lighthouse keeper brain, housecat heart

but, mm, what is the place of identity in this? I think identity is the chitin. the hard surface of you that separates within from without. and it is what the sockets are carved into. it determines what legibility you can access and how. what you are allowed to feel and how you are allowed to feel it. what you are allowed to perform and how you are allowed to perform it.

the identity-as-substrate model forms a decent basis for understanding the nature of an unexamined ("fixed") identity conveyed by fixed signifiers (names, titles, etc), on the understanding that "identity" is a communicable set of ideas and self-image parameters. where this analysis falls down, however, is the idea that "convincing the subject to perform the identity" is a process sufficiently straightforward to summarise in one line.

for pliable subjects, and those who, when guided, will tend to happily stay at the point to which their guide led them (or, in the failure case, snap back to a prior substrate, again treating identity as a set of rigid moulds, however narrow the range of experiences they serve to underpin), this is broadly true. but it fails when the subject is inclined to treat their identity as of interest in itself, i.e., they will be interacting with it themselves. in this instance it ceases to be functional as a fixed substrate and necessarily responds to interrogation, either by flexing to accommodate the interrogator or by resisting that interrogation.

in practice: "you are dog." as identity, "if i am dog, why speak english?" as interrogation. (simpler & less complete substrates will be naturally "interrogated" by the subject experiencing stimuli outside the context the proposed identity can support.) depending on construction, the substrate can either resist this interrogation - some penalty clause associated with introspection, to cut it off and replace it with another direction, being a cheap and nasty fix. ("as a dog, thinking big thoughts will only confuse you and make you want to nap.") - or the substrate can flex when interrogated: "huh, i guess i'm a talking dog". note in the latter case the substrate flexing in a very specific area to accommodate the interrogation has led to flexure elsewhere ("talking dog" has astonishingly different signifiers to "dog", in particular being inherently "cartoony").

as such, when convincing someone to adopt a new identity, it must be done in such a way as to "settle" beyond the subject's natural interrogation. if you want to imprint "you are dog", you must equip "dog" with sufficient scope to overcome "why talk" and "why upright" and "why complex opinions on trustworthiness of news media outlets", for example, or the subject will be replete with tools to throw off the new identity, deliberately or otherwise. (cheap and nasty options abound, but like any little tautology, will break down at the simple act of disbelief.)

the "simple" option is to consider the general scope of likely "breaks" in the new identity and provide it with sufficient scope to overcome them. ("dog internal thoughts vastly different to ability to externally articulate, source of frustration for dog, frustration at failure to communicate inevitably leads to emotion overcoming reason and utter failure" will lead to outcomes of the form "dog tries to communicate its needs, and responds to confusion with worsening failure, but responds to comprehension with rapturous joy at finally being understood".) this is widely done by "clever" people seeking to demonstrate how many steps ahead they are planning, or to savour the anticipation of an end-state set up in advance.

the less straightforward, but in my view more robust, option is to ensure the animacy of the substrate, e.g., "it sure is weird that you are dog and yet speak. but given that it's true, can you figure out why?". by preying on the extant processes "beneath" the substrate - problem-solving, confabulation, curiosity - the substrate becomes "embedded" more naturally, and in a form directly moulded to accommodate the subject's understanding of the world (being as all subjects understand the world via probing it using those natural faculties). this also lends itself to "healing" - a crack or contradiction in the identity becomes a crisis for the subject themselves to resolve, rather than a failure state in which the subject, noting the failure of a static identity, simply ceases to "perform" it.

you talk about 'connecting the substrate to the extant processes beneath', that is what i mean by the new identity granting legibility, and why I think the argument is to produce a new identity that grants greater legibility to the below processes than the prior identity.

of course an identity must not be static. Mm. I think 'static' is the wrong way to look at the fail state, though. i think a proposed identity must be 'in conversation with an implied greater social reality'. and the fail state is when the conversation is insufficient. I think the internal is fundamentally a kind of inverse image of the external, in this sense.

you talk of identity as if the logical contradiction is the danger point, but i disagree. identities and other socially legible constructs are frequently deeply logically contradictory. 'crushes', 'singlethood', 'anger', even 'crying' all present themselves through logical frameworks that are barely internally consistent, but through the strength of an extremely evident social legibility they maintain themselves.

observe where autistic children who favor the social fabric of 'logic' over the social fabric of 'emotions' break. their identities and subjectivities don't fit with the normal legible framework, and it's perceived as a failure of logic, but I really don't think it is.

my point with legibility is precisely to explain this. to see what exactly is "required" in terms of internal consistency and why exactly it is required. you want to construct a framework that takes internal experiences and translates them into "what others can understand". (or at least, what the subject believes is something others can understand)

we're treating legibility differently in different contexts. to make a behaviour or trait socially legible, i.e., the interior-to-exterior translation, is in my view an inherently different process to the process of making an external situation legible to the internal. in my view, when we connect the substrate of identity to the underlying firmware, whether or not it takes hold rests on the exterior-to-interior translation: is the subject able to make sense of the exterior world using this identity? this seems to rest on a bidirectional translation, but i contend that when the new identity is taking root (or indeed being rejected), the identity itself is taken as an object in the exterior world - and so it must be able to interpret the new subject-plus-substrate. ("you are dog, and dog does not understand this statement" fails to produce stable results. the image of dog in the exterior necessarily must exist to be examined and integrated into the interior.)

in my view, this is a point you approach but do not fulfil by saying "the internal is an inverse image of the external" - i would argue that in imposing an identity, one necessarily understands it as a manipulable object in conversation-space, and therefore to communicate this most cleanly will require the deliberate treatment of that identity as an external object to be stepped into or imposed on a subject, rather than a novel entity appearing ex nihilo. (in practice it will always begin in this way, but often subjects past a certain point must suffer through simply having assertions made at them that they are a thing, rather than the process of becoming being given voice.)

we then approach the issue of social legibility, which is neatly resolved by my view that identity is never internal, but always remains a manipulable external object: if the identity cannot accommodate the production of signifiers legible to the interrogators, they will fail to interface with the identity and declare it failed. (this is in my view best shown by negative stimuli; someone mocking the subject for being a dog, based on doglike traits, is nonetheless finding the "dog" identity legible, and thereby supports it despite subtextually or overtly disputing it.)

in a sense, translating the internal to external is then not the issue, as treating "the external" as a fixed far-field area containing all other minds but not the subject is in my view necessarily incorrect. if a mind is in play - and as we demonstrate necessarily as we begin this line of thinking, the subject's subjectivity is firmly in play - then either we engage in magical thinking (i.e., "the subject is inherently unlike other minds, by virtue of special factors"), or we accept that to split the world into interior and exterior on an ad-hoc basis can never create a reasonable framework for understanding any social dynamics.

to hammer home my thesis: assume an identity that translates nothing whatsoever of the internal, but instead simply copies whatever is said to it. "being copied" is an easily understood signifier, with which others can easily and straightforwardly engage; thus the "identity" of the mimic is both socially legible and solidified, even as no aspect of the subject's internality is expressed.

side pedantry that did not neatly fit into stream of consciousness writing: contradiction is harmless to identity stability, but only so long as it is unexamined. an examined contradiction produces tension which can destabilise an identity, particularly a newly rooted one.

at the risk of sounding somewhat less academic - i have a significant corpus of poetry on this topic, and in my view have sufficient evidence to believe that "all identity is necessarily external" is not only true, but far less bold than my genuine position ("there is no meaningful internal of any kind").

I think "external to internal legibility" can be functionally different from the "interior-to-exterior translation" but only when viewed in that way. I want to note that with this kind of 'interior to exterior translation', i think it is less about truly 'making it legible to everyone' but more about 'translating it into something the subject believes is understandable to others'.

Or, observe how in the process of "wording things", we have an idea of "what can be understood by others" that we are constantly reframing and recasting our own internality through the frame of. True internal understanding is frequently formless and illegible (though this varies wildly between subjects. look at the difference between someone who believes they naturally 'think in words' and someone with dysgraphia for whom 'internal to word' conversion is harmful).

then, in this microcosm, we observe how the 'goal' of this translation is to "make within understandable to without", but it's also the first step towards making the other subject's "without" understandable to their "within". in this case, literally casting it as legible (in words).

I tend to believe that 'identity' is the piece that exists both in 'interior' as well as in 'exterior'. My words as I put them here I believe to be "my own thoughts as they exist within my head", even as they are simultaneously "my own thoughts translated to outside". Of course it can go back and forth. Some things feel 'more interior' and other things feel 'more exterior'. But I think "legible experiences rendered for the exterior" tend to be in a kind of venn diagram location.

in general, i tend to understand the 'function of identity' to be as a kind of 'shell' to separate an individual from a potentially-harmful society. or, i think without identity, one would have no ego defenses against an external framework or different subjectivities. one would go along with anyone else's desires, whims, and beliefs, because nothing is in the way of that. of course this is an unstable state, as one's internal subjectivity will chafe against that, and an identity can be expected to form of that. but by disrupting the legibility of such chafing, one could prevent an identity for forming for longer.

I actually strongly disagree on your point about 'constructing an identity as a manipulable object in conversation-space'. Or, I think that it is entirely possible to not construct an object explicitly, but rather "imply" it into existence within a subject. In the same way that one can lie better by not 'stating the lie', but rather 'stating things that will imply the lie' (eg, not "I did not see the body in medical" but "I was not in medical at the time" or even "I was in comms for the past five minutes"). In fact, I find that the optimal deceptions are those that maximally allow the subject to construct the details within their own mind.

And, in this way, many "necessary contradictions" can be prevented from being observed entirely, by simply requiring the subject to do enough mental labor to construct the image of it that they do not see far enough to observe the contradiction. This is of course far more manipulative, and a lot more finicky, but it avoids a few of the fail cases you worry about.

This as well produces a context in which "identity" can seem to have 'internal components' (the subject coming to their own conclusions internally), but actually I do agree that identity is never (entirely) internal. To be precise, I think that 'identity' is not entirely a "thing that exists inside" but necessarily must be performed. As a materialist, I believe that nothing that exists 'fully inside' is well formed, but I believe that identity exists, and therefore it must have external components, and I think the performance of identity is what makes this up.

For example, I think in your example of 'mocking someone for doglike traits', the subject's actions that are 'doglike' (or, 'what specifically the subject did', whether intentionally or unintentionally) are cast as identity-performance, and thus within the subject become understood as "socially legible performance of dog-identity". In the microcosm, if they did not intended to be performed as such, perhaps they do not reinforce the identity fully, but through further engagement with them, the subject will find them increasingly reinforcing of dog-identity, as they have now been marked socially-legible.

And, thus, I don't really think "the set of all other minds" is ever relevant. Because, of course, it doesn't really ever exist. There is no noosphere. I see the framework of "social legibility" as describing the subject's own "belief in what other minds exist and can see". More a 'kind of marker' than a 'true fact of things'. My point is not to 'split up into internal and external', but to 'explain the process by which an individual may engage with and reckon with what they perceive as external'.

In your example of a "purely copying identity". The question of 'legibility' is one of "does the subject understand it as something others can understand?", to which "I copy others" is the "portion that is attempted to be legible". There's really only one 'reader' of the legibility, the subject themself. To them, "I copy others" must be understood in terms of their subjective experiences (internality), but as well the fact that it can be understood by others (or, that they believe it can be understood by others) is also relevant. In this way, 'legibility' is both "entirely within a subject's mind" as well as a comment on/belief in "how other mind's perceive the subject". That's what I mean by this.

I think to really get into 'why contradiction is unstable' requires either a more proper analysis of 'what logic is' (eg "logic is a framework for translation/iteration of ideas" then "contradiction implies that a given idea will not properly translate or will not properly iterate") or an analysis of saneism (eg "society expects a performance of non-contradictory identity/self" then "if my performance of self is contradictory, i will be punished/hurt/seen as wrong"). I don't think 'contradiction' itself is especially meaningful intrinsically, but it both can mark something that is meaningful, and can as-a-signifier be punished.

To reveal my own power level, I am broadly a rather strict materialist. I do not believe in mind-body duality, and thus I believe that the "inside of your head" is not well defined. I don't think 'internality' has any meaningful impact on reality, and I believe that anything that cannot be measured cannot be said to exist.

But, to be precise, just because the 'base' is all that meaningfully exists, does not mean the 'superstructure' is entirely not relevant. In this way, "the performance of identity" is a kind of 'base', and the "internal experience of identity" is a kind of 'superstructure'. The superstructure follows the base, thus by shifting the performance of identity, the internal experience will follow. But, the superstructure can exert some influence on the base (though if the superstructure merely changes the superstructure, nothing actually changes. something must be realized within the base to be considered an 'actual change').

It seems strange to me to say that "internality isn't real" when discussing 'identity', because everything in this conversation is ultimately a matter of belief. I think that it is self evident that people "experience" "internality", regardless of how 'real' it is. Further, I think that "subjective experiences may differ" is true, and that the appearance of "internality" is somewhat induced by that truth. I think that "things as they appear" can affect "things as they really are". Though, to a somewhat limited degree.

I think with the framework of materialism, we can precisely describe what is meant by 'meaningful existence', and precisely describe the ways that the 'internal' is not 'meaningfully real'.

And, my point with the framework of "legibility" is to describe the ways this occurs more precisely. Just as 'internal' is not "real", so too is 'fabric of society' not "real". But at the same time, culture self-evidently exists. Why do people move in certain patterns and present themselves in certain ways? How is this understood by an individual?

Or, more precisely, what is communicated to an individual that leads to this occurring? Legibility describes the "image of society" that is communicated. "This is what you do such that other people will understand you". "This is how someone-like-you looks when they experience your-subjective-experience". And so on.

to take a slightly more personal tack:

your stance seems to be to be pretty deeply heuristic in a way that's kind of not striking me as materialism. to assign a weight to internal subjectivity that can chafe against the external is to assert that the internal is an extant and meaningfully separable space from the external, rather than being conflicting aspects of the same landscape. i recognise your rejection of the idea of a landscape of minds, but i think it's premature - without recognising that the mind clearly exists in a pliable state on many axes, we can't meaningfully discuss changes in mind-state; and clearly, empirically, if those axes of variation exist, one can use them to define a landscape.

(brief aside - strongly agree that constructing an identity is best done vaguely; see my first entry on "just tell the dog to figure out what's up", which mutatis mutandis is the same as your "allow the subject to construct the details within their own mind".)

i do think in asserting the rational individual needing only to interface with a model of external responses, rather than accepting a position of like minds existing, you directly limit your own predictive power - mostly on efficiency grounds i would bet a decent amount that you already use "they are like me", and traits like "agency", as a shorthand for the way others will operate. object-oriented modelling is more efficient than treating everything as one massive function of the senses.

as for the experience of internality - given that the pointer to the experience is necessarily not the experience, and the pointer is the closest match to the consensus definition of "consciousness", i would argue those experiences, too, are external in materially the same way as other stimuli, and as other people's experiences. we could lose weeks in the qualia discussion hole but let's not bother. i think necessarily when we understand that the external can affect the internal, and that there is no meaningful limit to how far external stimuli can affect "internal" experience, the interior-exterior boundary of the "self" becomes clear as more a statistical truth than a law.

i have yet to see an argument - from anyone, to be clear, this isn't a you thing - in favour of a meaningful "self-other distinction" that isn't either a) entirely meat-based and detached from the mind-as-mind, or b) soul-based. i think your arguments largely fall into a heuristic "this stuff feels like it's inside" bucket, which i don't find hugely compelling - in the same way transference effects make a rubber arm "part" of a body, and show that the mind's understanding of body is not fixed, similar effects in the mindscape show that the self-as-entity-with-walls is in extremis a convenient fiction. (the rubber arm feels like it's yours; the "good dog" is empirically reported to feel like it's the subject, even as they have yet to "internally" "feel" they are dog.)

to assert that the internal experience of identity is a superstructure is in my view already to accept that it lives in the same exterior landscape as the "base" identity, external to the "self" of the subject. i suppose my view is mostly different in that i feel the "material" perspective - minds-as-illusory - is inefficient, and fails in several areas to predict as effectively as the "immaterialist" perspective - minds-as-entities.

'sapir-whorf' is complicated. the strong versions of the hypothesis are silly, but to say that language has no impact on experience is also silly. if one believed that, they'd stop talking.

i think it is self evident that someone's experience of society influences their performance of self. there is no immaterial element to this. 'experience of society' implies a 'thing that experiences society', and that 'thing' is purely material. it's just brainflesh, but it still learns, it still has experiences, it still iterates itself in response to them.

or, to put it another way, swearing helps with pain tolerance. why is that? going outside in the rain while you are sad feels good. why is that? looking at flowers when you're happy feels good. why is that? there must be a way that external 'definitions' are communicated, and there must be a process for selection of them and communication of them.

i see your point of "external and internal as parts of same landscape". i suppose that the internal experience of such things is that, yes. but at the same time, from outside, i cannot read your mind. i do not perceive your hallucinations. there is a 'gap' of some kind. that is what is meant. there is no difference between body and mind, but that does not mean that when we hold hands i can hear what you're thinking. there is an 'internal' experience of subjectivity.

im somewhat inclined to describe "internal" as "the brain as an information-dense compilation of prior experiences". and it is self evident that these experiences can chafe against external realities. observe gender dysphoria, anorexia, body dysmorphia.

i think that "an individual interfaces with expected external responses" and "an individual interfaces with other minds" are both true. object-oriented certainly is a framework that is used. certainly more elaborate frameworks can be and are constructed. it's besides the point. i do think there are individuals that construct their 'identity' specifically in the context of a specific 'other individual', which is when it is relevant to identity, but i think that a heuristic model of "all other individuals" is more commonly used. and yes it can be called 'heuristic', but i tend to think there exist more or less 'natural' (in the mathematical sense) heuristics.

it feels like you are making arguments about "what is more efficient", when i am interested not in "what i should do", but "what people do". regardless of the efficiency of an object oriented framework, i simply do not believe that people tend to see the world as a collection of individuals. if they did, anxiety would function differently, there would be far fewer books on "what other people think", and a great many things would be different.

your "meat based" vs "soul based" distinction is strange, because is not everything that is not soul based meat based? i certainly agree that those two groupings emerge, but those two groupings describe all possible models, do they not?

certainly in some ways my model contains signifiers of immaterialism, i think this is my own failure as well as a failure of the language i am familiar with.

i really dont think the 'self is an entity with walls', i can begin to see how you might get that from my reference towards 'internality', but you're taking it very strongly.

the world is purely material. a "brain" collects experiences over time, iterating brainmatter as they occur. this can induce superstition, and thus an experience of the world can contain elements that are "false" or "not material". sometimes a superstitious belief will be rewarded, sometimes a belief that is 'false' may be locally optimal. thus a collection of experiences may iterate to a place that is disconnected from material world.

in the prior paragraph i do not use 'brain' to mean 'human brain', this is true of anything with sufficient complexity to experience positive and negative reinforcement. horse trainers observe superstition in horses constantly. 'belief' may sound immaterial, perhaps 'model of world' is more true. or maybe you'd prefer 'compiled sense-experiences'.

nonetheless, there is a "compilation of sense-experiences" occurring. This is what I mean by 'internality', nothing more, nothing less. By my definition, dogs have internality, parrots have internality, mice have internality. I do not know if flies have enough brain complexity to learn "dont land on the hot stove", but if they could 'learn' that, then that 'learning' would be 'within their internality'. This is as opposed to "predetermined biological response", which is something else.

You could argue that this is a 'purely meat based' model. It is, absolutely, because nothing else exists.

to define the internal self as you do is, i'm afraid, contradictory. you both define it as that which the self perceives and others can't - "i do not perceive your hallucinations" - and as a "compilation of sense-experiences". effectively, to your definition, the self is both a walled garden and a library. but both halves fail both in isolation and together. the former fails as it places the walls of the self inconsistently. if an interlocutor can, with perfect accuracy, tell if a subject is nervous, is nervousness no longer internal? if an interlocutor is perfectly unable to perceive that nervousness, does it become internal? do the walls of the self bow in and out with the perceptivity of the other party?

similarly, defining the self as the store of learning - that an ability to learn from experience defines a self - produces conventionally "incorrect" results. a copy of a legacy board game, which is changed by the things it experiences, has a self under this model. a car, which records its experiences both in its direct tracking of performance and in its wear and tear, has a self. (i would separately contend that an even broader definition of self is possible, so i have no issue with this, but it bears pointing out.) these "selves", however, are in no way internal; a legacy board game can be perfectly known from the outside, predicted in advance, and deliberately trained to produce certain behaviours with no error. the ability to learn and store experiences is no guarantee of an internal self; thus the self-as-imperceptible is incompatible in basic terms with the self-as-storage models.

the self-as-storage also fails independently as it is unable to predict truly novel production. one can argue that a mind can never produce anything truly novel; in my view, this is countermanded by a great body of evidence in the human sphere alone, but if that's your contention, then this part of your view of the self, at least, is consistent with your worldview.

the opposition of "predetermined biological response" to "learned" is, in my view, magical thinking. surely to a good materialist all learning processes are inevitable results of environment and stimulus over time, and therefore biologically predetermined? (i do find this perspective "true but unhelpful" - perfect knowledge would reduce behaviour to predictable state machines, but absent that knowledge, it's sort of like knowing it's technically possible for a golf ball to undergo quantum tunnelling. given it's not ever happening, why bother factoring it in? nonetheless, the distinction is made in passing and begs the question of where it is actually drawn.) you might simply mean "anything that does not need external stimulus to learn is predetermined"; in that case, again, we run into the "board game of selfhood". one might even argue that within one game, a deck of cards has a self, as external forces determine what it can later produce.

in this sense, we come to the crux of my contention: not only do you not treat the self as meat, but you do so by resting on the immaterial. to justify this major assertion, i will briefly define structural realism.

structural realism: when a model of the world serves to make true predictions about relationships between other entities, while not itself being based on material fact.

examples: the "gene", which is used to mean either one nucleobase pair, a trait, the potentiality for a trait, the heritability of a trait, etc, but nonetheless can be comfortably used to produce true predictions about those traits and their heritability (even as they may be coded for in reality by many disparate base pairs); newtonian physics, which is demonstrably untrue in detail but can accurately predict the motions of macroscopic objects with fantastic accuracy.

i contend that your view of the self - if we take the strongest version of your argument, in which the self requires both the walled garden and the accumulation of sense-experience - is similarly only structurally real. is the set of things internal to a subject as opposed to their interlocutors fixed? no. but to define the self as bounded is structurally real, in that it makes useful predictions, and so treating this immaterial consideration as real is useful. is the store of sense-experience consistent, or bounded to the interior of the subject? no. is that store tied to the material reality of stimuli received? no. is that store therefore unable to produce things outside its own accumulated context? in my view, no. but is it useful to consider a "self" as an entity which roves around acquiring information and traits from its environment? yes! and thus this half of the definition is similarly structurally real, in that it is not rooted in the material but makes useful predictions about the material.

structural realism is not a criticism, for what it's worth - it's highly valuable as a tool for understanding the world, particularly in areas of high complexity (into which i would hope you would agree this falls) where material predictions cannot be made purely axiomatically. but it is also not materialism. it is an admission, however sensible, that the solely material perspective is insufficient for understanding. empirically, "what people do" - including yourself - is understand identity in structurally real ways, rather than material ones. as such, i hold that neither meat nor soul, but the cartoon drawn of soul by meat, is the nature of the self: unreal but useful.

miscellaneous other points:

efficiency is a major determining factor in how people move through the world. if a belief produces friction, it tends to be sanded down until it no longer does, either leading it to be disconnected from the behaviours it produces or leading it to be far weaker than an initial declaration. in that way i use it to mean "people tend to take the shortcuts available to them", the desire paths of thought, but i do take your point that it is an insufficient term to capture empirically how behaviour plays out.

the "internal experience of subjectivity" you describe is in my view still external. when one perceives stimulus, the stimulus is perceived to be without, not within, the perceptor. the reason one can notice w thought is that the thoughts are of the broader mindscape than the self. (if it were different, and the thoughts were solely within internal subjectivity, how could they ever be incepted from outside without treating that internal subjectivity as a semantic distinction at best?)

the idea of false beliefs as locally optimal is a somewhat classic defense of materialism at the edges where materialism fails. "materialism is the underlying truth, but other models may be performant in this area" is a position which tends to resist falsification. if other modes of thinking are more performant at predicting reality, as those including your own structurally real approach to the self demonstrably are, why does materialism warrant being considered axiomatically true?

to assert that none of the immaterial is necessary to exist as a mind is, in my view, to neglect a great deal of structural realism. if one contends that a mind is some unknown black-box function of meat, one can assert that it is material to no further gain. if one contends that a mind is an immaterial entity which can be moved by similarly immaterial forces, one makes true predictions about others and oneself. the mind-as-immaterial is therefore (i hold) just as structurally real as your own pseudomaterialist view of the self as "that which fits in a Skinner box".

but, mm, what is the place of identity in this? I think identity is the chitin. the hard surface of you that separates within from without. and it is what the sockets are carved into. it determines what legibility you can access and how. what you are allowed to feel and how you are allowed to feel it. what you are allowed to perform and how you are allowed to perform it.

the identity-as-substrate model forms a decent basis for understanding the nature of an unexamined ("fixed") identity conveyed by fixed signifiers (names, titles, etc), on the understanding that "identity" is a communicable set of ideas and self-image parameters. where this analysis falls down, however, is the idea that "convincing the subject to perform the identity" is a process sufficiently straightforward to summarise in one line.

for pliable subjects, and those who, when guided, will tend to happily stay at the point to which their guide led them (or, in the failure case, snap back to a prior substrate, again treating identity as a set of rigid moulds, however narrow the range of experiences they serve to underpin), this is broadly true. but it fails when the subject is inclined to treat their identity as of interest in itself, i.e., they will be interacting with it themselves. in this instance it ceases to be functional as a fixed substrate and necessarily responds to interrogation, either by flexing to accommodate the interrogator or by resisting that interrogation.

in practice: "you are dog." as identity, "if i am dog, why speak english?" as interrogation. (simpler & less complete substrates will be naturally "interrogated" by the subject experiencing stimuli outside the context the proposed identity can support.) depending on construction, the substrate can either resist this interrogation - some penalty clause associated with introspection, to cut it off and replace it with another direction, being a cheap and nasty fix. ("as a dog, thinking big thoughts will only confuse you and make you want to nap.") - or the substrate can flex when interrogated: "huh, i guess i'm a talking dog". note in the latter case the substrate flexing in a very specific area to accommodate the interrogation has led to flexure elsewhere ("talking dog" has astonishingly different signifiers to "dog", in particular being inherently "cartoony").

as such, when convincing someone to adopt a new identity, it must be done in such a way as to "settle" beyond the subject's natural interrogation. if you want to imprint "you are dog", you must equip "dog" with sufficient scope to overcome "why talk" and "why upright" and "why complex opinions on trustworthiness of news media outlets", for example, or the subject will be replete with tools to throw off the new identity, deliberately or otherwise. (cheap and nasty options abound, but like any little tautology, will break down at the simple act of disbelief.)

the "simple" option is to consider the general scope of likely "breaks" in the new identity and provide it with sufficient scope to overcome them. ("dog internal thoughts vastly different to ability to externally articulate, source of frustration for dog, frustration at failure to communicate inevitably leads to emotion overcoming reason and utter failure" will lead to outcomes of the form "dog tries to communicate its needs, and responds to confusion with worsening failure, but responds to comprehension with rapturous joy at finally being understood".) this is widely done by "clever" people seeking to demonstrate how many steps ahead they are planning, or to savour the anticipation of an end-state set up in advance.

the less straightforward, but in my view more robust, option is to ensure the animacy of the substrate, e.g., "it sure is weird that you are dog and yet speak. but given that it's true, can you figure out why?". by preying on the extant processes "beneath" the substrate - problem-solving, confabulation, curiosity - the substrate becomes "embedded" more naturally, and in a form directly moulded to accommodate the subject's understanding of the world (being as all subjects understand the world via probing it using those natural faculties). this also lends itself to "healing" - a crack or contradiction in the identity becomes a crisis for the subject themselves to resolve, rather than a failure state in which the subject, noting the failure of a static identity, simply ceases to "perform" it.

you talk about 'connecting the substrate to the extant processes beneath', that is what i mean by the new identity granting legibility, and why I think the argument is to produce a new identity that grants greater legibility to the below processes than the prior identity.

of course an identity must not be static. Mm. I think 'static' is the wrong way to look at the fail state, though. i think a proposed identity must be 'in conversation with an implied greater social reality'. and the fail state is when the conversation is insufficient. I think the internal is fundamentally a kind of inverse image of the external, in this sense.

you talk of identity as if the logical contradiction is the danger point, but i disagree. identities and other socially legible constructs are frequently deeply logically contradictory. 'crushes', 'singlethood', 'anger', even 'crying' all present themselves through logical frameworks that are barely internally consistent, but through the strength of an extremely evident social legibility they maintain themselves.

observe where autistic children who favor the social fabric of 'logic' over the social fabric of 'emotions' break. their identities and subjectivities don't fit with the normal legible framework, and it's perceived as a failure of logic, but I really don't think it is.

my point with legibility is precisely to explain this. to see what exactly is "required" in terms of internal consistency and why exactly it is required. you want to construct a framework that takes internal experiences and translates them into "what others can understand". (or at least, what the subject believes is something others can understand)

we're treating legibility differently in different contexts. to make a behaviour or trait socially legible, i.e., the interior-to-exterior translation, is in my view an inherently different process to the process of making an external situation legible to the internal. in my view, when we connect the substrate of identity to the underlying firmware, whether or not it takes hold rests on the exterior-to-interior translation: is the subject able to make sense of the exterior world using this identity? this seems to rest on a bidirectional translation, but i contend that when the new identity is taking root (or indeed being rejected), the identity itself is taken as an object in the exterior world - and so it must be able to interpret the new subject-plus-substrate. ("you are dog, and dog does not understand this statement" fails to produce stable results. the image of dog in the exterior necessarily must exist to be examined and integrated into the interior.)

in my view, this is a point you approach but do not fulfil by saying "the internal is an inverse image of the external" - i would argue that in imposing an identity, one necessarily understands it as a manipulable object in conversation-space, and therefore to communicate this most cleanly will require the deliberate treatment of that identity as an external object to be stepped into or imposed on a subject, rather than a novel entity appearing ex nihilo. (in practice it will always begin in this way, but often subjects past a certain point must suffer through simply having assertions made at them that they are a thing, rather than the process of becoming being given voice.)

we then approach the issue of social legibility, which is neatly resolved by my view that identity is never internal, but always remains a manipulable external object: if the identity cannot accommodate the production of signifiers legible to the interrogators, they will fail to interface with the identity and declare it failed. (this is in my view best shown by negative stimuli; someone mocking the subject for being a dog, based on doglike traits, is nonetheless finding the "dog" identity legible, and thereby supports it despite subtextually or overtly disputing it.)

in a sense, translating the internal to external is then not the issue, as treating "the external" as a fixed far-field area containing all other minds but not the subject is in my view necessarily incorrect. if a mind is in play - and as we demonstrate necessarily as we begin this line of thinking, the subject's subjectivity is firmly in play - then either we engage in magical thinking (i.e., "the subject is inherently unlike other minds, by virtue of special factors"), or we accept that to split the world into interior and exterior on an ad-hoc basis can never create a reasonable framework for understanding any social dynamics.

to hammer home my thesis: assume an identity that translates nothing whatsoever of the internal, but instead simply copies whatever is said to it. "being copied" is an easily understood signifier, with which others can easily and straightforwardly engage; thus the "identity" of the mimic is both socially legible and solidified, even as no aspect of the subject's internality is expressed.

side pedantry that did not neatly fit into stream of consciousness writing: contradiction is harmless to identity stability, but only so long as it is unexamined. an examined contradiction produces tension which can destabilise an identity, particularly a newly rooted one.

at the risk of sounding somewhat less academic - i have a significant corpus of poetry on this topic, and in my view have sufficient evidence to believe that "all identity is necessarily external" is not only true, but far less bold than my genuine position ("there is no meaningful internal of any kind").

I think "external to internal legibility" can be functionally different from the "interior-to-exterior translation" but only when viewed in that way. I want to note that with this kind of 'interior to exterior translation', i think it is less about truly 'making it legible to everyone' but more about 'translating it into something the subject believes is understandable to others'.

Or, observe how in the process of "wording things", we have an idea of "what can be understood by others" that we are constantly reframing and recasting our own internality through the frame of. True internal understanding is frequently formless and illegible (though this varies wildly between subjects. look at the difference between someone who believes they naturally 'think in words' and someone with dysgraphia for whom 'internal to word' conversion is harmful).

then, in this microcosm, we observe how the 'goal' of this translation is to "make within understandable to without", but it's also the first step towards making the other subject's "without" understandable to their "within". in this case, literally casting it as legible (in words).

I tend to believe that 'identity' is the piece that exists both in 'interior' as well as in 'exterior'. My words as I put them here I believe to be "my own thoughts as they exist within my head", even as they are simultaneously "my own thoughts translated to outside". Of course it can go back and forth. Some things feel 'more interior' and other things feel 'more exterior'. But I think "legible experiences rendered for the exterior" tend to be in a kind of venn diagram location.

in general, i tend to understand the 'function of identity' to be as a kind of 'shell' to separate an individual from a potentially-harmful society. or, i think without identity, one would have no ego defenses against an external framework or different subjectivities. one would go along with anyone else's desires, whims, and beliefs, because nothing is in the way of that. of course this is an unstable state, as one's internal subjectivity will chafe against that, and an identity can be expected to form of that. but by disrupting the legibility of such chafing, one could prevent an identity for forming for longer.

I actually strongly disagree on your point about 'constructing an identity as a manipulable object in conversation-space'. Or, I think that it is entirely possible to not construct an object explicitly, but rather "imply" it into existence within a subject. In the same way that one can lie better by not 'stating the lie', but rather 'stating things that will imply the lie' (eg, not "I did not see the body in medical" but "I was not in medical at the time" or even "I was in comms for the past five minutes"). In fact, I find that the optimal deceptions are those that maximally allow the subject to construct the details within their own mind.

And, in this way, many "necessary contradictions" can be prevented from being observed entirely, by simply requiring the subject to do enough mental labor to construct the image of it that they do not see far enough to observe the contradiction. This is of course far more manipulative, and a lot more finicky, but it avoids a few of the fail cases you worry about.

This as well produces a context in which "identity" can seem to have 'internal components' (the subject coming to their own conclusions internally), but actually I do agree that identity is never (entirely) internal. To be precise, I think that 'identity' is not entirely a "thing that exists inside" but necessarily must be performed. As a materialist, I believe that nothing that exists 'fully inside' is well formed, but I believe that identity exists, and therefore it must have external components, and I think the performance of identity is what makes this up.

For example, I think in your example of 'mocking someone for doglike traits', the subject's actions that are 'doglike' (or, 'what specifically the subject did', whether intentionally or unintentionally) are cast as identity-performance, and thus within the subject become understood as "socially legible performance of dog-identity". In the microcosm, if they did not intended to be performed as such, perhaps they do not reinforce the identity fully, but through further engagement with them, the subject will find them increasingly reinforcing of dog-identity, as they have now been marked socially-legible.

And, thus, I don't really think "the set of all other minds" is ever relevant. Because, of course, it doesn't really ever exist. There is no noosphere. I see the framework of "social legibility" as describing the subject's own "belief in what other minds exist and can see". More a 'kind of marker' than a 'true fact of things'. My point is not to 'split up into internal and external', but to 'explain the process by which an individual may engage with and reckon with what they perceive as external'.

In your example of a "purely copying identity". The question of 'legibility' is one of "does the subject understand it as something others can understand?", to which "I copy others" is the "portion that is attempted to be legible". There's really only one 'reader' of the legibility, the subject themself. To them, "I copy others" must be understood in terms of their subjective experiences (internality), but as well the fact that it can be understood by others (or, that they believe it can be understood by others) is also relevant. In this way, 'legibility' is both "entirely within a subject's mind" as well as a comment on/belief in "how other mind's perceive the subject". That's what I mean by this.

I think to really get into 'why contradiction is unstable' requires either a more proper analysis of 'what logic is' (eg "logic is a framework for translation/iteration of ideas" then "contradiction implies that a given idea will not properly translate or will not properly iterate") or an analysis of saneism (eg "society expects a performance of non-contradictory identity/self" then "if my performance of self is contradictory, i will be punished/hurt/seen as wrong"). I don't think 'contradiction' itself is especially meaningful intrinsically, but it both can mark something that is meaningful, and can as-a-signifier be punished.

To reveal my own power level, I am broadly a rather strict materialist. I do not believe in mind-body duality, and thus I believe that the "inside of your head" is not well defined. I don't think 'internality' has any meaningful impact on reality, and I believe that anything that cannot be measured cannot be said to exist.

But, to be precise, just because the 'base' is all that meaningfully exists, does not mean the 'superstructure' is entirely not relevant. In this way, "the performance of identity" is a kind of 'base', and the "internal experience of identity" is a kind of 'superstructure'. The superstructure follows the base, thus by shifting the performance of identity, the internal experience will follow. But, the superstructure can exert some influence on the base (though if the superstructure merely changes the superstructure, nothing actually changes. something must be realized within the base to be considered an 'actual change').

It seems strange to me to say that "internality isn't real" when discussing 'identity', because everything in this conversation is ultimately a matter of belief. I think that it is self evident that people "experience" "internality", regardless of how 'real' it is. Further, I think that "subjective experiences may differ" is true, and that the appearance of "internality" is somewhat induced by that truth. I think that "things as they appear" can affect "things as they really are". Though, to a somewhat limited degree.

I think with the framework of materialism, we can precisely describe what is meant by 'meaningful existence', and precisely describe the ways that the 'internal' is not 'meaningfully real'.

And, my point with the framework of "legibility" is to describe the ways this occurs more precisely. Just as 'internal' is not "real", so too is 'fabric of society' not "real". But at the same time, culture self-evidently exists. Why do people move in certain patterns and present themselves in certain ways? How is this understood by an individual?

Or, more precisely, what is communicated to an individual that leads to this occurring? Legibility describes the "image of society" that is communicated. "This is what you do such that other people will understand you". "This is how someone-like-you looks when they experience your-subjective-experience". And so on.

to take a slightly more personal tack:

your stance seems to be to be pretty deeply heuristic in a way that's kind of not striking me as materialism. to assign a weight to internal subjectivity that can chafe against the external is to assert that the internal is an extant and meaningfully separable space from the external, rather than being conflicting aspects of the same landscape. i recognise your rejection of the idea of a landscape of minds, but i think it's premature - without recognising that the mind clearly exists in a pliable state on many axes, we can't meaningfully discuss changes in mind-state; and clearly, empirically, if those axes of variation exist, one can use them to define a landscape.

(brief aside - strongly agree that constructing an identity is best done vaguely; see my first entry on "just tell the dog to figure out what's up", which mutatis mutandis is the same as your "allow the subject to construct the details within their own mind".)

i do think in asserting the rational individual needing only to interface with a model of external responses, rather than accepting a position of like minds existing, you directly limit your own predictive power - mostly on efficiency grounds i would bet a decent amount that you already use "they are like me", and traits like "agency", as a shorthand for the way others will operate. object-oriented modelling is more efficient than treating everything as one massive function of the senses.

as for the experience of internality - given that the pointer to the experience is necessarily not the experience, and the pointer is the closest match to the consensus definition of "consciousness", i would argue those experiences, too, are external in materially the same way as other stimuli, and as other people's experiences. we could lose weeks in the qualia discussion hole but let's not bother. i think necessarily when we understand that the external can affect the internal, and that there is no meaningful limit to how far external stimuli can affect "internal" experience, the interior-exterior boundary of the "self" becomes clear as more a statistical truth than a law.

i have yet to see an argument - from anyone, to be clear, this isn't a you thing - in favour of a meaningful "self-other distinction" that isn't either a) entirely meat-based and detached from the mind-as-mind, or b) soul-based. i think your arguments largely fall into a heuristic "this stuff feels like it's inside" bucket, which i don't find hugely compelling - in the same way transference effects make a rubber arm "part" of a body, and show that the mind's understanding of body is not fixed, similar effects in the mindscape show that the self-as-entity-with-walls is in extremis a convenient fiction. (the rubber arm feels like it's yours; the "good dog" is empirically reported to feel like it's the subject, even as they have yet to "internally" "feel" they are dog.)

to assert that the internal experience of identity is a superstructure is in my view already to accept that it lives in the same exterior landscape as the "base" identity, external to the "self" of the subject. i suppose my view is mostly different in that i feel the "material" perspective - minds-as-illusory - is inefficient, and fails in several areas to predict as effectively as the "immaterialist" perspective - minds-as-entities.

but, mm, what is the place of identity in this? I think identity is the chitin. the hard surface of you that separates within from without. and it is what the sockets are carved into. it determines what legibility you can access and how. what you are allowed to feel and how you are allowed to feel it. what you are allowed to perform and how you are allowed to perform it.

the identity-as-substrate model forms a decent basis for understanding the nature of an unexamined ("fixed") identity conveyed by fixed signifiers (names, titles, etc), on the understanding that "identity" is a communicable set of ideas and self-image parameters. where this analysis falls down, however, is the idea that "convincing the subject to perform the identity" is a process sufficiently straightforward to summarise in one line.

for pliable subjects, and those who, when guided, will tend to happily stay at the point to which their guide led them (or, in the failure case, snap back to a prior substrate, again treating identity as a set of rigid moulds, however narrow the range of experiences they serve to underpin), this is broadly true. but it fails when the subject is inclined to treat their identity as of interest in itself, i.e., they will be interacting with it themselves. in this instance it ceases to be functional as a fixed substrate and necessarily responds to interrogation, either by flexing to accommodate the interrogator or by resisting that interrogation.

in practice: "you are dog." as identity, "if i am dog, why speak english?" as interrogation. (simpler & less complete substrates will be naturally "interrogated" by the subject experiencing stimuli outside the context the proposed identity can support.) depending on construction, the substrate can either resist this interrogation - some penalty clause associated with introspection, to cut it off and replace it with another direction, being a cheap and nasty fix. ("as a dog, thinking big thoughts will only confuse you and make you want to nap.") - or the substrate can flex when interrogated: "huh, i guess i'm a talking dog". note in the latter case the substrate flexing in a very specific area to accommodate the interrogation has led to flexure elsewhere ("talking dog" has astonishingly different signifiers to "dog", in particular being inherently "cartoony").

as such, when convincing someone to adopt a new identity, it must be done in such a way as to "settle" beyond the subject's natural interrogation. if you want to imprint "you are dog", you must equip "dog" with sufficient scope to overcome "why talk" and "why upright" and "why complex opinions on trustworthiness of news media outlets", for example, or the subject will be replete with tools to throw off the new identity, deliberately or otherwise. (cheap and nasty options abound, but like any little tautology, will break down at the simple act of disbelief.)

the "simple" option is to consider the general scope of likely "breaks" in the new identity and provide it with sufficient scope to overcome them. ("dog internal thoughts vastly different to ability to externally articulate, source of frustration for dog, frustration at failure to communicate inevitably leads to emotion overcoming reason and utter failure" will lead to outcomes of the form "dog tries to communicate its needs, and responds to confusion with worsening failure, but responds to comprehension with rapturous joy at finally being understood".) this is widely done by "clever" people seeking to demonstrate how many steps ahead they are planning, or to savour the anticipation of an end-state set up in advance.

the less straightforward, but in my view more robust, option is to ensure the animacy of the substrate, e.g., "it sure is weird that you are dog and yet speak. but given that it's true, can you figure out why?". by preying on the extant processes "beneath" the substrate - problem-solving, confabulation, curiosity - the substrate becomes "embedded" more naturally, and in a form directly moulded to accommodate the subject's understanding of the world (being as all subjects understand the world via probing it using those natural faculties). this also lends itself to "healing" - a crack or contradiction in the identity becomes a crisis for the subject themselves to resolve, rather than a failure state in which the subject, noting the failure of a static identity, simply ceases to "perform" it.

you talk about 'connecting the substrate to the extant processes beneath', that is what i mean by the new identity granting legibility, and why I think the argument is to produce a new identity that grants greater legibility to the below processes than the prior identity.

of course an identity must not be static. Mm. I think 'static' is the wrong way to look at the fail state, though. i think a proposed identity must be 'in conversation with an implied greater social reality'. and the fail state is when the conversation is insufficient. I think the internal is fundamentally a kind of inverse image of the external, in this sense.

you talk of identity as if the logical contradiction is the danger point, but i disagree. identities and other socially legible constructs are frequently deeply logically contradictory. 'crushes', 'singlethood', 'anger', even 'crying' all present themselves through logical frameworks that are barely internally consistent, but through the strength of an extremely evident social legibility they maintain themselves.

observe where autistic children who favor the social fabric of 'logic' over the social fabric of 'emotions' break. their identities and subjectivities don't fit with the normal legible framework, and it's perceived as a failure of logic, but I really don't think it is.

my point with legibility is precisely to explain this. to see what exactly is "required" in terms of internal consistency and why exactly it is required. you want to construct a framework that takes internal experiences and translates them into "what others can understand". (or at least, what the subject believes is something others can understand)

we're treating legibility differently in different contexts. to make a behaviour or trait socially legible, i.e., the interior-to-exterior translation, is in my view an inherently different process to the process of making an external situation legible to the internal. in my view, when we connect the substrate of identity to the underlying firmware, whether or not it takes hold rests on the exterior-to-interior translation: is the subject able to make sense of the exterior world using this identity? this seems to rest on a bidirectional translation, but i contend that when the new identity is taking root (or indeed being rejected), the identity itself is taken as an object in the exterior world - and so it must be able to interpret the new subject-plus-substrate. ("you are dog, and dog does not understand this statement" fails to produce stable results. the image of dog in the exterior necessarily must exist to be examined and integrated into the interior.)

in my view, this is a point you approach but do not fulfil by saying "the internal is an inverse image of the external" - i would argue that in imposing an identity, one necessarily understands it as a manipulable object in conversation-space, and therefore to communicate this most cleanly will require the deliberate treatment of that identity as an external object to be stepped into or imposed on a subject, rather than a novel entity appearing ex nihilo. (in practice it will always begin in this way, but often subjects past a certain point must suffer through simply having assertions made at them that they are a thing, rather than the process of becoming being given voice.)

we then approach the issue of social legibility, which is neatly resolved by my view that identity is never internal, but always remains a manipulable external object: if the identity cannot accommodate the production of signifiers legible to the interrogators, they will fail to interface with the identity and declare it failed. (this is in my view best shown by negative stimuli; someone mocking the subject for being a dog, based on doglike traits, is nonetheless finding the "dog" identity legible, and thereby supports it despite subtextually or overtly disputing it.)

in a sense, translating the internal to external is then not the issue, as treating "the external" as a fixed far-field area containing all other minds but not the subject is in my view necessarily incorrect. if a mind is in play - and as we demonstrate necessarily as we begin this line of thinking, the subject's subjectivity is firmly in play - then either we engage in magical thinking (i.e., "the subject is inherently unlike other minds, by virtue of special factors"), or we accept that to split the world into interior and exterior on an ad-hoc basis can never create a reasonable framework for understanding any social dynamics.

to hammer home my thesis: assume an identity that translates nothing whatsoever of the internal, but instead simply copies whatever is said to it. "being copied" is an easily understood signifier, with which others can easily and straightforwardly engage; thus the "identity" of the mimic is both socially legible and solidified, even as no aspect of the subject's internality is expressed.

side pedantry that did not neatly fit into stream of consciousness writing: contradiction is harmless to identity stability, but only so long as it is unexamined. an examined contradiction produces tension which can destabilise an identity, particularly a newly rooted one.

at the risk of sounding somewhat less academic - i have a significant corpus of poetry on this topic, and in my view have sufficient evidence to believe that "all identity is necessarily external" is not only true, but far less bold than my genuine position ("there is no meaningful internal of any kind").

but, mm, what is the place of identity in this? I think identity is the chitin. the hard surface of you that separates within from without. and it is what the sockets are carved into. it determines what legibility you can access and how. what you are allowed to feel and how you are allowed to feel it. what you are allowed to perform and how you are allowed to perform it.

the identity-as-substrate model forms a decent basis for understanding the nature of an unexamined ("fixed") identity conveyed by fixed signifiers (names, titles, etc), on the understanding that "identity" is a communicable set of ideas and self-image parameters. where this analysis falls down, however, is the idea that "convincing the subject to perform the identity" is a process sufficiently straightforward to summarise in one line.

for pliable subjects, and those who, when guided, will tend to happily stay at the point to which their guide led them (or, in the failure case, snap back to a prior substrate, again treating identity as a set of rigid moulds, however narrow the range of experiences they serve to underpin), this is broadly true. but it fails when the subject is inclined to treat their identity as of interest in itself, i.e., they will be interacting with it themselves. in this instance it ceases to be functional as a fixed substrate and necessarily responds to interrogation, either by flexing to accommodate the interrogator or by resisting that interrogation.

in practice: "you are dog." as identity, "if i am dog, why speak english?" as interrogation. (simpler & less complete substrates will be naturally "interrogated" by the subject experiencing stimuli outside the context the proposed identity can support.) depending on construction, the substrate can either resist this interrogation - some penalty clause associated with introspection, to cut it off and replace it with another direction, being a cheap and nasty fix. ("as a dog, thinking big thoughts will only confuse you and make you want to nap.") - or the substrate can flex when interrogated: "huh, i guess i'm a talking dog". note in the latter case the substrate flexing in a very specific area to accommodate the interrogation has led to flexure elsewhere ("talking dog" has astonishingly different signifiers to "dog", in particular being inherently "cartoony").

as such, when convincing someone to adopt a new identity, it must be done in such a way as to "settle" beyond the subject's natural interrogation. if you want to imprint "you are dog", you must equip "dog" with sufficient scope to overcome "why talk" and "why upright" and "why complex opinions on trustworthiness of news media outlets", for example, or the subject will be replete with tools to throw off the new identity, deliberately or otherwise. (cheap and nasty options abound, but like any little tautology, will break down at the simple act of disbelief.)

the "simple" option is to consider the general scope of likely "breaks" in the new identity and provide it with sufficient scope to overcome them. ("dog internal thoughts vastly different to ability to externally articulate, source of frustration for dog, frustration at failure to communicate inevitably leads to emotion overcoming reason and utter failure" will lead to outcomes of the form "dog tries to communicate its needs, and responds to confusion with worsening failure, but responds to comprehension with rapturous joy at finally being understood".) this is widely done by "clever" people seeking to demonstrate how many steps ahead they are planning, or to savour the anticipation of an end-state set up in advance.

the less straightforward, but in my view more robust, option is to ensure the animacy of the substrate, e.g., "it sure is weird that you are dog and yet speak. but given that it's true, can you figure out why?". by preying on the extant processes "beneath" the substrate - problem-solving, confabulation, curiosity - the substrate becomes "embedded" more naturally, and in a form directly moulded to accommodate the subject's understanding of the world (being as all subjects understand the world via probing it using those natural faculties). this also lends itself to "healing" - a crack or contradiction in the identity becomes a crisis for the subject themselves to resolve, rather than a failure state in which the subject, noting the failure of a static identity, simply ceases to "perform" it.

me when I change in response to the material conditions of my life changing: huh, no way, I changed at random! Guess it's my fault I didn't do this sooner

I pay off every penny my friends owe

I keep my friends safe and loved and cared for