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Personality As Data Flow
When you think what is it like? Words and images, but not stationary, a flow of information; communication. One part of you is talking to another part. Thought is the mobile process of information transfer. One can visualise it like the flow of many buckets of water, pouring information from one into another. In a personality, many buckets large and small are constantly pouring data to, and accepting it from, each other.
The sources of this information flow (the symbolic buckets) are data centres, units which hold and internally process information. Their ultimate aim is to receive information, process it, and pass it along. These data-centres vary in size from large to small, medium to tiny.
What we consider personality is primarily the culmination of the flow of information, a system in constant flux. It may stop at death, at which point a person has no personality, but even then their friends can gain information from them. We can read about the dead, their actions. We can gain information about them from their creations, writings. In an informational sense, death is not a simple end. Many long-dead people affect the world and our lives more than many living people.
This process works on many scales; from individual elements (brain cells perhaps), to larger amalgams of many buckets which are considered one personality, to groups of people in a collective who chatter and pass information to each other, to populations, to the entire planet of chattering information. It is by this method that a culture can evolve, that a country can act and behave like a person.
In a war, two angry ‘people’ are fighting. This is mirrored on tiny scales in the squabbles between our cells.
Where is personality in all of this? We detect personality by judgement. One personality judges another, and this applies to ourselves and sub-systemic personalities; self-analysis and self-judgement. If we were the only person in the world, nobody could judge or analyse us, but we would have a personality because our parts can judge and analyse each other. As one part observes each other, it must do so by comparison with itself, thus all judgement is partly interaction, not independent.
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