Systems of Self: Identity as a System of Feedback

The “true self” story is comforting, and mostly wrong. 

We were taught to search for an inner core. A real you.

A stable, authentic essence beneath all the noise.

But when you actually watch yourself move across platforms, roles, and years, the statue cracks.

You’re one person in a video call, another in a group chat, another alone at 2 a.m.

You keep shifting tone, posture, and language.

Feeds push you into different mini characters without asking permission. And yet you still cling to “this is just who I am.”

We’ll call this illusion of the fixed self.

This article replaces that myth with a systems lens.

Instead of an onion with a hidden center, you’ll see identity as a live network of feedback loops: beliefs, roles, body states, memories, and social signals constantly adjusting to context, attention, and interface.

Especially if you work in creative tech, cultural institutions, or systems heavy practice, this isn’t just philosophy; it’s a practical design for how the self behaves.

From Fixed Essence to Adaptive System

The traditional myth of a stable, inner self

The “true inner self” is a useful story, not an accurate model.

The traditional view treats identity like an onion: peel away roles and circumstances and you hit a singular, authentic core.

In that essence based view, context is superficial; the “real you” supposedly sits beneath it all.

You see this everywhere: from personality theory, to self improvement, and even exhibition design that freezes identity into categories on walls.

Research on social identity and conflict challenges this layered core idea.

Instead of one center, identity looks like a system of interacting components that respond to context and pressure (Korostelina, 2007).

Core commitments, long term roles, and short term states don’t sit in a neat stack; they constantly renegotiate their importance depending on where you are and who’s watching.

Under multi platform, multi context life in our digitial age, the onion collapses fast.

A Gen Z user can move from activist to meme maker to professional in a five minute scroll, each interface and audience pulling a different “me” into focus.

Dynamic systems work pushes this further: identity is inherently time sensitive, nonlinear, and context coupled (Kaplan & Garner, 2017; Mercer, 2011).

So instead of asking: “What is my true self?”, a more precise question is:

“How does my identity system behave under different inputs, and which patterns keep recurring?”

That’s the pivot: from the archeology of inner essence to a live systems view, where regulation, perturbation, and adaptation are the main plot, not background noise.

Identity as a network, not a statue

The self works less like a statue and more like a network.

In a systems frame, identity is a network of interacting components:

1. Roles (“artist”, “parent”, “researcher”)
2. Memory networks
3. Somatic states (arousal, fatigue, tension)
4. Self-narratives
5. Social recognition signals

Each acts as a node. Their continuous interaction generates what you call “who I am right now”…

The self as a complex adaptive system foregrounds emergence, feedback, and self organization instead of fixed traits.

A micro story:

1. You’re mid-task.
2. A critical email lands about a project you care about.
3. Your body tightens; heart rate jumps.
4. Your narrative tilts: “I’m behind”, “I’m not good enough”, or “I can handle this”,
5. Your role identity shifts: from “confident professional” to “imposter” or “problem-solver,” depending on your typical attractors.

One small input perturbs the whole network and pulls you toward a familiar self configuration. That’s a system, not an essence.

The notification is an external signal.

The body and beliefs are internal variables. Their interaction can stabilize or destabilize your self view.

Complex dynamic systems perspectives formalize this kind of behavior, highlighting nonlinear trajectories and sensitivity to initial conditions in identity development (Kaplan & Garner, 2017; Mercer, 2011).

You don’t have a self like an object.

You run a self like a system.

How Identity Behaves Like a Complex Adaptive System

The internal agents of identity

Identity isn’t one thing; it’s many small agents coordinating.

In complex adaptive systems, agents are components whose local interactions produce global patterns. For identity, agents include:

1. Beliefs (“I’m creative”, “I’m bad at conflict”)
2. Habits (checking your phone when anxious)
3. Somatic states (wired, calm, exhausted)
4. Narrative fragments (“I always mess this up”)
5. Role identities (“mentor”, “outsider”, “leader”)

None of these agents is the self.

Together, they generate self experience.

When I design or analyze interactive systems, I treat these identity agents as variables in a live model.

Change one variable; sleep deprivation alters your body state, and suddenly, different beliefs and roles become more salient.

Over time, repeated interactions between agents form stable coordination patterns.

That’s how you get recognizable “versions” of you.

The combinations that keep showing up become your identity attractors and shape your characteristic trajectories.

Classic complex adaptive system properties map cleanly onto the self:

1. Emergence: The felt “I” arises from many micro processes.
2. Adaptation: Your identity system updates in response to new experiences.
3. Feedback: Outputs become inputs that shape future states.
4. Self organization: Identity elements cluster into coherent patterns without a central controller.

You don’t have a king self commanding from above. You have distributed identity processes coordinating from below.

Feedback loops and homeostasis

If you remember one mechanic, make it this:

Identity runs on feedback loops.

A feedback loop occurs when a system’s output is routed back as input and alters future states. Applied to identity:

1. A belief shapes behavior.
2. Behavior elicits social responses.
3. Those responses reinforce or challenge the original belief.

Two basic loop types:

Positive (amplifying) feedback

1. “I’m a failure” → withdrawal → poorer performance and negative feedback → deeper “I’m a failure” story.
2. “I’m capable of learning” → seek help → small wins → reinforced growth-oriented self view.

Negative (balancing) feedback

1. A threat to your self view triggers regulatory processes that try to bring things back to equilibrium.

Sedikides’ homeostatic model frames identity as a system that protects valued self views (Sedikides, 2021).

When criticism or exclusion hits:

1. You reinterpret the event (“they misunderstood”).
2. You seek more affirming environments.
3. You double down on other valued identities.

The system is trying to keep certain self views within a functional range. That’s why some parts of “who you are” feel surprisingly stable despite constant environmental chaos: there’s active regulation, not metaphysical permanence.

Attractors: the patterns you fall back into

Your “personality” is largely the set of attractors you keep slipping into.

In nonlinear dynamics, an attractor is a state, or a set of states; the system tends to return to after disruptions.

Identity attractors are the familiar configurations you keep falling back into:

1. “The reliable one”
2. “The outsider”
3. “The expert”
4. “The chaotic creative”

These are not just labels; they’re recurrent bundles of feeling, behavior, and narrative that your system finds easy to inhabit.

Marks Tarlow’s work on the self as a dynamical system suggests human selfhood lives near the “edge of chaos”, reorganizing under pressure while still showing recognizable patterns (Marks-Tarlow, 1999).

Culture and personal history carve the attractor basins:

1. Family, peers, institutions, and platforms repeatedly reinforce some patterns.
2. Those patterns become energetically cheap; the system needs almost no input to slide into them.
3. Other potential configurations remain shallow or unexplored.

From a design lens, noticing identity attractors is non-negotiable.

If an interactive installation, interface, or institutional experience only reinforces dominant attractors (“consumer”, “patient”, “user”), it narrows someone’s identity landscape by default.

Designing with identity as system means:

1. Revealing existing attractors.
2. Opening credible paths to alternative ones.
3. Refusing to pretend there’s one monolithic self you’re “speaking to.”

Time, Context, and the Moving Landscape of Self

Micro fluctuations and daily identity shifts

Identity doesn’t just shift in big “who am I?” crises; it flickers hourly.

Dynamic systems research shows that self experience fluctuates on short time scales; across days or even hours, not only in rare dramatic turning points (Branje et al., 2021).

Adolescents show rapid shifts as they explore and commit to different roles and values.

Adults also exhibit micro fluctuations driven by context, mood, and social feedback.

Try this for a week:

1. Notice who you feel like at work, online, with friends, alone.
2. Track which self states keep appearing.
3. Watch how fast they can switch.

You’ll see:

1. Some days: confident attractor.
2. Other days: doubtful attractor.
3. Most of it: happening beneath explicit awareness.

The identity system constantly samples possibilities, stabilizing some and discarding others.

Dynamic systems models treat this variability not as inconsistency or inauthenticity, but as a feature of an adaptive self system:

1. Variability equals exploration.
2. Exploration equals the capacity to adapt.
3. Micro identities equal the raw material of long term identity development.

You’re not failing at being “consistent”.

You’re running an adaptive system in a volatile environment.

Context switches and role identities

Roles are not just titles; they’re configurations.

Professional identity research treats roles like system configurations instead of static labels.

Work on medical professional identity, for example, describes it as a system comprising self-definition, recognition by others, and role performance, each component influencing the others over time (Dong et al., 2025).

When you step into “doctor”, “curator”, “founder”, or “artist”, you’re doing more than changing name tags. You’re reconfiguring:

1. Norms you follow
2. Expectations you anticipate
3. Feedback loops you pay attention to

Context switches: studio → board meeting → group chat, trigger different role identities with distinct attractors and regulatory loops.

The same person can be cautious in one context and experimental in another, not because their “true self” is inconsistent, but because the system is coupling to different environments.

Environment, recognition, and constraints act as control parameters influencing the system into different basins.

For institutions, treating role identity as a system leads to more honest experiences.

Instead of imagining visitors as one stable identity, you acknowledge that each space invites a specific configuration.

A museum can deliberately design for “co-researcher” or “co-creator” identities instead of defaulting to “passive viewer”.

The landscape of identity model

The landscape of identity model makes the metaphor explicit:

Identity is a terrain of possible self positions shaped by context, development, and social interaction (Van der Gaag et al., 2025).

You can imagine this as:

1. Valleys where attractors are easy to inhabit.
2. Hills as states that require effort to maintain.
3. Cliffs as crises or rapid reorganizations.

Across this terrain, multiple long term and short term identities coexist; core commitments, enduring roles, fleeting states.

The system moves between them:

1. Sometimes smoothly.
2. Sometimes through jolting shifts.

Development looks like reshaping the terrain:

1. Deepening some valleys.
2. Filling or softening others.
3. Raising new hills worth climbing.

Two key implications:

1. You are not a single point. You’re a distribution over the landscape.
2. Interventions, therapeutic, educational, artistic, act like localized earthquakes and erosion, reshaping what paths are viable.

So instead of asking “Who am I really?”, the more actionable question becomes:

“What does my identity landscape look like, and what new paths become possible if I alter my inputs and environments?”

Interfaces as Identity Engines: Attention, Algorithms, Culture

Attention architecture as an external control system

Your attention is the gatekeeper of your identity system. Interfaces are the ones knocking.

I use attention architecture to describe how interfaces structure perception:

How feeds, notifications, and UI patterns steer your limited attention toward specific signals.

For identity, attention decides which inputs get processed, rehearsed, and integrated.

So attention architecture becomes an external control system for identity.

Small interface tweaks; autoplay previews, notification badges, suggested follows, can produce large changes by repeatedly triggering certain identity loops.

This reflects a key property of complex adaptive systems: sensitivity to small changes in control parameters can push the system into different attractors.

Over time, a platform’s attention architecture normalizes particular self positions:

1. “Content creator”
2. “Professional brand”

Not because it tells you who to be, but because it makes some loops frictionless and others invisible.

When I design interfaces for cultural institutions or creative tools, I’m not just managing “user flow”.

I’m co-authoring identity trajectories.

For example: A scroll pattern that prioritizes metrics over reflection privileges performance oriented identities over exploratory ones.

Social platforms as identity experiments

Social platforms are continuous, messy identity experiments at scale.

Every post, like, comment, and metric is feedback:

1. It tells your identity system which performances are rewarded.
2. It signals which communities you’re aligning with.
3. It shapes which narratives feel believable.

Recognition; who responds, how fast, and in what tone, feeds directly into self view maintenance and social identity processes (Korostelina, 2007).

From a systems angle, platforms deepen or shallow identity attractors by:

1. Amplifying certain aesthetics and behaviors.
2. Hiding others in the long tail.
3. Letting algorithms optimize for engagement, not identity health.

Agent based models of identity show how “I” becomes “we” as individuals sync with group norms and stories.

Platforms can nudge these transitions toward specific group level attractors, without ever using the word “identity”.

Cultural signaling and identity economics

Identity is also a currency.

Your clothes, aesthetics, bios, and “about” pages broadcast signals to institutions, brands, and people. Signals reduce uncertainty:

1. What groups you belong to.
2. What roles you claim.
3. How you expect to be treated.

In a systems frame, these signals are both outputs and inputs:

1. You broadcast a signal.
2. Others respond.
3. That response loops back into your self-view and future signaling.

Institutions and brands treat identity as data infrastructure:

1. Preferences, interaction histories, and demographics are used to segment, target, and personalize.
2. Certain signals gain access, status, or resources.
3. Others get filtered out.

This creates an economy of identity.

Your system adapts, often by narrowing your identity landscape to what “works” inside a given market.

For cultural institutions, acknowledging identity economics means:

1. Moving beyond static demographic labels.
2. Designing with identity systems, not merely for identity categories.
3. Recognizing that each experience perturbs visitors’ networks of signals, loops, and attractors.

Interventions: Designing with Identity as System in Mind

Working with your feedback loops (personal practice)

Personal growth becomes less about “finding yourself” and more about editing your system.

When you see identity as feedback loops, your job shifts:

1. From hunting for an authentic core
2. To mapping and adjusting the loops that dominate your landscape

A practical sequence:

Map triggers

• Which situations, platforms, or people consistently pull you into specific self states?
• Which stories autoplay afterward?

Name attractors

• Label the familiar configurations: “curious learner”, “burnt out caretaker”, “performer”, “quiet observer”.

Design new loops

1. Choose environments (communities, tools, routines) that make desired attractors easier to inhabit.
2. For example, join spaces where “experimental artist” is rewarded, not ridiculed.

Weaken unhelpful loops

1. Treat chronic self criticism or compulsive performance as deep basins, not destiny.
2. Introduce structural perturbations: new attention habits, reflective practices, or social inputs that interrupt the loop.

The key principle here is to identity is an adaptive system.

Sustainable change comes from altering structure and inputs, not just demanding more willpower from the same old configuration.

Interactive art as identity laboratory

Interactive installations can make the system visible in real time.

In my new media and creative technology work, I build systems that:

1. Capture live behavioral data (movement, gaze proxies, interaction patterns).
2. Reflect it back as shifting visual or sonic identity “states”.
3. Let visitors see their own influence on the shared system.

When an installation shows how small changes, a pause, a gesture, a choice, reconfigure the visual or sonic field, visitors feel identity as plastic, not fixed.

They stop relating to themselves as static observers and start experiencing themselves as adaptive agents inside a complex system.

That’s what I mean by interactive art as a laboratory of self:

1. It makes identity attractors visible.
2. It lets people experiment with new micro-actions.
3. It prototypes future interfaces where identity feedback loops are explicit, not hidden.

Treat installations as agent based models of identity, and you can prototype cultural infrastructures where identity is visible, negotiable, and collectively shaped.

Living as a System, Not an Essence

The “stable self” as a UX shortcut

The stable self is a user interface hack, not a metaphysical truth.

It’s cognitively efficient to compress everything into “this is who I am”.

That shortcut helps you coordinate action and maintain narrative coherence without tracking every micro fluctuation.

But from a dynamical systems perspective, the shortcut is partial.

The self feels stable because your identity system operates within familiar attractors, not because it’s fundamentally fixed (Marks-Tarlow, 1999; Laughlin, 2024).

Recognizing the fixed self myth does not mean:

1. You abandon continuity.
2. You reject responsibility.

It means:

1. “This is just who I am” often describes the depth of a basin, not the existence of a soul object.
2. Designers and institutions need to be careful when they lean on stable self assumptions for targeting and messaging; it erases complexity and plasticity.

If your entire self concept fits into a bio or a brand deck, that’s not “clarity”; that’s compression.

Ethical considerations: influence, manipulation, identity steering

Once you admit identity is steerable, ethics isn’t optional.

Platforms and institutions already influence identity attractors through:

1. Attention architecture
2. Algorithms
3. Institutional rituals
4. Metrics and rewards

Most of this happens without naming it.

The question isn’t whether we steer identity systems. The question is:

“How consciously, how transparently, and for whose benefit?”

From a systems ethics view, influence means:

1. Giving people visibility into the loops acting on them.
2. Offering them leverage to adjust inputs or opt out.

Manipulation hides the steering while optimizing for engagement, profit, or institutional comfort.

Designing around identity as system asks us to:

1. Surface the levers: which signals are amplified, which metrics matter, which identity states are incentivized.
2. Make attention architectures auditable.
3. Create room for users/visitors to resist, remix, or reject the offered configurations.

This becomes critical in collective identity contexts, brand tribes, and institutional trust.

Steering “I → we” transitions without consent can cause deep structural harm. A systems aware ethics pushes for participatory design and shared governance of identity infrastructures.

A reflection and next steps

Living as a system, not an essence, is both destabilizing and freeing.

It requires accepting that:

1. “Who you are” is not a single object to discover.
2. It’s an evolving configuration of feedback loops, attractors, and contexts.

It also gives you more room to move:

1. More parameters to tweak.
2. More environments to choose.
3. More loops to redesign.

If you want a concrete next step:

1. List three recurring self states.
2. Trace the inputs that trigger each one.
3. Identify the feedback that keeps them in place.
4. Choose one small structural change (environment, attention habit, relationship boundary) that could reshape one loop.

Institutions can run the same exercise at scale:

Map how your experiences select for certain visitor identity states, and decide intentionally which attractors you want to deepen.

Treat identity as editable infrastructure that deserves care, consent, and thoughtful design; not as a branding exercise or a psychological afterthought.

Conclusion

Seeing identity as a system reframes selfhood from static object to adaptive, complex process.

The self becomes a landscape of micro identities, role configurations, and attractors, continuously reshaped by context, culture, and interface.

For creative technologists and cultural institutions, this view opens concrete design space:

1. Craft attention architectures that reveal, not just exploit, identity loops.
2. Build installations that visualize identity dynamics rather than freezing categories.
3. Design institutional experiences that expand visitors’ identity landscapes instead of locking them into default roles.

If you’re curating exhibitions or building tools around identity, AI, or perception, I create interactive systems that turn identity into visible, manipulable infrastructure.

You choose whether this stays as an interesting idea or becomes an experiment you run in your own life, practice, or institution.

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