Severance, The Substance and Our Increasingly Splintered Selves

today in the New York Times

From one day to the next, you inhabit one body; you have access to one set of memories; your personality, values and appearance hold more or less steady. Other people treat you as a single, unified person — responsible for last month’s debts, deserving punishment or reward for yesterday’s deeds, relating consistently with family, lovers, colleagues and friends. Which of these qualities is the one that makes you a single, continuous person? In ordinary life it doesn’t matter, because these components of personhood all travel together, an inseparable bundle.

But what if some of those components peeled off into alternative versions of you? It’s a striking coincidence that two much talked-about current works of popular culture — the Apple TV+ series “Severance” and “The Substance,” starring Demi Moore — both explore the bewildering emotional and philosophical complications of cleaving a second, separate entity off of yourself. What is the relationship between the resulting consciousnesses? What, if anything, do they owe each other? And to what degree is what we think of as our own identity, our self, just a compromise — and an unstable one, at that?

[continued here; if you're a friend, colleague, or regular Splintered Mind reader and blocked by a paywall, feel free to email me at my ucr.edu address for a personal-use-only copy of the final manuscript version]