Who Am I?

Hiding Behind my Persona.

Genesis.

Analytical psychologists say we engage with society through our persona. In this story, I apply systems thinking to make sense of my persona.

This story explores the notion that my persona is an innate human system that is a complex emergent from the process interactions in my brain-mind.

My Persona as a Mask?

According to Carl Jung, the persona is the mask or appearance I present to the world. I could choose to wear a social mask or use a persona to make myself appear more socially desirable (fat chance). I can have multiple personas that I use in various situations, such as work or family life or writing in Illumination. But, this make me ask: Who am I?

From the perspective of a systems engineer I am uncomfortable with the notion of interchangeable personas (masks). I prefer the metaphor of a persona as the surface of a lake.

A lake’s surface is affected by wind, light, heat, rain, leaves and other things falling on the water. Equally, the lake’s surface reacts to events in the lake such as currents. There is only one, ever-changing surface of the lake that reacts as a complex system to its under-water and above-water environments.

My Persona as a Complex Emergent of my Brain-Mind.

My concept of Self or Selfhood emerges from the complexity of my own reflective consciousness. Self is subjective, deeply personal and indescribable. For my analysis I’ll conceive of SELF as a sphere (black-box) within my consciousness (see diagram). Surrounding SELF are layers of emergents that are themselves complex systems.

I imagine my world view and persona as layers. The outer surface of my persona interfaces with society through my body’s sensors (which may be enhanced or augmented by technology).

External and internal stimuli pass through successive layers undergoing processors instigated by SELF. In this environment of dynamic activity my consciousness adds too, adapts and draws upon my worldview. It responds to feedbacks by instigating changes in my persona so as to optimise dealing with the perceptions of my external environment.

Consider my social interaction with the people in the picture below. I am the person on the left wearing glasses. I emphasize that I would never wear a suit or for that matter a tie and forget wearing a white shirt. On other thing, my hair is rarely combed and these days it’s concentrating on falling out.

It is a pleasant productive discussion as no one is yelling at me. I perceive this situation and amend my persona to convey feelings of satisfaction. In turn, the group responds warmly. I receive their feedback as an affirmation of a correct adjustment to my persona.

Last thought concerning the notion of having many masks. I may meet with the same group repeatedly over a period of time. I propose that, my mind draws from my worldview the “configuration” of my persona that emerged from previous meetings. At the start of each meeting, SELF ensures my persona reflects the optimal remembered configuration. Remembering multiple configurations of the persona allows me to quickly adapt to familiar social situations or make reasonable preparation for new encounters.

My persona is deeply personal, subjective and indescribable. I rely on external social feedback to optimise my persona to deal with my world. This helps explain why the deprivation of social contact during the COVID lockdowns had such a deleterious effect on me.

I think the idea of remembered configurations are not too dissimilar from the concepts of roles. Except that roles concern relationships imposed on, or accepted by me.

My Roles as Relationships.

A role is a set of connected behaviors, rights, obligations, beliefs, and norms that govern my behaviour in society. I accept roles suitable for business (e.g. manager), charities (e.g. fund-raiser), university (e.g. researcher) and so on. A role is an expected or free or continuously changing behavior and may have a given social status or social position.

In my research, I treated the acceptance of a role as a knowledge learning process. I make sense of a role by comparing its information with my worldview. In this process, I interpret the role and create what I call a “role-in-use” that suits my particular circumstances. In the diagram below both Anne and I have adapted our social roles to roles-in-use according to the nature of the social occasion: meeting, discussion over coffee, and so on.

In taking on a role, I anticipate rewards, I’m aware of punishments, as well as the satisfaction of behaving pro-socially that encourages me to conform to the role’s requirements. Therefore there are constraints on how much my role-in-use can vary from the stated role.

I have many roles. Roles form a template (or model) for my roles-in-use. The roles-in-use are performed in the context of my persona.

Reflection on Who am I?

My mind-brain is a complex adaptive social system. This means that everything has the capability of interacting and exerting causality on everything else.

I have discussed my roles-in-use and persona separately but they can and do interact. Consider that I may become dissatisfied with my role-in-use and that dissatisfaction may affect my persona and influence my work group’s attitude towards me.

Illness or other maladies can affect the performance of my mind-brain. For example headaches will affect my ability to think and perform in my group.

Who Am I? I am the complex emergent of my mind-brain’s interactions, remembered persona states, roles-in-use, and thinking processes. All in the context of my health and constrained by my ability to perceive my surroundings.

What I find amazing is that I have survived to my current age and still be able to love and be with my family.

Blessed be.