivering an explanation to a shadowy classroom. That's you, right now! But it's really me. I'm trying to figure something out for myself, but imagining explaining it to you is the best way to do that!

Forgetting there's an audience may lead to mistakes. Informally, I hope to publish something on Substack roughly weekly, which would make this recording a week late. A week ago, my spouse Charlie and I recorded a conversation about the different ways we help unstick stuck STEM people. That's a large part of Charlie's work, and of my work. It was animated and fascinating for us. Unfortunately, we somehow overlooked the implications of it being a podcast episode. To count as a success, you would have to understand it. With decades of shared context, Charlie and I talk in a private language of jargon from several fields. We can allude vaguely to esoteric concepts and understand each other without explanation. No one else could possibly have followed our recorded discussion.

I’ve been intending to record audio monologs for several years. I’ve tried several times and failed. This is the first I’m reasonably happy with. What do you think? How is the audio quality? Is my voice annoying, or OK?

What I realized in retrospect is that a podcast isn't a conversation; it can't be. It's a stage play, a simulacrum, a theatrical performance of a conversation. That's why I am using "podcast" as the symbol for this approach to relating to myself. I find myself performing, and then may interrupt the performance.

I've noticed that when I'm being Good Self scolding Bad Self, there's a third person in the room. Am I really Good? I can't be sure unless there's a judge to confirm my Goodness. My diatribe against Bad Self plays to an imaginary audience, the authority to who will rule in my favor and declare that I am justified in beating my self up.

Why is that part of my self in that role? I might turn to the judge and ask "Who are you? Why are you here? What's your agenda? Who appointed you as an authority?"

I don't know much about Internal Family Systems therapy, but this seems to be in line with its general method. It's natural to regard one's self as having parts. "Part of me wants to go to the concert, but I'm tired and another part of me just wants to go to bed early." If you feel an internal conflict, you could treat these parts as full-fledged selves and put them in dialog with each other. If you encourage them to be civil, maybe they can work out a compromise.

It may be useful to stabilize these parts. It's not just a vague momentary impulse that wants to go to the concert, there's a regularly-appearing character "Party Self" who's always up for a good time, and there's "Stick-in-the-mud Self" who's boring and just wants to be comfortable at home alone. Then you can develop complex enduring relationships with these imaginary people.

I've mostly avoided this. I'm wary of it. I don't believe this is how selves work, although apparently you can mold yours into acting as if they do. Applying a theory that is relevantly wrong can lead to bad results. The danger is getting lost in a complicated fantasy world populated with drama queens, in simulacra of emotional conflict. This can result from taking the theory much too seriously, and concretizing "parts" as truly existing, rather than as a useful fiction. It seems to me likely to make things worse, rather than better.

These may be risks of amateur self-therapy. I don't know, maybe a good therapist understands all the limitations and failure modes I've discussed, and can help clients work around them.

However, a secret about IFS came out recently, which is that many prominent advocates, supposed experts, believe their patients are parasitized by literal demons, which require exorcism. This is crazy talk.

I hold all theories about selves lightly. All models are wrong, even if some are sometimes useful. When I use a model, I try to maintain awareness of what's actually going on, to prevent the theory from obscuring accurate self-perception.

Leaf devil: self as interaction

OK, now the fourth and last way I relate with my self. I'll start with the symbolic analogy.

The chemical engineering department at MIT, where I was a student, is in a modernist building in the shape of a 3-4-5 triangle. So one corner is a concrete knife edge. Very peculiar. I used to stop there to eat my lunch, sitting on a long rectangular concrete planter. It's in a walkway between the chemical engineering building and the biology building. The odd angles of the closely-packed many-story structures often channeled an intense wind through the walkway, and the planter was put there to break up the gale. I think.

But interrupting the smooth flow of the wind created vortices. And in autumn... there is a dust devil. Or, I should say, a leaf devil. The swirling wind picks up the fallen leaves in a mini tornado, sucking them way up in the air. At the height of the season, maple leaves, brilliant red and gold, swirl up in a tight column, a dozen feet into the air, four feet across. It's magical! Memorable! Mesmerizing! It's glorious like nothing you have ever seen!

I would play with it, feeding it extra leaves, or it would happily pick up whatever I gave it, crumpled up scratch paper maybe. How much could I stuff in there?

If I stepped into it, the whole thing would collapse, dropping leaves all around me. That was cool but also slightly disappointing: wouldn't it be more fun to stand at the center of the tornado, gesturing like a wizard, levitating the world?

The leaf devil is not a thing. It's a pattern of activity. It comes into being only when conditions are right, and then subsides. It depends on the physical form of its surrounds, but it has no fixed form itself.

This is the way I try to relate to my so-called "self" now. It's not a thing; it's a dynamic pattern of activity. Or, rather, unlike the leaf devil, I have many different patterns I self with. Different circumstances call forth different patterns, different "selves," different ways of being. How I am on a zoom call with a mentee, how I self, is different from how I self when talking with my spouse over dinner.

This helps makes sense of the wildly different concepts of "self" proposed in different psychologies. What does it include and not include? Paying close attention to ways I use the word in different contexts, I find that I too conceptualize it in quite different, inconsistent ways.

You could say we have many selves; but since none of them are definite things, just nebulous patterns of interaction, there can be no specific list of which selves I have. Then it is tempting to say "there is no self, really," as in some Buddhist metaphysics—and also in some Western philosophies. Which might be true in some sense, but in most cases it's not a useful way of understanding what's going on. "I do selfing in different ways when interacting with different situations" is more accurate.

Or, maybe better still, I can say that I have a different self in every moment. There's a Dzogchen practice of taking literally Heraclitus' maxim: "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." The Dzogchen practice frames this in terms of the Buddhist doctrine of rebirth. "I," my "self," die and am reborn in every second, into a different world. This is astonishing! I am a new person, opening my eyes and beholding a fork for the first time in my life! It's like nothing I've seen before, it glitters, it undulates, it's pokey and scary and delicious! I can hear a plane passing overhead, growling—I've never heard anything like that—it's unprecedentedly irregular; ominous yet pleasing!

You and I are in constant contact with a vast and endlessly complex and fascinating worlds, featuring especially other people. We are constantly acting in it, and with them, and so we are constantly being re-formed by this involvement.

My self is not a fixed machine. There is no self—in that sense. I switch from a noun to a verb, or a quality: "selfing," or "selfness." Selfing is nebulous, emergent, transient but recurring patterns of interaction with circumstances. Selfing is spontaneously called forth in the moment, prompted by perception.

"Not a fixed machine" doesn't mean "runs on non-physical woo," nor that what we do is random or arbitrary. There's a brain involved, which provides some stability. The traditional rationalist view is that the brain generates actions autonomously, or that minds decide what to do; but this is false, as a matter of simple causality. What I do right now depends on the situation I perceive right now, which is also somewhat stable. There's two sides to the interaction that are both causally involved. The leaf devil is also an intermittent but somewhat stable pattern. (Apparently it's still going, decades after I left MIT!) It's brought about by the interaction of the wind, the weird geometry of the buildings, and the maple trees dropping their leaves in response to the changing seasons.

For many listeners, this will not be a familiar view, unlike the systematic and psychotherapeutic approaches. If you find it intriguing, and would like to learn more, the show notes link to several essays and a book.

This understanding of selfness is unsettling because it undercuts fantasies of control. It contradicts the rationalist ideal of a unitary subject, with free will to make decisions. That's infeasible, because activity is always a dynamic, improvised collaboration with nebulous-but-patterned otherness.

How much influence I can have, short of perfect control, varies, of course. And how much control I try to exert varies. Sometimes going with the flow is best; sometimes applying force to make things go my way is best. This is tricky to get right. I'm still learning. Probably I'll never stop learning, never get it consistently right. I think this is a skill that demands awareness. It's easy to go one way or the other out of habit, and that risks missing opportunities or causing needless friction.

Learning to be more comfortable with the ambiguity and unpredictable fluidity of selfness has taken hard work, attention, some courage, and—when I can manage it—good humor. When I can do it, allowing nebulosity of my self frees me from neurotic self-obsession, and increases the effectiveness and enjoyability of my relationships.

My book Meaningness describes six textures of experience which manifest when I allow fluidity in selfing. They are: wonder, open-ended curiosity, humor, play, enjoyment, and creation. I hope those came through in my description of the leaf devil! On a good day, I regard my self with wonder, open-ended curiosity, and amusement; I play with it, enjoy it, and help create it.

Opening awareness meditation

I started to understand selfing this way intellectually by reading phenomenology and ethnomethodology, as I mentioned at the beginning of this recording. But making it real began with meditation, of a particular sort taught in Dzogchen, an unusual branch of Buddhism.

Different types of meditation have different methods and different results. The currently mainstream ones in America turn you inward, often using strong concentration on a single focus. They were originally actually designed to cut you off from the world, and if you go hard at them, that's what happens. Ideally, you lose all contact with reality, and then "discover" that you have no self. That's because selfing is an interaction, and it stops happening if you don't let the world play its part. No wind, no leaf devil.

Dzogchen meditation turns outward, toward the world. Perception opens up toward reality's vividness, its intensity, its richness, revealing the six textures of experience, starting with wonder. When I get up from my sitting cushion, I often find that the scent of meditation lingers, and I can engage the world with greater curiosity, humor, playfulness, enjoyment, and creativity.

This may sound a bit elevated. As a practical matter, what you do is mostly responding to a concrete situation. If you want to act more effectively, you need to perceive the situation more accurately. I find that Dzogchen-style meditation leads to insight into what I do, in what sorts of situations. This contrasts with the inward-turning styles of meditation, which supposedly reveal the causal mechanics of mind. I don't believe they do; I find their theories implausible.

Meditation lets me take my self much less seriously, and then it becomes much less of a problem. Also my thoughts and emotions and beliefs and desires. It's useful to know what those are, to see them clearly, as they appear in meditation. I don't want to be compelled by them into doing counterproductive things. Just sitting with emotions, allowing them to appear and pass away without having to react to them, or trying to manipulate them into better behavior, is perhaps the most valuable aspect of meditation for me.

Further resources

* The Meaningness book's page on selfness is a short explanation of my understanding of it.

Also on Meaningness:

* Textures of the complete stance

* Open-ended curiosity

* Wonder

On Vividness, my site about Vajrayana Buddhism:

* Your self is not a spiritual obstacle

* Spacious freedom

* Relating as beneficent space about spontaneous activity

* Beyond emptiness: Zen, Tantra, and Dzogchen

My spouse Charlie Awbery's book Opening Awareness is about a Dzogchen style of meditation. You can read the first two chapters for free on the Evolving Ground website.

In the book itself, the two chapters "Emotional Turbulence" and "Spacious Involvement in Life" are especially relevant.

Also see Charlie's Taking Vajrayana into every relationship.

Part One of my meta-rationality book explains why rationalism, and rationalist cognitive science, are wrong.

I've found a video of the leaf devil by Building 66, the chemical engineering building at MIT. It wasn't taking full form on the day this was filmed, mostly just swirling the leaves in a circle on the ground, but you can see some being lifted a few feet near the end. I wasn't sure whether it would still be there, decades after I left MIT, with new construction in the area, and was glad to see it still going.

Scott Alexander's review of the book The Others Within Us illustrates some dangers of taking mental contents too seriously. The book is about IFS therapists thinking they've found literal demons parasitizing their patients.

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