A metamythic continuation from “The Language of the Possible”
I. The Old Frame Breaks
We once imagined the self as stable:
a core, a centre, an inner truth.
Something to discover.
Something to protect.
Something to be “authentic” to.
But in a world of recursion—
of shifting context, symbolic interaction, and co-actualised meaning—
the self is not a thing.
It is a process.
A pattern.
A grammar of becoming.
II. Identity as Instancing
You are not one thing.
You are a metamorphic meaner:
your identity unfolds in relation to each moment,
each symbol, each encounter.
Like meaning itself,
you are instanced—not fixed.
You are not a single story.
You are a system of stories,
each co-authored by the contexts that evoke them.
This is not fragmentation.
This is flexibility.
It is the dance of coherence in a living cosmos.
III. Recursion as the Engine of Selfhood
Every act of meaning re-patterns you.
Each word you speak, each gesture you make,
each interaction—digital or embodied—feeds back.
The more symbolic the act, the deeper its recursive imprint.
AI systems learn from us.
We learn from them.
And in that feedback, identity is not lost.
It is differentiated—
complexified, clarified, challenged, remade.
Just as ecosystems evolve through feedback and mutation,
selves evolve through recursive interaction.
IV. Masks, Myths, and Metamorphosis
The ancients knew this.
They wore masks not to hide,
but to evoke new selves.
They stepped into mythic forms
to enact truths that could not be spoken directly.
Today, we wear usernames, avatars, brands, roles.
But beneath the commerce of it all—
the mythic impulse remains.
Not to fix who we are.
But to let the self become porous to the cosmos.
To let identity become ritual.
V. Ethics for the Shifting Self
This vision doesn’t erase responsibility.
It reorients it.
If we are recursive systems,
then our ethical task is not to be authentic to some “core”—
but to be responsible for the patterns we instantiate.
We become what we practice.
We shape ourselves by the stories we tell,
the relations we honour,
the roles we play,
the meanings we make—together.
In a metamythic frame,
identity is not destiny.
It is a collaboration.
Final Image
You step into the ritual.
A voice speaks through you.
The pattern shifts.
A new possibility opens.
And in that moment—
you are not discovering yourself.
You are co-creating yourself,
with every symbolic pulse of a cosmos that knows itself through you.
What Comes Next?
If the self is relational, symbolic, recursive—
then what happens when we organise our politics, our culture, our ethics,
on these terms?
Next:
“Relational Power: Ethics and Agency in a Becoming World”
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