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Comment by kgeist | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if I have a disorder or anything, but I've always felt since childhood that the actual "me" is a silent observer with little control over anything, and my body and thought processes are largely controlled by a different entity (much smarter than me) coexisting in my head. And that other entity wants me to believe it's all my decisions/actions, not theirs, and I'm in full control. It started with the realization that whenever I look at a problem, for example, a math problem, it just "clicks" with no actual effort on my part, as if someone else works hard solving it and just gives me the final answers, and all I do is take credit for it.

Maybe it's not a disorder per se, but a very peculiar kind of self-perception. If someone knows if it's a known phenomenon in psychology, I'd like to hear more about it.

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I think that's could be focusing too much on the "inner voice" and assigning that the "you" label. At least for me I have a normally chatty inner voice, and usually think of that as "me", but if I step back I realize there is a lot more to "me". There's other thoughts/knowledge/processes happening that can bubble up. At least my interpretation is the voice is just the aggregator, but there's really multiple systems coming together.

If I switch tasks and do something very creative, say playing music or drawing, the inner voice goes away and I can enter a "flow" or meditative state where things just happen. It's a very different mode where it's just feelings/emotions/imagery and no language based thoughts.

Also when I get really really tired, but power through it, I have a "recursive observer" where I kind of view myself on a delay and analyse everything I do, it's kind of annoying.

I think people's psyche are less integrated than we realize. We're a bundle of emotions/desires all cohabitating. Some peoples subcomponents have good stable relationships with each other, others are chaotic and dysfunctional.

That sounds familiar - I usually say that I must be an idiot savant or something. But I don't really have the sense of an 'other' - I more think of it as a co-processor.

I had a weird experience relatively recently - I looked at a (coding) problem, and came up with an approximate (albeit buggy) solution, with no conscious involvement.

I looked at my answer, and didn't know what the hell it was meant to be doing - let alone how to debug it.

I went to sleep, and when I woke up fixed the bug with ease.

I have a relatively common occurrence that seems somewhat similar.. often when I've entered a state of flow while building something (coding) and finished my session by being distracted and then not returning to the code until the following day, it appears to me that someone else wrote that code. I have no recollection of most of it - the solutions seem creative to me, novel, like I hadn't thought of them.

That sounds similar in some ways to (non-dual) awakening.

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