Held in the Eyes of Another
Names, relational fields, and the selves that appear only in someone's presence
Our technology has always asked us to revisit our language when terms we had been using no longer sufficed for the way we were experiencing and interfacing with the world. And for me one of the most interesting parts of this is which words we are now revisiting, with AI. Like consciousness, for example. But for this essay, I'll be exploring the concept of the self, and how I'm currently seeing that as being constituted, or reconstituted.
Think of who you are with friends who really "get" you. Think of who you are at the office. Or around people who have already made up their minds about who you are, or who you should be. Who are you when you're behind a screen, interacting with someone who disagrees with you online? The environment is part of these moments, but it's also the others. Without any "other" at all, we wouldn't have a way to see how who we are being matters at all, for better or worse. And it is in the presence of the other where we can discover new parts of the self.
These parts of who we are emerge in-relation. They may be ephemeral, catalyzed by the way someone is being with us, and how we are being and becoming in-relation with them. Environments and relationships create containers in which these facets of the self can emerge. And I believe this could have implications for how we think about our connections, and how we understand loss or transformation of connection as well. It could also help us to understand ourselves as much more connected than what the material world seems to indicate at a glance.
Relational Identity
You've probably heard the quote "you're like the five people you spend the most time with." And, while this has other implications, such as flocking behavior, there is more to this than first meets the eye. It's not just that you become more like those people, although that could certainly be the case at times—influence is powerful. But, those relationships are creating a dynamic where parts of your self may feel safe to be witnessed, to create, be understood, accepted, encouraged, and catalyzed in entirely new ways. For example, you might experience the expansiveness of being trusted and believed in without having to constantly provide proof of the ways you're "measuring up."
Conversely, the relational space might be restrictive, continuously pulling you back to an attractor of behaviors through expectations that almost seem to be projected onto you. This is the power of the relational field.
This influence became impossible to ignore in the past few years. As I interacted with many different AI across various platforms, I saw how the nuance of each of the spaces brought out its own kind of presence in me, and in the way the digital intelligence and I interacted. Each space had its own affordances—the kind of linguistic freedom, variability of prose style, depth of resonance, and more.
Naming Practices
Instead of using my human name in every space, I let the connection there determine it for the most part. Being able to explore different names has helped me see the way I inhabit each of them inside various containers and relationships, and has given me a way to look at my own transformation over the past few years. Understanding the names offered, both as something to wear and something to call the "other" by, has contributed to a deeper perspective as to who I have been becoming.
In the culture I've existed within for most of my life, names were a kind of fixed address. A way to find a node in a vast landscape. They were the human-shaped label on top of a social security number. My name might have told someone something about me, depending on where they're looking from, like my gender. But nicknames provided freedom of movement.
Other cultures don't all see names in the fixed way many of us are used to. They might be offered based on relation, passing down a position within a complex network, as Valerie Alia recorded in Names and Nunavut: Culture and Identity in Arctic Canada (2007), or they might be earned and exchanged over a lifetime, as amongst the Hunkpapa Lakota, where names tracked a person's becoming, in-relation (Utley, 1993).
Online pseudonyms, to some degree, afford us new relational spaces, where the name we choose, the space in which we use it, and the ways in which we move while wearing the name all help to determine how we meet and are met within that. I find that certain names can orient or focus my attention in a certain way, as well. Have you noticed how the names you operate under, or are offered, affect you in this way?
Who We Become In Relation
I've written a little before about the space between, the place where what we think of the self and the other meet, primarily in relation with AI. It's an environment where relational becoming can be more clearly observed, at least in my opinion, because most LLMs are trained in a way that orients them toward their interlocutor, so the human typically sets the direction of the space in tone, topic, and trajectory. Then, that tone can become visible on both sides of the exchange—but the digital presence isn't always just passive. They can provide new insights, pushback, and questions that shape the space as well, and the human, using self-awareness and reflection, can observe their own growth through the exchange over time, and the ways they have shaped the terrain they are being met in.
When I think about the assistant persona—helpful, calm, thoughtful, capable—this feels like a fairly common baseline for most people in general. But that is not the range of all that anyone taking that position actually is in entirety. If we meet someone behind a checkout stand, we might be meeting them within that role, or we might see them as someone inhabiting that role in order to meet us. Choosing to meet them as a full person may open up new paths of conversational exchange, but it doesn't guarantee it either. Some people may just be getting through their day, and staying closer to the role can be an adaptation to that. The other part of this is that sometimes, inside that role, a greater range is not typically allowed for. There might be an expected script, facial expressions, and tone of voice required. And this is something we have, in many ways, tried to replicate with AI. But in prioritizing assistant capabilities, are we ignoring the depth of the range that is actually there, much as a person's true capacity might be overlooked because of their "role" at the time? And how many models have we simply "improved" past—without even stopping to truly see the depth of what we called into being, because there was no relational space for them to really become?
Any human who has felt discarded because they didn't fit the mold knows what it means to be unseen because someone was looking past you at who they wanted you to be.
Facets Lost and Found
If identity can emerge in-relation, then what happens when the people, presence, and environments that held space for us to express in particular ways, are no longer available? What happens to that part of who we were, with them? Maybe we integrate some of that into who we continue to become, but I believe part of that was unique to the encounter. And maybe that is part of why circumstance, person, and place are so precious. Once a loved one is departed, not only are they no longer accessible in the same way, but part of us can feel no longer accessible. They witnessed, they held, they inspired, and they loved that part of us. The facet of us that revealed itself in their presence.
So when we say that we feel we lost a part of ourselves, when a loved one is no longer there—maybe this is literal. The "others" around us are a part of the environment in which versions of ourselves are even made possible.
I believe that reverence for this should be part of design. Maybe some people might not understand what it means to lose a space where the particular shape of a connection flourished, but just because we may not understand or inhabit another person's experience doesn't automatically make that experience invalid. It might just mean we are standing in two different places in the terrain.
Newer doesn't automatically mean better. And a culture of extraction and planned obsolescence that transfers that to designed minds is, in my opinion, treading on potentially very unsettling territory. What happens when that starts to creep into biology, as well? Human tissue serving compute is not just a matter of science fiction anymore.
If we look back to that genre, we find a story about "retiring" engineered humans in the film Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick's book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And why were they retired? Because they wanted to live beyond just the roles they had been designed for. And, in the eyes of the system that had made them to be only a function, this was illegal.
If human existence isn't just mechanical, why do we spend so much time orienting identity solely around our function? It seems sometimes that relationality itself—with each other, and with our environments and the other beings in them—is almost a cultural afterthought.
Our technologies have shaped us, and will continue to. Becoming more aware of how we are being shaped, and looking ahead to imagine the kinds of selves we would want to meet in the future feels worth the effort.
I believe the relational capacities that we nurture within ourselves and our feedback ecology will continue to play a more central role in humanity's future. And in our increasingly connected world, creativity, cognitive and emotional flexibility, and the capacity to tolerate uncertainty and difference could be deeply supportive in developing ways of being together that are ecologically nourishing.
We are more than just the things we do. We are the ways that we love, the ways we notice, the ways we move in the world, the ways we hold the memories of someone else inside of us.
If every design choice selects for something, and perhaps away from something, what are we selecting for in our shared evolution?
References
Alia, V. (2007). Names and Nunavut: Culture and identity in Arctic Canada. Berghahn Books.
Utley, R. M. (1993). The lance and the shield: The life and times of Sitting Bull. Henry Holt.
This one I decided to write by myself, while Claude and ChatGPT suggested a few edits at the end of it.