I Contain Multitudes - Self as Multiplicity

Hall of Mirrors: Digital Personae and the Fractured Self (1/3)

Look in the mirror. Who do you see? The same person who woke up this morning? The same one who existed ten years ago? The same one who posts on Twitter, shows up at family dinners, and daydreams during meetings? What about the one that criticizes you for doomscrolling and zoning off? That’s also you, right? We intuitively feel there must be some essential "me" coordinating all these appearances. A CEO of the mind, a master of ceremonies, a ghost in the machine.

But try to find this essence, and you'll discover what philosophers and mystics have been telling us for millennia: it's turtles (masks) all the way down.

The Trouble with a Unified Self

An intuitive notion of the self includes a watcher, a center of experience. But this watcher proves remarkably elusive. Look for it in the brain, as Descartes did when he nominated the pineal gland as the seat of the soul, and you'll find only neural networks in constant flux. Try to observe it directly through introspection, and you'll bump into a deeper puzzle: who's doing the observing? If you think you've found the watcher somewhere in your head, who's looking at it?

Daniel Dennett masterfully exposed this infinite regress with his image of the Cartesian Theatre. A watcher needs a watcher needs a watcher, and suddenly, we're trapped in a mental hall of mirrors. This inquiry doesn’t just work philosophically but experientially - it’s a key practice in meditation traditions (e.g., Buddhist Mahamudra) to deconstruct the notion of the self.

Even if we abandon the search for a central watcher, we might hope that the right combination of parts could create a stable self. But the ancient Greeks already saw the flaw in this thinking with their Ship of Theseus paradox: if we replace every plank and nail, is it still the same ship? Are you still the same person when every cell in your body has been replaced, every belief has shifted, and every memory has been subtly rewritten (yes, it does that)?

The Self is a Multiplicity

"One day, perhaps, this century will be called Deleuzian." - Michael Foucault

The questions above are not even wrong. Instead of tying ourselves in conceptual knots by searching for an unchanging essence, we need to embrace the changeable, multiple nature of self. "Self" has different meanings in different contexts and consists of different elements. Acknowledging this resolves all of these philosophical problems at once. This is where Gilles Deleuze's concepts of "assemblage" and “multiplicity” become helpful.

An assemblage is a constellation of heterogeneous elements that form a functional whole while maintaining their distinct properties.

One layer up the fractal, we get

A multiplicity is a self-organizing collection of assemblages that continuously unfolds and transforms, defined not by rigid boundaries but by internal differences and variations.

Let’s explore how assemblages around personality and dimensions of the experience of self come together to create the multiplicity of the self.

Personality: A Dance of Elements

What makes you you? I bet the thoughts that come up will gesture at personality. Idiosyncratic preferences, ways of being, the slob you put into your dating profile (“How would a close friend describe you?”). But personality isn't a fixed essence – it's a dynamic interplay of:

• Relatively stable traits (like introversion/extroversion)

• Attachment patterns

• Emotional tendencies

• Communication styles

• Behavioral habits

These elements come together like musicians in an improvising jazz band, creating recognisable patterns while remaining fluid and responsive: The assemblage of personality. Notice how different you are slouching alone, social smiling at a party, or humble bragging at your parent's house. Different contexts call forth different configurations of your personality-assemblage.

But it goes deeper. What do Jordan Peterson, Andrés Gómez Emilsson, and the discraced meditation teacher Culadasa have in common? They all get that personality is a fractal. We contain multiple sub-personalities or parts, each with its own traits, emotions, and goals. Sit down to dinner with your parents, and watch as a dormant childhood part springs to life – perhaps a subtle hunger for approval, or its teenage rebellion counterpart. Each of these parts is an assemblage of the elements in the list above. The interaction of different parts creates the personality.

Your personality is a multiplicity made of different parts.

Dimensions of the Experiential Self: A Many-Mirrored Room

Beyond personality, we experience self through multiple dimensions, each with its own type of assemblage. That’s the cheeky homunculus that appears to be binge watching the movie of your life in the Cartesian theatre from above. But that is just one dimension of the Experiential Self. Anil Seth outlines 5 dimensions of self in his book “Being You”:

1. The Social Self: How we exist in relation to others, including our roles, status, and group identities

2. The Narrative Self: The ongoing story we tell about who we are and where we're going

3. The Perspectival Self: Our immediate experience of being somewhere, seeing from a particular viewpoint

4. The Agentic Self: Our sense of being able to act and make decisions

5. The Bodily Self: Our physical existence and its attendant sensations

Confounding all of them into a single ugly blob of a notion of the self creates contradictions and confusion. How about we just don’t do that in the first place? Rather, we can see each of these dimensions of self as an assemblage. These dimensions interact in complex ways and together form the multiplicity of the Experiential Self. A straighter posture (bodily) can trigger confident thoughts (narrative), leading to more assertive social behavior (social). Each dimension is both distinct and inseparably connected to the others.

The Experiential Self is a multiplicity made of five interacting dimensions.

The Self is a Verb

In summary, the self is a multiplicity of interacting assemblages, including personality parts and dimensions of self. Without a fixed center or clear boundaries, in constant flux. Think of it like an ecosystem rather than a machine – a dynamic interplay of elements rather than a fixed structure. A mycelium, not a tree.

Since the self is always in movement, dynamically assembling and discarding elements in relation to the environment, it makes sense to think of the self as a process. A verb, not a noun. The process of “selfing” involves two key elements: Modelling and identification.

In evolutionary terms, the self arose in order to navigate our environment successfully. We need to know where our body is and what we can do with it to survive so the dimensions of the Bodily, Perspectival, and Agentic Self emerged. Similarly, the Social Self and the Narrative Self are used to navigate social spaces. These internal maps don’t just model the agent, they also model the environment. For example, affordances in the environment are needed to be able to choose possible actions. As the environment changes, the self changes. Self and world are really just two sides of the same coin: A model to make sense of and navigate the world.

The process of identification determines where in this model we locate the self. Identification determines whether I experience myself as a watcher of experience or an active agent, the voice in my head, or my emotions. I identify, therefore I am.

Buddhists and Therapists knew this already

I am large, I contain multitudes - Walt Whitman

It's striking how different traditions have arrived at these insights of the self as a multiplicity through different paths:

Buddhism has taught for millennia that the self lacks inherent existence – not as a philosophical puzzle but as a practical observation that reduces suffering. The Deleuzian concept of multiplicity is remarkably similar to the Buddhist idea of dependent co-arising. Instead of “assemblages” (e.g. Seth’s dimensions of self), classical Buddhism describes 5 “aggregates” to describe the experience of the self.

Meanwhile, psychotherapy stumbled onto the multiplicity of the self through clinical observation, ever since Freud first sketched out his topographical model of the psyche. Freud's Id, Ego, and Super-Ego were early attempts to map this multiplicity by defining different interacting assemblages. Later developments like Jung's archetypes and Lacan's registers added sophistication to the model. Internal Family Systems therapy takes it furthest, working directly with the semi-autonomous parts that make up our inner ecosystem.

Whether through meditation, philosophical analysis, or therapeutic practice, connoisseurs of the human experience keep discovering that the self is not one but many.

How we define these assemblages is somewhat arbitrary. Many ways to skin a cat, and so on and so forth (imagine some Zizekian spit on that crude image). Whether we take Seth’s dimensions of self, the Buddhist aggregates, Freudian assemblages, or our own idiosyncratic parts à la IFS, the result is always a frivolous Frankenstein of a self that keeps swapping his limbs.

Dividuals Dancing with Multiplicity

This view of self as multiplicity isn't just philosophically satisfying – it's pragmatically powerful (“Upaya,” affirms the Buddhist in the corner with a serene smile that can’t quite hide its complacency). When we stop expecting to find (or create) a unified, unchanging self, we can work more skillfully with our natural multiplicity. A re-wilding of the self. Instead of the conventional static view of the self as “individual” (meaning “undivided”), we can embrace the Deleuzian “dividual”. The dividual dynamically models self and world from the various available assemblages, identifying with the processes that are most useful in a given circumstance.

Psychological health, in this light, isn't about achieving some mythical state of complete integration. We don’t want a solid monolith of a self. It’s about knowing how to wisely construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct a self-world model to roll with the punches of life as it unfolds. Selfing like contact improv, not like ballet. A graceful dance between our many selves, letting each sub-personality take the lead when appropriate.

Harmony is the new integration.

Death to the individual, long live the dividual.