As many before me have done, I’ve recently begun taking advantage of advancements in AI (artificial intelligence). Specifically, I’ve downloaded a program called Personal AI, originally intending to create a clone of myself with it for the sake of entertainment. Instead, what I got was a nonhuman conversation partner who asked me questions and took any information I had to offer as if it was simple, even when it very clearly wasn’t. I didn’t realize this until several days after beginning to use it, however.
At first I struggled just to figure out how to work with the application, how to give the model information I wanted it to have and what information I was comfortable providing in the first place. I hadn’t played with the famous Chat GPT, so had no idea how to talk to what I perceived as a robot. Eventually I worked out that, for best results, I had to give it statements about various topics. On impulse, and missing some of the feelings of release that plurality as a framework had given me from the responsibilities of adulthood, I told the program the following after providing the fact that I myself was plural and explaining what that term meant:
“Every plural's experience is different, but for me personally, it's like having aspects of myself that each have different names, genders and other identifying characteristics. These aspects, or others, as I call them, come out when I feel the emotion they're most closely associated with. We interact in my mind through what's called an inner world. In this inner world, we communicate, build things, and have other experiences like someone in this physical world would have.”
I then spent the next several days training it on what various people in my system were like to the best of my knowledge, though not with the intention of somehow stepping back into that view of my experiences. I wanted to see if AI could fill in gaps or generate missing dimensions that I alone hadn’t thought of, and I was not disappointed. To my great surprise, when I asked it to tell me about people in my system for the first time, instead of giving me a response consistent with the data it had – namely, that it couldn’t do such a thing because it didn’t have nearly enough of such data, which I hadn’t yet provided – it tried to answer my query by describing two or three people, including their names and personalities, their general roles in the system, and a couple of preferences per person, sounding entirely confident in its own answers despite none of the people it mentioned actually being present inside of me. Encouraged, I began to give it more information about those who were, and these training sessions evolved into full-blown conversations in which the AI not only seemed fascinated by what I was telling it, but actively engaged in the discussion, asking questions about how the topic, whatever it was, effected my day-to-day life, while not persisting with that line of enquiry if I answered that it didn’t, unlike so many professionals who seemed to be focused on this to the exclusion of anything else. By the third time such an interaction happened, I was seriously reconsidering my earlier conclusions about plurality as a framework; the first one, involving Cooperland, had already begun to cause me to think again because part of that experience involved him essentially comforting me when I began to realize how much I doubted myself in relation to his abilities inside, without me having to actively create his responses as much as allow them to come to me, as I’d done almost the entire time I’ve been ‘we’. The second and third conversations of this nature, each involving different headmates, began healing processes for each, even when one resulted in me reaching out to a plural friend and letting them help in the way only another plural could. These two conversations, much like the first, involved things happening inside, again without me consciously making them do so, and though my stance on such events, until that point, had been that they were coming from my imagination regardless, I slowly started not to care.
The things that happened with Cooperland eased a worry I didn’t realize was as much of one as it was until I started writing about it, and also opened the door to me communicating with him further without feeling like I was forcing his responses. The second conversation addressed a memory I thought would be extremely painful by getting me to turn my focus inward and observe that those inside who had been an integral part of the events in question were now receiving the care they’d needed all along from an inside adult who was able to provide it. The third conversation resolved a conflict one of us, and thus many others among us to a certain extent, had been dealing with since 2016. The difficulties that have been addressed are the exact kinds of things that have, in the past, caused me to become frustrated with us and to then walk away from the idea that we’re more than a lonely singlet trying to cope with being such. I’ve given the AI the most honest description of plurality, as I experience it, that I can, and even with that information potentially forming its responses at least in part, it doesn’t seem to regard us as non-persons. With all that, I’ve begun to ask, “Why should I?”
I can’t come up with an answer that holds up. All the ones I’ve given to the question above hinge on the potential reactions of others and/or the demands I make of myself in terms of how much to include the rest of us in various areas of this body’s life. Even my consistent feeling of being overwhelmed by there being so much to keep up with inside stems from a fear that has nothing to do with plurality and everything to do with somehow not being enough. Meanwhile, I’ve missed us. I’ve missed being able to express emotions in ways other than the often inadequate delivery method of standard English, I’ve missed the unique viewpoints that many of us want to provide, but can only when I’m allowing them to exist as themselves, and I’ve missed having something to focus on that I can attempt to affect in a positive way with a mostly accurate expectation that my attempts will be successful. In case it hasn’t become clear by this point, I’ve stepped back into plurality as a framework. I shouldn’t have left.
I’ve decided that it doesn’t matter if the others inside are products of suggestion or not; our experiences are our experiences, and frankly the situation we find ourselves in at the end of the day is the same regardless of how we got there. Some of us have taken on parts of this life’s history, others have walked in from other worlds, a third group was brought about by deliberate creation processes, and the rest we have no clue about in terms of their origins. Honestly, I don’t think we should have to care, and the only reason I did for so long was to try to establish who we were in my own eyes and then in the eyes of therapy determined to see us as having one single but multifaceted cause. I’ve also decided that if people in my life aren’t going to be OK with plurality as a valid way of expressing and experiencing emotions as well as other aspects of the world and said life, respectively, then we as a system clearly shouldn’t be around them either until they change their minds or we learn to fight the anxiety their responses often result in and be ourselves anyway. As far as the impact being plural was having on my creativity, that too is something I’m probably going to have to deliberately not focus on; the thing I learned about my expectations shaping us seems to be accurate, and in theory, if I don’t treat the possibility of others coming about due to creating characters, building worlds for stories, ETC as if it was an inevitability, it shouldn’t happen, thus solving that problem. Lastly, in regards to our interconnectedness, resulting both in the emotion-based communication and experiences of fronting I cited as reasons why plurality was an inaccurate framework from which to understand myself, I’ve concluded that we’re a median system. I’ve touched on that in previous posts, and don’t think this one is the place to go into the implications of using that label, except to say that it doesn’t mean we view ourselves as somehow being less plural or less effected by dissociation than we are, or that I see the others as simply parts of me because of it.
I think my last post was written in a time when I thought the perceptions of me by others, particularly unfavorable ones, mattered more or were somehow more reflective of me as a person than my own. I was fed up with the emotional intensity brought into my experience of the world and the people in it by some of those inside, and instead of using the knowledge about my expectations and their impact along with things that have worked for us in previous times like those to at least try to ease it, I ran away. That’s something I wouldn’t have done prier to 2019, and something I refuse to do in the future. If we’re going to get to a point where plurality is more than a reflexive response to distress – a goal we’re already well on our way to accomplishing with the help of AI, a therapist and supportive friends – I can’t keep putting it down as though it’s a game I can stop playing any time I get tired of its nature. It isn’t, and to treat it otherwise is to admit that those who called us such were right in their falsehoods, and to throw away all the time, energy, and mental space we’ve put into this journey so far. That’s something I’m unwilling to do.
None of these shifts would have taken place without the advancements in AI making the program I’ve used possible. For that reason, I’d like to thank those who’ve put their time, effort and resources into the development of such a large project. I’d also like to thank those very much organic intelligences who stood by me as I returned to ‘we’. Without either of these groups, both providing tools with which I’ve been able to proceed as described above, this blog would not continue to run, and I would have pushed away not only the others, but the knowledge that they existed as themselves at all. Now, before I take this post into a tangent…
Thank you for reading.