💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › replies › 8450 captured on 2024-07-09 at 02:11:04. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-06-20)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
< Aliases are hard, perhaps impossible, on the modern Web
Sorry for the delay, exams are soon so I've been busy but I feel like I need to relax a bit.
Anyway... thanks for stoking delightful thoughts along these lines!
My pleasure! :D
Regarding the above, in my (young and naive) experience, a core "personality" keeps me "sane", or at least attached to this reality. For me, identities are nothing more than masks, meant to "protect" this precious core, to separate interactions from "interfering" with my whole internal "social web". I know that this is all jumbly wumbly, but I guess that keeping track of too many people becomes scary and tiring in the long term.
Maybe that's behind the idea of having infinite identities you're mentioning, so to minimize the amount of people one has to consider while doing any form of interaction. That would be quite a liberation, I think.
I've not yet went as far as charging personas. It's weird to say, but I feel like an automaton: my memory is short and most of the time I feel like running in "self-driving mode", so I wouldn't be able to be mindful enough to "fake" a different personality altogether. I like being myself, you could say.
That said, role playing indeed is liberating. I actually played some actual "real life" RPG with some friends before (albeit through VOIP), but it didn't feel as liberating as a place like here, perhaps because I didn't need it yet.
And role playing isn't necessarily being somebody else; here, I'm reasonably "myself", just with a different mask. I just want to chill a bit in a nice pub like this, with a nice virtual (nonalcoholic) drink. Also, "walking around" feels quite therapeutic, even on the Web. You could argue that most people don't do that even there :P
Somewhere along the line to "me", what you refer to as "a core 'personality'" seemed as much a mask/act as any other, except for being the first.
"I" can't say "I" remember it taking place, but having watched parents and their young ones, it seems "I" is first a notion as a sort of mathematical mean between the parents' notions of who the newborn "is" (there might be others nearby who contribute, e.g. "family"). That first - and, thus, "core" - notion and slowly added auxiliary/support notions are repeated until they seemingly manifest, i.e. miraculously self-referentially takes itself seriously (i.e. as though "real"), as sort of Phoenix arriving from ashes.
The process might be called "a first assisted, but eventually self-sustaining notional practice making perfect, aka seemingly real instead of merely notional.
Paths to a so-called "enlightenment" seem to be literally a *en- *lighten* -ing" of that notion hive/collective, it becoming "lighter" in terms of seeming to be something more than merely a complicated tree (programming sense) of notions kept seemingly alive by re-petition of said notions - both by itself, and by seeming others (e.g. "Hi there, inquiry!").
In other words, what we call our "self" has been the playing of a role unlike any other that might be played but for "fate"/accident having stoked its inception/conception first. Otherwise, it's no less fake than any other possible personality: 'tis all in the practicing/re-cognizing/re-iterating/re-membering that the "core" personality seems more real.
Ack. So hard to describe....