There is no authentic self

A lot of people talk a lot about finding their authentic self. And the way the go about it is silly. So, here’s an example from psychiatrist-cum-twitch-streamer-cum-spiritual-guru “Dr K”, who in one of his streams says:¹

When you are with other people your impression of who you are is fractured between your experience and their perception of your experience. So if I go to school with a Ninja Turtles backpack, I’m excited … and the second kids start making fun of me, this is very confusing. Now there’s a part of me that loves [the backpack] and there’s a part of me that doesnt … and I’m getting really confused. And so then, over time, we start to compromise who we are. We try to reconcile this internal thing with this external impression … you compromised what you wanted for the sake of the world around you. And as you compromise yourself in that way, generally speaking it leads to unhappiness because I’m the most happy when I’m with my Ninja Turtles backpack.

And this is the typical expression of the idea. Other people somehow take us away from who we are. Inside us is some truer version of us that is slowly withering in the face of the demands of the world around us to be something else.

And I just reject this premise out of hand.

There are a few reasons for this, but since I am what I am, let’s start with some brain stuff. Our brain, and our nervous system more broadly, does a lot of stuff. But, as I keep pointing out, the most obvious thing it does is map inputs (the world) to outputs (the right behaviour for the world).

Dr K, and people like him, are very worried about the influence of these inputs. But I guess the question that should leave us asking is, without those inputs, exactly what would the output be? In the absence of the world, what kind of ‘self’ would our nervous system be trying to produce?

I’ll give you an example of what I mean. There’s this occasional phenomenon of the feral child: a kid who, for some reason, has ended up isolated from human contact for a long time. Often they end up raised by animals of one sort or another. Other times, they’re bleaker stories of confinement and neglect. Wikipedia has heaps of them. Have a read.

The common thread is that these kids end up very far from the typical idea of ‘human’. A particularly famous French account is notable because this feral child eventually learned to read and write, making her ‘unique among feral children’. Mostly, they never learn to speak, or if they do, it’s extremely limited and often only by way of hand signs. The one you’ll be taught about in any class on human perception is that of Genie, who’s used to demonstrate that without early language stimulation, your brain never really quite develops the ability to develop language properly.

More generally, feral kids are weird as hell. As you could imagine, having been raised by wolves, or confined to a dark room, they behave extremely differently to people who were not raised that way. Often, as the books describing them will gently put it, they ‘only partially adapt to a conventional lifestyle’.

Are these kids closer to some authentic self, having been isolated from the demands of other humans? Obviously not. And you could argue that their authentic self is similarly ‘fractured’ by whatever their wolf parents wanted from them or something. But I think you’ll agree that whatever authentic self you’re picturing is an authentic self that knows how to speak. And like many other things about being human, language is something we learn socially.

It’s not at all clear what would be left in us without what we learn from others. For example, there seems to be something about our temperament that seems quite innate, but the rest of our personality is surprisingly changeable. Whatever is ‘authentic’ to us is probably going to be very basic indeed, and otherwise we learn how to be in the world based on social influences. Social influences we’re never really free of, and without which, would have us much closer to a feral child than something we’d like to imagine as our ‘authentic self’.

A better way to look at things is to think about how we swap social identities in and out. In that article I talk about how, when we’re attracted to a group, we bias our thinking and behaving to be more like the group. And we do this, because we’re noisy creatures:

All these things exist inside you. You can occupy any of them, or none. You could be the weirdest version of yourself—the one that talks to themselves when they’re at home alone (just me?). You could be the corporate version. The networking version. The party version. And in each of these settings you have individual parts you competing for expression, alongside the pressure to be like whatever groups you want to be like.

So, to cut out the noise, we bias our thinking and behaving to ignore these noisily competing parts of yourself.

But, later I talk about why all this noise is necessary:

the world is a noisy place. So we have to be noisy people. If we weren’t we’d be trapped. Managing the need for noise with the need for bias is one of the main things the nervous system does.

Group identity, and the way we swap these in and out, is just one of the strategies it uses to solve the problem of a complex world. On one hand, these different identities let us benefit from bounded bias—knowing exactly who we are and what we do in a given group. On the other hand, having these multiple sources of identity injects just enough noise into our lives to keep us open-minded, flexible, and capable of responding to unexpected change.

This is probably much closer to the ‘authentic self’, this capacity for swapping in and out disparate pieces of ourselves to match the moment. To get beside Dr K’s increasing interest in plugging expensive spirituality courses², many spiritual traditions consider that underneath all these disparate parts, driven by the world around us, there is in fact nothing at all. There isn’t a self in there. As I say elsewhere:

The traditional metaphor for this ‘illusory continuity’ of experiences is a candle. It lights another candle. That new candle lights the next, and that the one after. The flame is passed on, but nothing material unites them.

We are a composite of pieces that the world puts together, but there isn’t any reason for a truer self to lie beneath them. Again, in that last article, I quote the philosopher of mind:

David Hume famously wrote that, after searching in earnest for the mind, he’d be better off giving up, going off instead to play some backgammon:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.

Hume noticed that, in searching for the mind or self, he could find nothing but a collection of experiences. The mind, for Hume, is nothing more than a bundle of impulses, perceptions, and other properties.

Marvin Minsky called this the ‘society of mind’, a vast society of individually simple processes that come together to make up who we are at any given moment.

So, even if there is some kind of ‘authentic’ self, underneath all our ‘fracturing’ social influences, it’s not likely to be very coherent. A bunch of fragmentary pieces of a mental society without any social narratives to bind themselves to.

And we are narrative creatures. Everyone writes books about this. Sapiens, The Storytelling Animal, The Power of Myth, all of Jordan Peterson’s stuff before he came careening off the tracks there, Peterson’s inspiration, Carl Jung, and there’s even an entire form of therapy based on it.

However you package it for sale, we are creatures of narrative. And these narratives help us put our minds together. Narratives generated by what we’ve seen and learned. Social pressures both to fit in, and to work out what we’re supposed to do in different settings. And without any of these things, we’d be a very different thing. Something feral, perhaps, but not something authentic.

The ‘fracture’ isn’t between some authentic self and the expectations of others. The ‘fracture’ is between stories you tell about yourself that make you happier or less happy. You need to find an authentic narrative, not an authentic self. And you’re only going to find that by working out what narratives there are, and then weaving all your noise little pieces into one that works for you.