Psychological Stages of Identity Development
How mind generates who you are
What happens when a nerd reads psychology? He comes up with 7 stages of identity development.
The nerd I’m talking about is Joscha Bach, the great great great grandson (don’t remember exactly how far removed) of the famous composer Johann Sebastian Bach.
The following is a summary of one of the many fascinating ideas he shared on this podcast.
How Your Mind Cooks Up Reality
Imagine your brain's a gamer locked in a basement, playing through a console. It only knows the game world via the controller (the five senses).
The brain and nervous system interpret sensory data, integrating past experiences and neural pathways to construct our perceived reality.
This isn't a direct reflection of your external world, but a neurologically-generated representation, shaped by synaptic connections and neurotransmitter activities.
We’re basically all living in a real-life Matrix, each playing our own personalized version. Look up scientists such as Donald D. Hoffman, V.S. Ramachandran, Anil K. Seth, Antonio Damasio or Oliver Sacks for more.
7 stages of Identity Development according to Joscha Bach
Stage 1 (Infancy)
In infancy, there’s no concept of self yet.
Instead, you have an attentional self that builds the view of the world and the initial model of self.
It’s a bit like building a game engine in the brain to track sensory data and interpret that data.
Stage 2 (Young child)
Your brain now has its very own world model (a sense of Self).
You begin thinking of the outside world as an objective reality, interacting with the “outside” world based on the model of the world we developed in stage 1.
Stage 3 (Adolescence):
At this stage, you begin forming a social self that allows you to experience yourself as part of the group.
You form opinions by assimilating them from your group. What my environment thinks about x is the underlying worry.
You also begin building empathy. As in building a mental architecture similar to your group akin to a hive mind.
It becomes difficult to resonate with the group if you are wired differently. That’s why people we refer to as ‘nerds’ or neurotypical sometimes struggle at this stage.
Most folks get stuck at Stage 3, forever picking sides of their peer group (as can be witnessed in politics, culture wars and the online space).
Stage 4 (Rational Agent)
You begin to understand that stuff is true and false regardless of what other people believe, and you have agency over your own beliefs.
In this stage, you also discover epistemology, the rules about determining what’s true and false. Thus determine for yourself, as opposed to looking for the hive mind for answers, what’s true.
Stage 5 (Self-Authoring)
At this stage, you discover how identity is constructed - you realize that your values are not terminal, but they’re instrumental to achieving a world that you like.
The more you understand this, the more you get agency over how your identity is constructed, and you realize that identity and interpersonal interaction are a costume you have agency over.
You also become more compassionate and understand that people form their identities depending on their past experiences.
Stage 6 (Enlightenment)
At this stage, you can collapse the division between a personal self and the ‘generator’ (the mind) of the world. A lot of people get there via meditation, psychedelics or by accident (Ekhard Tolle).
You suddenly notice that you are not actually a person, but you are a vessel (consciousness) that can create a person, and the person is still there.
You observe that personal self, but from the outside, and you notice it’s a representation. You might also notice that the world that is being created is a representation of you.
Stage 7 (Transcendence)
It’s a trans-humanist stage (hypothetical as of now) in which you understand how you work, in which the mind fully realizes how it’s implemented and can also enter different modes in which it could be implemented.
This stage is not open to people yet, but this could change if/when we merge with AI.
In the grand scheme of things, we're all just players in our own mental video game.
Enjoy your game engine,
Rima ✨ 😝
P.S. You can listen to a more in-depth commentary I recorded on this podcast (23 minutes).