If, following the Buddhists, subjective depth and “interiority” can be considered as little more than a mischievous illusion, it is certainly a persistent one. There is a sense in which internal subjective depth and personal identity is that temporary (“digital cloud”-like), elastic storage space in which cultural and institutional meaning, presence and experience is located. Our internal worlds have evolved and adapted along with, and as direct organisational reflections of, our external ones. Subsequently, beyond that ambiguous and limited range of selective and creative reconfiguration which this self (now constituted, literally incorporated) may call it’s own, the vast majority of those inner forms and psychological architectures are always already internalised frameworks and relational networks absorbed from culture, language and social interaction.
Most of that which is “you” may not actually be you at all. We may be the nodes and microcosms in a distributed network of this world and through which this world manifests, in and as our experience. That ego of yours (yes, actually ours) may be little more than some ballooning and apparent interior space into which a complex and rapidly evolving world unknowingly and without cognition casts so many semantic and referential anchors, upon and from which to reflexively secure or measure and procedurally, progressively generate itself. The world, like the self, is an act of recursion, informational and energetic self-gravitation, self-replication and that which is being reproduced is the process of self-replication itself.
