The self is a fragile illusion that needs constant reinforcement through the mirrors
The self is a fragile illusion that needs constant reinforcement through the mirrors.
The brain is a VM that uses reflection in a mirror to do Bayesian.
The world is a labyrinth of funhouse mirrors that offer reflections of you from different angles.
Human evolution has given us the prosocial ability to build ourselves by observing the mirror. When the outspoken Wei Zheng died, Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty said, "If you use copper as a mirror, you can dress properly. Take history as a mirror, you can know the ups and downs; Take a man as a mirror, you can see the gains and losses. " In addition to the mirror in common sense, the ancients at the time compared history, humans, and society to mirrors, because these serve as channels that provide feedback that one updates the internal self-model based upon. Mirrors as in school, social media, the social environment we position ourselves in, etc. In sociology, there is a looking-glass self theory, which describes the process wherein individuals base their sense of self on how they believe others view them. Using social interaction as a type of “mirror,” people use the judgments they receive from others to measure their own worth, values, and behavior. Self-concept is built not in solitude, but rather within social settings. In this way, society and individuals are not separate, but rather two complementary aspects of the same phenomenon.
The process of discovering the looking-glass self occurs in three steps:
An individual in a social situation imagines how they appear to others.
That individual imagines others’ judgment of that appearance.
The individual develops feelings about and responds to those perceived judgments.
Social interaction is a mirror through which people learn about themselves, measure their own values, and adjust behaviors based on the judgment they get. Therefore, people react responsively to the changes in social forms to respond to the needs of society. This is one reason why philosophers think that all human culture is constituted and constrained within a specific social context.
Self-concept is prosocial, and once the existing self-concept is broken off or substantially overturned, the idea of man will be destroyed and cease to exist. If a new self-concept takes its place, a new self is formed. This process is often accompanied by a sense of distortion and fear. Last December, I noticed that "I've been wanting to move away from personal portraits at times lately. Every time this feeling surfaced, it was accompanied by a sense of strangeness and distortion. My perception of how I look as a woman has attached and even shaped my identity. When I step out of this identity, I no longer know myself." I asked myself if I would die if I lost a particular identity or image, but the answer was no, I could live with the new identity and forgive the old one.
a woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood, she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another…. Thus she turns herself into an object — and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
Physical appearance, taste, and body language are so tightly linked, as one single entity, that we can't get rid of them without completely changing the other elements. It's like a person can put on an exotic costume, but if their taste, physique, and body language do not change, their self-image does not change at all. My guess is that this change can be facilitated by cutting off feedback from some mirrors. Contrarily, enhancing self-understanding through a mirror over time can lead to even more self-consolidation, but it depends on mental maturity, the effects of drugs, etc.
Each mirror only provides a perspective, not a complete, true reflection of anything. It is dangerous to completely trust and rely on the mirror. If we do not get consistent, consistent, positive, and effective feedback from the mirror, it will be a long and challenging process to build a stable self-model, and it will go through a rather painful run-in period.
everything we hear about ourselves is an opinion, not a fact. everything we see is a perspective, not the truth. — Marcus Aurelius
Each of us is also the mirror of others. Mirrors are interdependent with and reflected in all of the other mirrors, forming Indra’s Net (or Markov's blanket). By understanding others we understand ourselves because all selves are interconnected. In return, Our changes of behavior based on the judgment from others influence how they establish themselves. One’s process of self-building will reshape the process of reinforcement of self for all beings - it is that impactful.
you’re walking through
a labyrinth of funhouse mirrors
the world offers you
one warped reflection to the next
every corner you turn
a different perspective
as you’re caught between
who you’ve been, who you are, and who you could be
the looking glass
may paint you as mighty and tall
worthless and small
be careful, darling
you may go mad if you gaze into any one mirror too long
falling into your relection like quicksand
stuck on an aspect of yourself
where will the labyrinth lead?
very few make it to the center, you see
the only way to be free of such a place
is to dance blinded along your path
trusting that beating compass
in your chest you call a heart
so give them all your best wicked smile
and laugh with your eyes closed
at this circus of illusions
as you fall down the rabiit hole of your own soul
I’ll meet you in the center