• she/her

Principal engineer at Mercury. I've authored the Dhall configuration language, the Haskell for all blog, and countless packages and keynote presentations.

I'm a midwife to the hidden beauty in everything.

💖 @wiredaemon


discord
Gabriella439
discord server
discord.gg/XS5ZDZ8nnp
location
bay area
private page
cohost.org/newmoon

fullmoon
@fullmoon

i'll try to explain what i mean by "weakly plural" since i don't really know the name for what i'm experiencing

the short summary is: the way my mind works internally is that my mind has (roughly) two parts:

  • an emotional center
  • a rational center

fullmoon
@fullmoon

if i'm going to talk more about this i might as well share the names of my two halves

luna = emotional center
lucina = rational center


fullmoon
@fullmoon

short answer: lucina (my rational center) fronts

long answer: it's complicated


fullmoon
@fullmoon

one of my favorite tricks i've adopted recently is to use different capitalization, grammar, and punctuation, when the two halves are speaking. My rational center speaks with perfect capitalization, punctuation, and grammar (formal style). on the other hand my emotional center drops all of that (informal style)


one of the things that clued me into the fact that my mind was set up sort of like a large language model was when i started noticing this distinction between the two communication styles show up in my private notes. i'd notice that many thoughts would begin in the informal style (the "prompt" from my intuitive emotional center) and then continue with formal style shortly thereafter as I completed the thought (the "elaboration" from my rational center). I began to recognize that my emotional center was actually generating prompts for my rational center which (like an LLM) would elaborate upon and complete those thoughts.


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in reply to @fullmoon's post:

i am happy you have found this, and it's been helpful!

if it's alright, i'd like to share my maybe-similar setup.

i do not share these exact two sides, but i do have to sides. though, what started for me as two warring sides who eventually made peace has become more of a multitude of bundles of {motivation, wants, behaviors, innate purpose} that drive the more "conscious" side of me. similarly, though, i have a strong relationship with another side of me, who i label as "subconscious". i send tasks, wants, and most of all well-thought-out intentions to them. they set my desires, control what i focus on / what my immediate unthinking next thing to do is, send back intuitions, and come up with solutions - ideas that come "out of nowhere" from my perspective.

for a while i tried on the label of "median system", where as i understand it a plural system has a single continuous conscious experience & set of memories, but multiple underlying parts who are in control at various points. but it didn't stick.

the biggest reason i'm not plural is the lack of separation of identity. no part of me has any intention of forming or assuming any identity other than "Dabo", or another name that describes all of us. it's like identity just slides off the individual parts and pools, and is just used by anyone in here interchangeably.

anyways. again, as another not-quite-plural person, thank you for posting this, and i'm glad you have found some words and a useful framework that helps!

yeah, i appreciate you sharing that!

i also get the ideas "out of nowhere" experience, too (i.e. leaps of insight). it's really weird when working with others to explain to them how i jumped to those conclusions because it's like … i don't know! i didn't think of them (my other half did)

also, my rational half is always the one that fronts, so a lot of the time when i'm speaking it's from the perspective of my rational half

it's really weird when working with others to explain to them how i jumped to those conclusions because it's like … i don't know! i didn't think of them (my other half did)

I sometimes get this even for things that I thought of myself because of autism x3

i relate to this! maybe not to having halves, but certainly to feeling like a collection of members integrated to various degrees at various times, altogether forming some 1.x number of entities. this discovery is not really recent, but treating it as maybe-legitimate is

one thing that's been super awesome for us is that by viewing ourselves as a system it can become much more natural to successfully hold inner conflict, because all sides of the conflict are actually given room to coexist (by expression through different members)

it can rock ... but this plural self-perception comes and goes, and unfortunately it's usually going rather than coming. (there's often some tether to it in the background, though)

I don't have much to say, but I've been plural my whole life and having some amount of visibility about this among Legitimate Important Computer People feels reassuring and so I appreciate that you've made this post

in reply to @fullmoon's post:

Funny you describe producing natural language as "synthesizing speech and writing". I have described it in the past as "serializing a thought into natural language". I also actually communicate this back to me out loud, as it makes it easier for me to understand my own thoughts, for whatever reason.