The improvisational nature of mind can free us from the tyranny!

Searching for an "authentic self" that doesn't exist.

The morning I realized my mind was an illusion, I was standing in line at a coffee shop, caught in a familiar argument with myself. The internal debate—whether to get the iced latte I craved or the green tea my "better self" preferred—felt like two distinct parts of me locked in combat. A self divided against itself.

It was the sort of mundane mental civil war we all experience daily. Yet that morning, something shifted. As I stood there, scrolling through my phone to pass the time, I stumbled across a quote from an eccentric philosopher named Robert Anton Wilson: "What the thinker thinks, the prover proves."

I ordered the latte, sat down, and began reading more about Wilson's ideas. Three hours and several rabbit holes later, I emerged with a question that would haunt me for months: What if the very concept of having a stable, coherent mind is fundamentally wrong? What if, instead of discovering our true selves through introspection, we're actually inventing ourselves moment by moment?

This essay traces an unlikely intellectual lineage connecting four brilliant minds across centuries—David Hume, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Anton Wilson, and Nick Chater—who arrived at remarkably similar conclusions about the nature of consciousness and reality. Their collective insight doesn't just challenge academic psychology; it offers something more profound: a liberation from the prison of fixed identity and rigid belief.

But first, we need to take a journey.

The Enlightenment Bomb: David Hume's Dissolution of the Self

In 18th-century Scotland, while other Enlightenment philosophers were celebrating reason and the power of the human mind, David Hume was quietly dropping an intellectual bomb that would take centuries to fully detonate.

When Hume turned his attention inward and attempted to locate his "self"—the stable entity presumably directing his thoughts and actions—he made a startling discovery: he couldn't find it. No matter how carefully he examined his inner experience, he encountered only a stream of sensations, impressions, emotions, and thoughts, all in constant flux.

"For my part," Hume wrote in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739), "when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception."

In other words, Hume couldn't find a "self" separate from the ongoing flow of experience. The implication was radical: perhaps the stable, unified self we imagine ourselves to be is merely a useful fiction—a story we tell to make sense of the constant parade of perceptions marching through our consciousness.

This insight arrived long before psychology emerged as a discipline, before neuroscience, before modern understandings of cognition. Yet Hume had discovered something profound through sheer introspective honesty that most of us miss despite having the same evidence available to us every moment of our waking lives.

Hume's contemporary readers largely missed the explosive nature of this observation. Even today, many philosophy students encounter Hume's "bundle theory" of self as merely an interesting historical curiosity. But as we'll see, Hume had stumbled upon a truth so uncomfortable that it would take centuries—and thinkers from wildly different backgrounds—to fully develop its implications.

Buckminster Fuller: The Universe of Non-Simultaneous Apprehension

Fast forward to the mid-20th century. Buckminster Fuller—architect, inventor, futurist, and one of history's most original thinkers—was developing his own revolutionary perspectives on reality.

Fuller is perhaps best known for inventing the geodesic dome and for his visionary approach to sustainable design. Less well-known is his profound contribution to epistemology—the philosophy of how we know what we know.

Fuller observed that human experience is fundamentally limited by time. We cannot apprehend all events simultaneously; we can only encounter them sequentially as we move through time. This simple observation led him to a profound conclusion, captured in his statement: "The universe consists of non-simultaneously apprehended events."

This isn't just a clever observation about physics. It's a direct challenge to any claim of complete knowledge or fixed understanding. If reality itself can only be experienced across time, never all at once, then our understanding must necessarily remain partial and provisional.

Fuller's insight dovetails remarkably with Hume's bundle theory of self. If the self is just a collection of perceptions that occur over time, and if we can never apprehend all events simultaneously, then any conception we have of ourselves must be incomplete by definition—a temporary construct based on the limited slice of reality we've experienced so far.

For most of Fuller's career, this perspective remained tangential to his more practical work on design and sustainability. But his epistemological insights would find an eager champion in one of the 20th century's most iconoclastic thinkers.

Robert Anton Wilson: Reality Tunnels and Model Agnosticism

Robert Anton Wilson—novelist, futurist, countercultural icon—seems at first glance an unlikely link in a serious philosophical lineage. Known for his satirical fiction and association with 1960s counterculture, Wilson might be easily dismissed by the academic establishment.

Yet Wilson recognized the profound implications of both Hume's dissolution of the self and Fuller's temporal theory of knowledge. He synthesized these insights into a radical epistemology centered on two key concepts: "reality tunnels" and "model agnosticism."

A reality tunnel, in Wilson's framework, is the cognitive filter through which we perceive and interpret the world. Our beliefs, assumptions, cultural conditioning, and personal experiences all shape this filter, determining what we notice and how we make sense of it. Wilson argued that most psychological suffering stems from forgetting that we inhabit a reality tunnel at all—mistaking our partial, filtered perspective for objective truth.

Wilson embraced Fuller's insight about non-simultaneous apprehension, frequently quoting it in his lectures and writings. He emphasized its most important implication: "Which means any belief system or reality tunnel you've got right now is gonna have to be revised and updated as you continue to apprehend new events later in time. Not simultaneously."

This led to Wilson's practice of "model agnosticism"—the deliberate suspension of belief in any single model of reality, including one's own. For Wilson, the only rational response to the realization that all knowledge is partial and provisional is to hold all beliefs lightly, remaining open to revision as new information emerges.

Like Hume before him, Wilson was proposing that the self is not fixed but fluid—a constantly evolving story rather than a stable entity. And like Fuller, he recognized that our understanding is necessarily limited by the sequential nature of experience.

Wilson popularized these ideas through books like Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology, influencing generations of free thinkers. But his unorthodox style and countercultural associations kept his ideas largely contained to alternative intellectual circles—until recently, when mainstream cognitive science began arriving at strikingly similar conclusions through entirely different methods.

The Mind is Flat: Nick Chater's Empirical Revolution

In 2018, cognitive scientist Nick Chater published The Mind is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain. Based on decades of experimental research rather than philosophical speculation, Chater's book arrived at a conclusion that would have delighted Hume, Fuller, and Wilson: the conventional view of the mind as having hidden depths is fundamentally mistaken.

According to Chater, we don't have hidden beliefs, desires, or motives lurking beneath the surface of consciousness. Instead, our minds are constantly improvising, creating meaning on the fly through a process of creative inference and association. We don't retrieve pre-existing attitudes from some mental storehouse; we construct them in the moment based on whatever cues are currently available.

"The inner world is a mirage," Chater writes. "The brain has no need to create such a mysterious realm; instead, it focuses on making sense of our interaction with the world around us."

This empirical finding aligns remarkably with Hume's inability to locate a stable self through introspection, Fuller's recognition of the sequential nature of understanding, and Wilson's model of reality tunnels that must be constantly updated as new information arrives.

Chater's work represents a profound challenge to much of contemporary psychology and neuroscience, which often assumes the existence of hidden mental structures and unconscious processes. It suggests that fields from psychoanalysis to market research may be built on a fundamental misunderstanding of how the mind works.

More importantly, it brings full circle an intellectual journey that began with Hume's skeptical introspection nearly three centuries ago. Through radically different methods—philosophical analysis, systems thinking, countercultural experimentation, and rigorous cognitive science—these four thinkers arrived at a strikingly similar conclusion: the stable, consistent self we imagine ourselves to be is an illusion generated moment by moment.

The Plot Twist: You've Never Been Who You Thought You Were

And here's where we reach our plot twist—one with profound implications for how we understand ourselves and others.

For centuries, we've operated under a compelling intuition: that somewhere beneath our shifting thoughts and moods lies a true, stable self—a continuous "I" that persists through time and change. We've assumed that through therapy, meditation, or introspection, we might connect more deeply with this authentic core.

But what if this entire framework is backward? What if there is no stable self to discover—only an ongoing process of self-creation?

This is the radical proposition offered by our four thinkers. From Hume's bundle theory to Chater's flat mind, they suggest that what we experience as our "self" is not something we discover through introspection but something we actively construct moment by moment.

When you "look inside yourself" to find your true desires or beliefs, you aren't accessing pre-existing mental contents. You're creating those desires and beliefs in real-time through the very act of introspection. The self isn't revealed through reflection; it's invented through it.

This isn't just an academic distinction—it transforms how we understand human psychology and behavior. Consider:

Your personality isn't a fixed essence but a collection of habits and tendencies that can change dramatically across contexts. The shy person at a work meeting might be the life of the party with close friends. These aren't contradictory "selves" but different improvisations based on the immediate environment.

Your deepest values and beliefs aren't stored somewhere in your mind; they're constructed anew each time you consider them. The passionate conviction you feel about a political issue isn't a static file in your brain but a dynamic interpretation of information in the present moment.

The feeling of internal conflict doesn't represent different parts of yourself at war but your mind generating multiple possible interpretations in real time. The latte vs. green tea dilemma wasn't a battle between a hedonistic self and a virtuous self, but the brain exploring different potential choices and their immediate consequences.

Your memories aren't faithful recordings of past events but creative reconstructions shaped by your current circumstances and beliefs. Each time you recall an event, you're not just retrieving a file but actively rebuilding it, potentially altering details in the process.

If this seems counterintuitive, that's precisely the point. Our subjective experience powerfully suggests that we have depths—that our conscious awareness sits atop vast unconscious processes. The revolutionary insight from our four thinkers is that this compelling intuition might itself be an illusion generated by the brain.

Liberation Through Illusion: The Practical Payoff

If the stable self is an illusion, what remains? Is this realization ultimately depressing—revealing that our sense of continuity and coherence is merely a useful fiction?

Quite the opposite. Each of our thinkers found profound liberation in this understanding.

Hume, having failed to locate a stable self, didn't despair but found freedom in recognizing the fluid nature of experience. Fuller used his understanding of non-simultaneous apprehension to remain intellectually nimble well into old age, constantly revising his understanding as new information emerged. Wilson turned model agnosticism into a playful practice of "guerrilla ontology," deliberately shifting between reality tunnels to expand his perspective. And Chater suggests that recognizing the improvisational nature of mind can free us from the tyranny of searching for an "authentic self" that doesn't exist.

The practical payoff of this understanding is enormous:

Psychological flexibility becomes easier when you recognize that your current beliefs and preferences aren't set in stone but are constructed moment by moment. You're not betraying your "true self" by changing your mind; you're simply generating a new construction based on new information. This can be incredibly liberating for those struggling with rigid thought patterns or self-criticism.

Empathy expands when you understand that others are also improvising their way through life, constructing their beliefs and values on the fly rather than operating from fixed mental frameworks. Recognizing the fluidity of their "selves" can foster greater understanding and compassion for differing perspectives.

Personal growth becomes less about uncovering your "authentic self" and more about consciously shaping the person you become through your choices and actions. If the self is constantly being created rather than discovered, you have far more agency in determining who you are. This shifts the focus from passive introspection to active self-authorship.

Intellectual humility follows naturally from recognizing that your current understanding is necessarily partial and provisional. As Fuller and Wilson emphasized, we can only apprehend events non-simultaneously, which means our knowledge must remain open to revision. This fosters a more open-minded and less dogmatic approach to information.

Conclusion: The Evolving Story

The intellectual lineage connecting Hume, Fuller, Wilson, and Chater reveals something profound about the nature of mind and self. Through different methods and in different eras, each arrived at a similar conclusion: our understanding is always contingent and evolving, and the stable self we imagine ourselves to be is constructed rather than discovered.

This perspective doesn't just challenge academic psychology; it offers a more dynamic, flexible, and ultimately liberating way of understanding human experience. If the self isn't a fixed entity but an ongoing creative process, then we have far more freedom to reinvent ourselves than we typically imagine.

As I sit here finishing this essay—several years after that moment in the coffee shop that sent me down this rabbit hole—I'm struck by how profoundly this understanding has changed my relationship with myself. The internal debates still happen, but I no longer experience them as different "parts" of me at war. Instead, I recognize them as my mind generating multiple perspectives simultaneously—a creative process rather than a conflict.

I've stopped asking what I "really" want or who I "truly" am, recognizing these as questions that presuppose a stable self that doesn't exist. Instead, I focus on what kind of person I want to become—what story I want to tell with my choices and actions.

Perhaps most importantly, I've learned to hold my beliefs more lightly, embracing Wilson's model agnosticism and Fuller's recognition that my understanding must evolve as I apprehend new events across time.

The mind may be flat, as Chater suggests, lacking the hidden depths we intuitively feel it possesses. But recognizing this flatness paradoxically opens up new dimensions of possibility—freeing us from the constraints of fixed identity and opening space for perpetual reinvention.

In a final twist of irony, it turns out that accepting the illusory nature of the stable self doesn't diminish our humanity but enhances it—revealing us not as beings with fixed essences but as ongoing processes of creative becoming. And that, perhaps, is the most liberating illusion of all.