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Comment by noobker | Hacker News Reader

> you wear one mask with one group, another with a different group. Wouldnt say multiple identities though

You're just establishing that for a given persona there is a spectrum from 'Mask' to 'Identity' and insisting that there is an arbitrary threshold.

For a moment, embrace a worldview that there is no singular, core Identity -- in fact all personas are masks to some degree. An Identity may be a mask you're particularly dedicated to wearing, but it's still a mask. The rest of these "systems" people's perspective follows from this point and emphasizes certain experiences -- that you may suppress -- over others that you may hold on a pedestal.

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You have a salient point in regards to mask vs identtiy being an abitrary distinction and I agree it's definitely a spectrum to an extent, but thaat's nothing to do with the majority of the people on those subreddits and tiktok circles. They will literally fake seizures or passing out to indicate when they change between alters, or insist that they have literal fictional(often anime) characters as part of their "systems", and do these delusional showcase videos where they will rapidly shift between all of their "alters" on video, changing their facial expressions and posture to signify that they're a different one.

It doesn't follow. A system is a collection of distinct, separate, entities in a single body. They are not equivalent to the personas of most people. They are, to a greater or lesser extent, siloed off from one another, as distinct as you and I. That is the description given by a significant part of the systems community, and is not compatible with your view of identity. A system would likely take offence at your suggestion that each member is just a persona.

Obviously I don't know how other people feel, but even when I have to project different "identities" in different social situations, I'm still the same person within and just tailoring the output to be appropriate to the settings. I act differently when I'm playing with my son, when I'm at work, when I'm with my wife, etc... But I'm always the same person in all those situations with the same thoughts, the same desires, and can be thinking about those other situations while actively expressing a different "identity" for a different one.

I think the mask analogy is a good one, it feels to me that regardless of what "mask" I'm wearing, I'm still the same, singular person underneath it in all situations. I am only one person, even if I only choose to show selective parts of my personality at different times.

If you like this topic, what you’re describing is the essentialist worldview, and in my opinion a major part of societal debates today touch on the rejection of this worldview (classically by existentialists).

Is there stability to who you are? This question can also be asked of nations, of language… And this debate dates back to Plato.

> But I'm always the same person in all those situations with the same thoughts, the same desires

I think that's debatable, and further, a lot of that coherence is a personal/cultural choice and not something inherent to consciousness. At a minimum, you might admit the existence of biases like anchoring -- maybe you'll more heavily weight your child's desires while playing with them versus when your in the middle of work a day later (maybe vice versa!) -- but such things might be a hint of how these other perspectives work.

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