inside you are two wolves. this is below the minimum viable population threshold, so they soon die out. the deer population inside you explodes, quickly stripping you of your internal vegetation, erosion increases, streams and rivers silt up, and insect numbers collapse due to ha—@wife_geist

i can fix her, i mutter to myself, about myself—@embryosophy

Let’s preëmpt the pseudo-diagnostic objections. In an extremely coarse-grained sense, surely the crippling-fear-of-failure-that-resigns-one-to-inaction that you’re describing (and that we both experience) either contains, or is contained within, some variety of what people like to call ‘imposter syndrome’.

(Other people might have the so-called ‘imposter syndrome,’ but I’m just actually an imposter.)

Yes, well.

The problem is that, whether legitimate and DSM-ish or otherwise, not all ‘diagnosis’ is ontologically equal. Sometimes a ‘diagnosis’ is tightly entangled with a causal account. Down Syndrome. Leukemia. A broken toe. Sometimes it’s just a fancy label for a cluster of observations.

I know that I like to talk of subagency sometimes. I notice, also, that I tend to talk in ways that personify with the tacit assumption of such a schema—as kelpie, or as parliament. However, one of the problems that I have with this model/reflex-in-description is captured in the moment you mentioned in your previous letter: that night, years ago, in the hut, in the forest, in the rain, when “somebody asked what everyone’s greatest fear was” and

You and I, right off the bat, we said ‘failure’. And the other two, just a second behind, said it was losing someone they loved.

What agent(s) spoke up, there, ‘right off the bat’? What parallel parliamentary processes in the two of us decided to bubble up those particular admissions?

In his introduction to The Society of Mind, Minsky writes of the difficulty in describing in sufficient detail the scheme by which “you can build a mind from many small parts, each mindless by itself”, that

It’s much the same for shattered pots as for the cogs of great machines. Until you’ve seen some of the rest, you can’t make sense of any part. (17)

In practice, the problem isn’t just that there is a stylised Fred the Swede in my skull who whispers ‘att misslyckas’ at every turn. Rather, the problem is that knowledge of that part—even in exquisite detail—is not useful knowledge of the form of the whole.

I was an odd and awkward child, and often bullied. I remember my father saying to me, once, in the midst of a kind-and-yet-doomed-to-failure attempt at an explanation of the situation, “you’re never gonna be anything those people respect.”

(While, at the time, it’s fair to say it didn’t help, he also wasn’t wrong. Adult Me still isn’t anything that Child Me’s Bullies, Now As Adults would respect.)

Today, I imagine that phrase in another context: one subagent, talking in a gentle voice to another, speaking about the rest of the so-called ‘Society of Mind’.

“Look, Kelpie, you’re never gonna be anything those people respect.”

It’s cute, perhaps a label-diagnosis, even, but it doesn’t explain. As a model, at this level of granularity, it doesn’t result in testable predictions.

Clear evidence, I think, that the model is wrong-and-not-quite-useful.