What does it mean to say that we contain multitudes? Most of us experience at least some variance in self-recognition during the course of our lives, perhaps feeling that we are different people at different times or in different situations. The aim of this paper is to make sense of this experience, but in order to do this, we must first confront a more basic question: what is a self? The paper begins by outlining three different historical approaches to the nature of selfhood, before providing a minimal characterisation of a person as an autonomous agent, and exploring two different models of personal multiplicity — minds with multiple selves (plurality), and selves with multiple minds (forking) — before synthesising these into a model of manifold selfhood (personae) and unpacking some of its implications.
Peter Wolfendale is an independent philosopher living in the North East of England and the author of Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon's New Clothes (Urbanomic / MIT Press) and the forthcoming Revenge of Reason (Urbanomic / MIT Press). He has also been disseminating philosophical ideas on his blog (deontologistics.co) for over ten years. His interests range from the correct methodology with which to pursue metaphysics, to the abstract computational structure of the mind, taking in a number of other topics in aesthetics, ethics, and logic in the process. He is currently working on what it means for to have a self (to have autonomy), and what it means to value something for its own sake (to appreciate beauty). He believes these questions are more closely related than is generally suspected. He is also writing a sci-fi novel, just because.
Reading: We will be reading Nicholas Humphrey and Daniel C. Dennett, 1989, "Speaking for our selves: an assessment of multiple personality disorder".