Multiple Selves and Information Systems
by Robert Anton Wilson
Between 1910 and 1939, Charlie Chaplin always played the same character in all his films — the beloved little Tramp that became world-famous.
In 1939, Chaplin wrote, directed and starred in The Great Dictator, in which the little Tramp did not appear.
Instead, Chaplin played two characters — a tyrant, based on Hitler, and a Jewish tailor, one of Hitler's victims.
Audiences all over The World (except Germany, where the authorities banned the film) complained, mournfully and angrily, that they missed The Little Tramp.
Chaplin, however, having gotten rid of The Tramp once, never did bring that persona back.
In later films, he played many characters (a serial killer, a kindly old vaudevillian, a deposed king), but never The Tramp.
People still complained that they wanted to see The Tramp again, but Chaplin went on creating new characters.
(We will leave it to Jungians to explain why Chaplin had to become two opposite characters before he could personally escape the Archetype of The Tramp...)
Many actors have had equally hard battles in getting detached from, if not a specific character, a specific type.
Humphrey Bogart remained stuck in villain roles, usually gangsters, for nearly a decade before he got to play his first hero.
Cary Grant never did escape from the hero type — either the romantic hero or the comic hero; when Alfred Hitchcock persuaded him to play a murderer, in Suspicion, the studio over-ruled both of them and tacked on a surprise ending in which the Grant character did not commit the murder, after all. Etc.
Back in "the real world," if a member of a family changes suddenly, the whole family suddenly appears agitated and disturbed.
Family counselors have learned to expect this, even when the change consists of something everybody considers desirable — e.g., an alcoholic who suddenly stops drinking can "destabilize" the family to the extent that another member becomes clinically depressed, or develops psychosomatic symptoms, or even starts drink-ing heavily (as if the family "needed" an alcoholic).
It seems that we not only speak and think in sentences like "John is an old grouch" but become disoriented and frightened if John suddenly starts acting friendly and generous.
(Audiences rejected the previously "lovable" Chaplin most vehemently when he played the multiple wife-killer in Monsieur Verdoux.
Probably, audiences would not have felt upset if the role had gone to the actor who originally wrote it for himself and sold it to Chaplin when the Hollywood moguls blacklisted him — Orson Welles.)
If Dickens’s Scrooge had changed, in actuality, as he changed in the book, several people in his social field would have suddenly developed bizarre behaviors they had never shown before...
Chaplin, amusingly, once made a comedy about the chaos created by a man who conspicuously does not exhibit the "isness" or "essence" our subject-predicate language programs us to expect, City Lights.
In this film, The Little Tramp encounters a millionaire with two entirely different personalities: a generous and compassionate drunk, and a greedy, somewhat paranoid sober man.
The Tramp and all the other characters soon exhibit behaviors that would look like clinical insanity to the audience, if we did not know the secret none of the characters guess: namely that each "personality" in the rich man appears when brain chemistry changes.
The Russian mystic Gurdjieff claimed that we all contain multiple personalities.
Many researchers in psychology and neuroscience now share that startling view.
As Gurdjieff indicated, the "I" who toils at a job does not seem the same "I" who makes love with joy and passion, and the third "I" who occasionally gets angry for no evident reason seems a third personality, etc.
There does not appear anything metaphysical about this; it even appears, measurably, on electroencephalograms.
Dr. Frank Putnam of the National Institute of Health found that extreme cases of multiple personality — the only ones that ortho-dox psychiatry recognizes — show quite distinct brain waves for each "personality" almost as if the researchers had taken the electrodes off of one subject and attached them to another. (O'Regan. op. cit.)
Dr. Rossi defines these separate personalities as "state specific information systems."
Not only do we show different personalities when drunk and when sober, like Chaplin's emblematic millionaire, but we have different information banks ("memories") in these states.
Thus, most people have noted that something that happened to them while drunk appears totally forgotten, until they get intoxicated again, and then the memory "miraculously" re-appears.
This observation of state-specific information occurs even more frequently with LSD; nobody really remembers the richness of an LSD voyage until they take another dose.
Emotional states seem part of a circular-causal loop with brain chemistry — it seems impossible, for science in 1990, to say that one part of the circle "causes" the other parts. Thus, we can now understand a phenomenon mentioned earlier, namely that we tend to remember happy experiences when happy and sad experiences when sad. The separate "personalities" or information systems within a typical human seem to fall into four main groups, with four additional groups appearing only in minorities who have engaged in one form or another of neurological self-research (metaprogramming).
1. The Oral Bio-Survival System.
This seems to contain imprints and conditioning dating from early infancy, with subsequent learning built upon that foundation.
If you stop and think about, you know how a carpet tastes, how the leg of a chair tastes, etc. You may even remember how the dirt in a flower pot tastes.
This knowledge dates from the oral stage of infancy in which we take nourishment (bio-survival) through the mother's nipples and also judge other objects by putting them in our mouths.
A large part of parenting an infant consists in following the little darling around and shouting "Don't put that in your mouth" whenever they try to taste /test something toxic.
Dating from Adorno in the 1940s, psychologists who do surveys on large groups (e.g., entering college freshper-sons) have repeatedly noted a correlation between dislike of "foreign" and "exotic" foods and the "fascist" personal-ity.
A total Gestalt seems to exist — a behavioral/concep-tual cluster of dislike of new food-dislike of "radical" ideas/racism/nationalism/sexism/xenophobia /conserva-tism/phobic and/or compulsive behaviors-fascist ideolo-gies.
This cluster makes up the well-known F-Scale (F for Fascism). Where more than two of these traits appear, the probabilities indicate that most of the others will appear.
This seems to result from a neophobic imprint in the bio-survival system. Those with this imprint feel increasingly insecure as they move in space-time away from Mommy and "home-cooked meals."
Conversely, those who like to experiment with strange and exotic foods seem to have a neophilic imprint and want to explore the world in many dimensions — traveling, moving from one city or country to another, studying new subjects, "playing" with ideas rather than holding rigidly to one static model of the universe. On this baby-level of the brain, some seem to have an imprint that clings to the familiar ("Oh, Mommy, take me home"), some have the opposite imprint that seeks novelty and exploration ("Let's see what's on the other side of the mountain") and most, following the Bell-shaped curve, have an imprint somewhere between these extremes — "conservative" on some issues, innovative on others. Subsequent learning will tend to get processed through these imprints, and those with strong neophobic reflexes will usually, if they ever reject the initial dogmatic family reality-tunnel, settle at once into an equally dogmatic new reality-tunnel.
E.g., if raised Catholic, they seldom become agnostics or zetetics; rather, they will move, like iron filings drawn by a magnet, to dogmatic atheism or even a crusading atheist "religion" like Marxism, Objectivism or CSICOP.
Since the mechanical bio-chemical reflexes on this level remain "invisible" (and cannot even reach translation onto the verbal level except in an altered state of consciousness, such as hypnosis, or under certain drugs), this hard-wired infantile information system controls all later information systems (or "selves") without the knowledge of the conscious ego.
In most cases, the "happiest" or most tranquil areas of the infantile bio-survival system — those imprinted by the Safe Space around Mommy — can only be "remembered" or re-experienced with drugs that trigger neurotransmit-ters similar to those activated during breast-feeding.
The attempt to re-capture that state may lead to re-imprinting via yoga or martial arts, or to a search for chemical analogs, which will eventually lead to the opiates. "Disturbed" or "unhappy" (ego dystonic) imprints here may account for opiate addictions. This oral bio-survival system makes a feedback loop from mouth to hypothalamus to neuropeptide system to lymph and blood etc. to immunological system.
What Transactional Analysis calls the Wooden Leg Game — evasion of adult responsibility through chronic illness — does not appear conscious in most cases.
Rather a Loser Script in this system depresses the sub-systems, including the immunological system, and renders the subject, or victim, statistically prone to more illness than average. Similarly, a Winner Script on this circuit contributes to longevity and may account for cases like Bertrand Russell (still writing philosophy and polemic at 99), George Burns (busy with three careers until 100) etc.
2. The Anal Territorial System. Since all mammals mark their territories with excretions, the "toddler" stage of development and associated toilet training produces a system of synergetic imprints and conditioning concerned with territory and what Freudians call "anality" (sadomasochism).
Those who take a Dominant imprint in this system seek power all their lives; those with a Submissive imprint seek Dominant types to lead them (the Reichian Fuhrerprinzip) and most people settle somewhere between these extremes, taking a masochist stance toward those "above" them (government, landlords etc.) and a sadist stance toward selected victims defined as "below" them (wives, children, "inferior races," people on Welfare, etc.)
The "self" or information system on this toddler level may function as the predominant self or "normal" personality in those whose lives center around power or it may remain "latent" usually and only emerge in conflict situations.
Usually, it emerges full-blown when enough alcohol enters the brain and alters habitual circuitry.
The anal-sadist vocabulary of the typical drunk ("Oh, yeah? Stick it up your ass," "You dumb ass-hole," "Up yours, buddy," etc.) recapitulates toilet training and mammalian habits of using excretions as territorial fight-or-flight signals.
People say later "He was acting like a two-year-old" or more simply "He just wasn't himself last night."
These remarks signify that the toddler information system — i.e., the mammalian anal-territorial circuits — temporarily took control of the brain. Politicians have great skill in activating this system and easily persuade large crowds to behave like small children having temper tantrums.
The favorite activating device (dramatized by Shakespeare in Henry V) invokes mammalian pack-solidarity by attacking a rival pack.
George Bush, perceived as a "wimp" by many, raised his popularity to unprecedented heights, just as I looked about for a contemporary illustration of this point.
Mr. Bush simply invaded a small, Third World country (Panama) where a quick, easy victory came within a week.
The "wimp" image vanished overnight.
Any alpha male in any gorilla or chimpanzee pack, feeling his authority slipping, would have followed the same course.
This system makes a feedback loop between muscles, adrenaline, the thalamus of the brain, the anus and the larynx. Swelling the body and using the larynx to howl (muscle-flexing and noise) makes up the usual Domination signal among birds, reptiles, mammals and politicians.
Study the speeches of Hitler and Ronald Reagan for further details, or just watch two ducks disputing territory in a pond.
Conversely, shrinking the body and muttering (or becoming totally silent) make up the usual Submission reflex.
"Crawling away with its tail between its legs," the dog's submission reflex, does not differ much from the body-language of an employee who made the mistake of disagreeing with the boss and received a Dominator (flexing/howling) signal in response.
The ego — or self — defined by this system appears more mammalian and evolutionarily advanced than the quick reptilian reflexes of the self operating on the oral bio-survival system.
Nonetheless, the personality shrinks back to the primitive bio-survival self whenever real danger appears — whenever confronted by threat to life, rather than mere threat to status.
This difference between mam-malian strategy and reptilian reflex explains why there seems more "time" in the anal territorial system than in the oral bio-survival system. In the later, mammalian system, one explores relative power signals slowly; in the earlier, reptilian system, one attacks or flees instantly.
3. The Semantic Time-Binding System. After the growing child acquires language — i.e., learns that the flux of experience has had labels and indexes assigned to it by the tribal game-rules — a new information system becomes imprinted and conditioned, and this system can continue growing and learning for a lifetime. This system allows me to receive signals sent 2500 years ago by persons such as Socrates and Confucius.
It allows me to send signals which, if I have more luck than most writers, will still find their way to new receivers 2500 years in the future.
This time-binding function of symbolism gives humans problem-solving capacities impossible to most other animals (except, perhaps, cetaceans) and also allows us to create and suffer from "problems" that do not exist at all, except on the linguistic level.
With human symbolism we can produce (or learn from their producers) mathematical systems that allow us to predict the behavior of physical systems long before we had the instruments to measure those systems (as Einstein predicted that clocks in outer space would measure time differently than clocks on our planet face). We can even build complex machines that work — most of the time.
With symbolism we can also write messages so profound that nobody fully understands them but almost everybody agrees they say something important (e.g., Beethoven's Ninth Symphony).
And with symbolism we can create meaningless meta-physics and Strange Loops so weird that society grows alarmed and either locks us up or insists on "medicating" us.
With such weird symbols, if not locked up or medicated, we can even persuade multitudes to believe in our gibberish and execute 6,000,000 scapegoats (the Hitler case), line up to drink cyanide cocktails (the Jim Jones case), or perform virtually any idiocy or lunacy imaginable.
If the imprints in the first two information systems differentiate us into large groups — conservatives and pioneers, dominators and followers, etc. — the semantic system allows us to differentiate ourselves still further, giving humanity more tribal eccentrics, both benevolent and malign, than any other class of animals.
We do not all live in the same universe. Millions live in a Moslem universe and find it very hard to understand persons living in a Christian universe. Millions of others live in a Marxist universe.
Most Americans seem quite happy in a mixed 19th Century Capitalist and 13th Century Christian universe, but the literary intelligentsia lives in an early 20th Century Freudian/Marxist universe, and a few well-informed scientists evidently actually live in a 1997 universe. Etc.
The elaboration of such emic realities or reality-tunnels can reach extremes of creativity, in which a person "invents" a totally new and individualized gloss on the whole of existence.
Such great creators will either win Nobel prizes (for art or science) or will get thrown in "mental hospitals," depending on how much skill they have at selling their new vision to others.
Some will even get locked up in nut-houses and later become recognized as great scientific pioneers — e.g., Semmelweiss, the first physician to suggest that surgeons should wash their hands before operating.
(Ezra Pound had the peculiar distinction of winning an award from the Library of Congress for writing the best poem of the year, in 1948, while government psychiatrists insisted he "was" insane.)
The semantic time-binding system makes a feedback loop between the verbal left brain hemisphere, the larynx, the right hand (which manipulates the world and checks the accuracy of maps or glosses) and the eyes (which read words and also scan the environment).
The self existing in this system has more "time" than the self on the mammalian territorial system or the reptilian survival system.
Indeed, it can speculate about "time", or about other words, and invent philosophies about timeless universes, three-dimensional time (Ouspensky), infinite time dimensions (Dunne) etc.
It can invent new Gestalts which make quantum jumps in our social information banks and it can wallow in utter nonsense endlessly.
A "clever" imprint in this system usually lasts for life, as does a "dumb" imprint. Subsequent conditioning and learning all occur with the parameters of a fluent (well-spoken, clear-thinking) self or a dull (inarticulate, "unthinking") self.
4. The Socio-Sexual System. At puberty, the DNA un-leashes messenger RNA molecules which notify all sub-systems that mating time has arrived. The body metamorphizes totally, and the nervous system ("mind") changes in the process. A new "self" appears.
Cat and Mouse
As usual, imprinting and genetics play a major role, with conditioning and learning modifying but seldom radically altering genetic-imprinted imperatives. If the environment provides a sex-positive imprint, adult sexuality will have a joyous and even "transcendental" quality;. if the environ-ment provides a sex-negative imprint, sexuality will remain disturbed or problematical for life.
The socio-sexual system feedbacks run from front brain through hormonal and neuropeptide systems to genitalia to breasts and arms (hugging, cuddling, fucking circuitry).
A "good" sexual imprint creates the archetypal "bright eyes and bushy tails," while a "bad" imprint creates a tense (muscularly armored) and zombie-like appearance.
The self or ego in this system easily learns adult Game Rules (civilized norms, "ethics"), if the sexual imprint has not had strong negative components.
Where the imprint does have negative or "kinky" components, adult Game Rules do not set in place and either an "outlaw" personal-ity crystallizes (the rapist/criminal with the archetypal "Born to Lose" tattoo) or else the Jekyll-Hyde dualism appears, well illustrated recently by several sex-negative TV preachers who got caught in some very kinky private sex-games.
Whatever system dominates at a given time appears as the ego or self at that time, in two senses:
1. People who meet Mr. A when he has the Oral Submissive self predominant, will remember him as "that sort of person."
People who meet him when he has the Semantic/rational self predominant remember him as another sort of person. Etc.
2. Due to state-specific information, as discussed earlier, when you have one of these selves predominant, you "forget" the other selves to a surprising extent and act as if the brain only had access to the information banks of the presently predominant self.
E.g., when frightened into infantile Oral states, you may actually think "I am always a weakling," quite forgetting the times when your Anal Dominator self was in charge, or the Semantic or Sexual imprints were governing the brain, etc.
(This analysis owes a great deal to Dr. Timothy Leary's Info-Psychology, Falcon Press, 1988. A discussion at greater length, less technical than Leary's, appears in my Prometheus Rising, op. cit.)
But, if we have a variety of potential selves rather than the one block-like "essential self" of Aristotelian philosophy, and, if each self acts as an observer who creates a reality-tunnel which appears as a whole universe (to those unaware of Transactional and Quantum psychology), then:
Each time an internal or external trigger causes us to quantum jump from one "self" to another, The Whole World around us appears to change also.
This explains why Mary may say, and honestly believe, "Everybody bullies me" one day and then say, and honestly believe, "Everybody likes me and helps me" on another day, why John may feel "Everybody is a bastard" one hour and "I feel sorry for everybody; they're all suffering" the next hour.
Every person lives in different umwelt (emic reality) but every self within a person also lives in a different reality-tunnel.
The number of universes perceived by human beings does not equal the population of the planet, but several times the population of the planet. It thus appears some sort of miracle that we sometimes find it possible to communicate with each other at all, at all.
Quantum mechanics says an electron has a different "essence" every time we measure it (or, more clearly, it has no "essence" at all).
Neuroscience reveals, similarly, that the Mary we meet on Tuesday may have a different "self" than the Mary we met Monday (or, as the Buddhists said long before neuroscience, Mary has no "essence" at all).
As we said at the beginning, the bedrock claim of existentialism holds that "existence precedes essence," or we have no "essence".
Like electrons, we jump from one information system to another, and only those who have not looked closely believe that one "essence" remains constant through all transformations.
Cat and Mouse Exercizes
1. J. Edgar Hoover, Head of our Secret Police for over 50 years, now appears to have lived the life of an active homosexual.
He kept files on the sexual behavior of politicians, business people, famous actors and anybody who could advance or harm his career, and used these files for blackmail.
[ AND he was Secretly Black (his parents generation would have called him a Mulatto), passing as White -- he also spied on and persecuted Black Civil Rights Leaders and had a letter sent to Dr. Martin Luther King threatening sexual blackmail and encouraging him towards suicide. ]
Try to figure out Mr. Hoover's imprinted and conditioned selves, according to the above analysis.
2. Try the same on Jesus Christ.
3. Try Thomas Jefferson.
4. Let each member of the study group pick some subject, or victim — not part of the group, but someone the member sees daily.
Let the member study that person care-fully and analyze which selves appear most often, how frequently the selves shift, and which self (if any) appears dominant most of the time.
5. This exercize will seem the hardest in the book, but try it anyway.
Observe yourself for a week, and try to see which selves appear most often, if one self appears dominant, etc.
