First impressions matter, right? The funny thing about that overdone saying is that it's true! Think of the first time you've met someone. The good impressions. And the bad ones. How hard was it to shake that first impression? No matter how untrue you felt it was.
You may have met someone on a good day. You were creative and witty. And in top form. Is that your true self?
Or think of another first meeting when you were sad or tired or otherwise miserable. You may have met someone you would have otherwise instantly clicked with. Instead, you came across as dull and sluggish and slow-witted. Is that your true self?
And what about those times you tried to manage first impressions. The job interviews. The first time with the lover's family/friends. At these times, you want to put your best traits forward. And keep your worst ones firmly in check. Were you tricking people? Hiding your true self behind this carefully assumed self?
How do you even know what your true self is? We all have this idea of who we really are. The self we want to project out onto the world. Except, not always. Sometimes we only want some parts to come out. Other times, other parts. What does that tell us about our true selves?
What if 'you' don't exist as a constant, definable and true entity? What if that sense of self and meaningful identity is false? An illusion. What if you aren't a 'you' but a constantly shifting process that deludes itself into thinking it's a 'you'? Wouldn't that explain why pieces of 'you' come out depending on the circumstances...?
The contingency of first impressions provides evidence for the non-existence of a real self. The ability to represent the self differently under different conditions provides further evidence that 'we' as an indivisible and complete unit do not exist. Our selves are multi-faceted. A face for every face we face, to paraphrase 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. And if that is the case, then which face is the true face?
All of our faces may be equally untrue. And we may very well not be masters of our own domain. Thomas Metzinger is a philosopher who explores the nature of consciousness and the self. His work argues that 'no such things as selves exist in the world: Nobody ever was or had a self [italics in original] (p. 186).' We are an illusion of our brain and we can't even see it! So we go about our business assuming that 'we' are going about our business when instead something completely different is actually going on: 'The phenomenal self is not a thing, but a process--and the subjective experience of being someone [italics in original] emerges if a conscious information processing system operates under a transparent model...All that exist are specific information processing systems engaged in self-modelling, but whose models cannot be correlated with any ostensibly 'real' items in the world (p. 187).'
We feel like we are selves, so we assume that we as a self exists. But this sense of self is false, we 'possess 'self-models' which cannot be recognised by the system that employs them (p. 187).' How does this happen? How can we be so deluded by our own bodies? According to Metzinger, 'we do not experience phenomenal states as phenomenal states...[we] look through them [italics and ellipses/brackets in original] (pp. 189-190).' We then live in a 'fully immersive virtual reality' which Metzinger likens to 'cyberspace': 'We do not experience our conscious field as a cyberspace generated by our brain, but simply as reality itself, with which we are in contact in a natural and unproblematic way (p. 190).' It would seem then that The Matrix is not science fiction at all but a good picture of the kind of world we actually inhabit as self-models constantly tricked into taking 'appearances' literally.
Of course, that is only partially accurate. The true horror of reality is that you cannot wake up. Choose the red pill, choose the blue pill. It doesn't matter. You have no choice. There is no 'you' to choose. You can't wake up. You can only dream. But maybe dreaming is a comfort...
Dream on, my dark comrades.
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