![]() In light of these obstacles to understanding the plural identity claim, it would be natural to hope that plurals mean the claim metaphorically. (A singlet will, of course, experience another human being’s actions as not mine – but that person’s body will also be visibly distinct.) This is a challenge for understanding the plural identity claim, on two levels: one, because we can’t access other people’s experiences just in general and two, because singlets don’t have these same types of experiences. The discontinuities that mark the boundaries of people p, in other words, aren’t bodily nor are they psychological attributes that can be observed from the outside, like differences in memory and personality. Instead, plurals’ grounds for distinguishing between people p seem to be that each person p has his or her own sense of self and agency. They deny that different people p need to be unaware of each other person p’s thoughts and experiences, or necessarily have radically different characters. Meanwhile, plurals’ grounds for distinguishing between different people p seem to be essentially first-personal and phenomenological – that is, based on their own private experiences. Singlets experience ourselves as being ‘alone in’ our bodies, and our strong default assumption is that all people come, one per body, in this way. These plural identities can be difficult for singlets (including me) to wrap our heads around. Plurals are defined by what I will call their plural identities. Although I am conjoined inseparably from the other members of my group … phrases like ‘your other selves’, or ‘when you were that other person’, or ‘the other you’ … non-sequiturs. The most striking feature of plurals is that they don’t say things such as: ‘I am many people p.’ Rather, they might say, as one person p put it in an open letter: I am only myself I have one identity, one sense of self, one personality. Different people p might speak of liking or disliking, respecting and disparaging, cooperating and arguing and negotiating with each other. Each person p takes him or herself to bear social relations to the others, as members of a household might. No, we’re just people, thanks.’Īccording to plurals, then, a plural human being isn’t a person, but a co-embodied group of people. As one person p puts it: ‘You presume that there’s a “real person” underneath all of us who’s conjuring up “imaginary friends”. And they take each of these psychological beings, inhabiting one shared body, to be a full person: let’s call each of them a person p, where the little ‘p’ stands for ‘part of one human being’. Plurals don’t just feel as though they are psychologically multiple – they believe that they are. Conversely, most people with DID aren’t plurals. In other cases, it’s because they don’t meet the amnesia criterion for DID, since the multiple beings that plurals experience as being inside them can share experiences or communicate to each other about their experiences. Often, this is because they don’t find their plurality per se to be distressing or impairing. But many plurals don’t meet the diagnostic criteria for DID. You might think you’ve heard of plurals if you’ve heard of dissociative identity disorder (DID), because, like plurals, people with DID experience themselves as being psychologically multiple. At present, there is a handbook online about how to respond to a co-worker’s ‘coming out’ (as the document puts it) as plural. But what about identities that we think are false or absurd – or that we simply don’t understand?Ī plural is a human being who says things like: ‘I’m one of many people inside my head.’ Although they are quite rare (it’s impossible to say how rare), plurals are increasingly visible on social media and in the occasional popular media article. Our vulnerability to how others regard us might create obligations to try to regard others in some of the ways they desire – ways that are consonant with their own identities. This potential for conflict gives us unique power over each other, and also makes us uniquely vulnerable: only self-conscious beings can kill with a glance or die of embarrassment. ![]() This opens up the possibility of a conflict between our own identities and how we are perceived by others. In addition to being able to think about ourselves, self-conscious beings can recognise that we are the objects of other people’s thoughts. We also have identities : self-beliefs that are sources of meaning, purpose and value, and that help to constrain our choices and actions. Human beings are self-conscious creatures: we can conceptualise ourselves as psychological beings, forming beliefs about who and what we are. ![]()
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