Can you change who you are?

This very question is at the centre of an essay published in Philosophy Now (Issue 170, Oct/Nov 2025, pp. 56-9) under the topic of Film, because the authors, Jason Friend and Lauren Friend, start with an analysis of a movie by Richard Linklater, Hit Man (2023), which I haven’t seen. Whether they are husband and wife, or otherwise related is not given, but according to the footnote at the end of the article, they’re both academics based in California.
 
Specifically, ‘Jason Friend has an MA in English from Stanford University and teaches literature and philosophy in California’ (institution not given). ‘Lauren Friend has an MA in Educational Administration from Concordia University’. And according to the footnote, ‘She is the Dean of Faculty at Pacific Collegiate School’. However, if you go to their website which lists faculty and board members, you’ll find she’s not listed. Maybe they’re using pseudonyms, I don’t know.
 
All that aside, from my perspective, someone’s qualifications is generally not the basis for how I judge someone’s work – how could I, when I have no qualifications of my own. And if they’re hiding their identities, I have no problem with that either.
 
I wrote a 'Letter to the Editor' in response, and as I pointed out, they provide a lot of food-for-thought, which meant I had to limit what I could talk about in a short missive. I had a letter published in that very same issue (on science and philosophy) and it’s rare for them to publish 2 in a row. So I won’t get ahead of myself.
 
In essence, the film is about a philosophy professor called Gary, who has an alter ego which is an ‘undercover agent for the New Orleans Police’. In that role he meets and falls in love with a woman, Madison, and to quote from the article: ‘he is in character playing Ron, a charismatic alpha male who happened to kill people for a living’. Its relevance to the plot is that Madison is in an abusive relationship and she toys with the idea of hiring a hit man, hence the title of the movie. I can’t tell you much more without watching the movie, but I don’t have to, to discuss the Friends’ essay.
 
Basically, the authors discuss the possibility of someone playing a role actually becoming the role, which they talk about in depth in the context of acting. That is specifically what my letter addresses so I won’t discuss it here. What I didn’t discuss in my letter, is the possibility of how role-playing, whether it be undercover or in a work situation can create a cognitive dissonance. If, for example, your work situation requires you to do something that is ethically dubious. I’ve been in that situation; I ended up getting sacked (fired) when I told my superior exactly what I thought. This is happening en masse under the Trump administration in various departments. I’ve explored this in my own fiction, where a woman in an undercover role ends up in a relationship with the man she was sent to spy on. It’s made more complex when he learns what she’s really doing and blackmails her.
 
The authors also discuss whether or not we can change our core personality traits: extroversion, openness to new ideas, neuroticism, agreeableness and conscientiousness. They cite Stephen Pinker who argues that these traits are hardwired as part of our genetics, while others argue they can be changed or modified. I’ve argued that these traits are significant in determining one’s politics, and are also evident in delineating creative types from analytic types. Based on my experience, I’d say that people in the arts are generally on the Left of politics and people in engineering are generally on the Right – I’ve had exposure to both.
 
Towards the end of the essay, the authors talk about existentialism, which I also touch on in my letter, but I don’t necessarily agree with their perspective, which I would suggest has a distinctive Californian slant. They compare Sartre’s existentialism with a particular brand of ‘individualism’, whereby you can become whoever you want to be, as many self-help books try to tell us. I’m not sure the authors actually agree with this, as they also point out the opposite side of the coin, where one has to ‘take responsibility for our social order’ (their words). To me, existentialism is all about authenticity, which I allude to in my letter, and which I’ve discussed in other posts. Trying to be something that you’re not or 'faking it till you make it', is the opposite of existentialism in my view. My first rule of life: Don’t try or pretend to be something that you’re not. I also like to quote Socrates, whom I argue was the first existentialist: To live with honour in this world, actually be what you try to appear to be.
 
So, in answer to the question heading this post: Yes, you can and do change who you are. I even wrote about this in an oblique fashion in my very first post. We don’t live in isolation, and our environment and milieu have an undeniable impact on who we become.
 
Here is the letter I wrote:
 
Jason and Lauren Friend’s essay on Richard Linklater’s film, Hit Man (which I haven’t seen) provides a lot of food-for-thought (Philosophy Now, Issue 170, Oct/Nov 2025). I know I can’t cover everything in this missive, so I’ll limit my response.
 
One of the things they raise, which is a core feature of the film, is the ability for an actor to ‘inhabit’ a character. I use the word ‘inhabit’ deliberately, because it’s what I do as a writer of fiction. I’ve long believed that writers and actors use the same mental process to create characters. I can’t act, I should point out, but I can create a character on the page. I’ve also had a friend (passed not-so-recently) who was both an actor and director of theatre and had won awards for both.
 
But here’s the thing: the key to acting and also writing, in my view, is to leave your ego in the wings or off the page. I think it paradoxically requires a degree of authenticity to take on the role of another personality. In my fiction, many of my main characters (though not all) are women, and I’ve received praise for my efforts; from women.
 
The key to fiction is empathy. In fact, without empathy, fiction wouldn’t work, not only for the writer, but also for the reader or audience (in the case of film or theatre). Of course, I’ve also created characters who are unpleasant to varying degrees and in different ways. Motivation is the key to a villain. It could be something petty like jealousy or more ambitious like being the leader of a cult or a world (I write sci-fi), which requires delusions of grandeur, which we’ve witnessed in real life. They all have a reality-distortion-field and are hierarchical in the extreme, where they naturally belong at the top.
 
Personally, I think exploring these characters, vicariously helps one to have a better understanding of oneself, including our demons.

Staying with their essay and its relevance to existentialism and whether we can change our personalities: I think it’s possible, but it depends on circumstances. Many of us have not been in a war, but my father had, including 2+ years as a POW, and I think it changed him forever. Growing up with him meant growing up with his demons, which he suppressed but couldn’t hide. This affected me negatively, but over time I found a balance. We are all a product of everything that’s happened to us, both good and bad, and only You can change that, no one else. To me, that’s what existentialism is all about. 
 

Left and Right; a different perspective

 I’ve written on this topic before, where I pointed out that Left and Right political tendencies are based at least as much on personality traits as environmental factors. Basically, conservatives wish to maintain the status quo, and liberals or progressives advocate change. This is often generational, and in practice there is an evolvement, where what was once considered radical becomes the new norm and is eventually accepted by conservatives as well. Though, by the time that happens there is invariably a new challenge to the status quo, so it becomes an historical dialectic that appears neverending.
 
The reason I’ve revisited it is because I’ve noticed a specific trait which seems to delineate the two trends universally. And that trait is one of exclusion, or its antithesis, inclusion – I don’t even have to tell you which trait is associated with which side.
 
I recently read an interview with a former Australian PM, which brought this home. Now, this particular PM was particularly pugnacious (he was a boxer) and divisive when he was a politician, but in the interview, he comes across quite differently, where he is generous to many of his former opponents, candid and even humble – he has no illusions about his place in history. I’ve come across this before in people I’ve known. I knew a work colleague who was friendly, co-operative and reliable, yet we had strongly divergent political views. And I would put my father in that category (who was also a boxer), because he was very principled, though conservative in his outlook, especially compared to me.
 
I have neighbours, who are very good friends, whom I’ve known for decades, and who are super reliable - we help each other out all the time - yet we are completely divided over politics and religion. Evidence that we can all live together despite ideological differences. The traits that stop these relationships from completely disintegrating are trust and honesty.
 
Getting back to the interview with this former PM, it was only towards the end that he started to articulate his particular belief in the need for unity and solidarity in the face of diversity and pluralism. In other words, he became tribal in his outlook. I think he articulates a point that many of us on the Left tend to ignore, and that is that too much change too quickly will create friction and conflict within a society when the opposite is what is sought.
 
I think, for me, it started in the school playground, very early on, where I resisted joining a group or a gang, because I wanted to avoid conflict. Physical bullying was a common occurrence when I went to school, and basically, I couldn’t fight, so I became a diplomat early in life.
 
The other thing is that I was attracted to eccentrics, or they were attracted to me. Looking back, I’d say that’s a normal behavioural trait for anyone with artistic tendencies. It’s why the theatre was a home for homosexuals well before they became accepted in open society.
 
I’ve long been an advocate for leaders who can find consensus over their antithesis (including the former PM I mentioned), who polarise people and create divisiveness. I’ve also witnessed this in my professional life, which included analysing and preparing evidence in disputes. I took an unusual approach in this role, in that I told myself I’d propose the same argument no matter which side I was on. This meant that I sometimes told my ‘client’ that I wouldn’t support an argument or position that I thought was wrong, whether for evidential or ethical reasons.
 
I worked on projects where there are commonly one of two approaches: confrontational or collaborative; which reflect the two attitudes I’ve been discussing. Basically, one is exclusive and the other is inclusive.
 
Some of these ideas have also found their way into my fiction. One of my friends commented that a character in my novel, Elvene, was ‘conservative’, which he was, and she took a dislike to him. I should point out that one of my ‘rules’ for writing fiction, is to give my characters free will, so I didn’t really know how he’d turn out or what his relationship with Elvene would be like. Not surprisingly, they clashed, yet there was mutual respect. The key point, which I didn’t foresee, was the depth of loyalty that existed between them.
 
Likewise, many of my villains show traits that I don’t admire, like duplicity, vengefulness, extreme narcissism and manipulativeness. I see this in some world leaders, and I’m often amazed at how they frequently create a cult following that leads to their ascension.
 
I’ve said before, we need both perspectives, and it’s a consequence of our evolutionary tribal nature. So one trait is arguably protective, which is not just protective of life, but protective of culture and identity – we all have this to some extent. I came to the conclusion a long time ago that identity is what someone is willing to die for, therefore willing to kill for. But the other side of this is a tendency to reach out, to create bridges, and art, in all its forms, but particularly music, exemplifies this. I’ve argued previously that an ingroup-outgroup mentality can make highly intelligent people completely irrational, and is the cause of all the evil we’ve witnessed on a mass-scale, including events currently happening.

Why democracy works

This is prompted by another article in Philosophy Now (Issue 169, Aug/Sep 2025) on Karl Popper, titled Popper, Science & Democracy written by Brian King, a ‘retired Philosophy and History teacher, author of an e-book, Arguing About Philosophy, and who currently runs adult Philosophy and History groups for the University of the Third Age’. The citation doesn’t give his country of residence.
 
The article covers Popper’s well known ideas on the importance of ‘falsification’ in science, especially in distinguishing science from pseudo-science, which I’ve covered elsewhere. It then discusses the role of language, which was the subject of my last post, so I won’t dwell on that either. The last (roughly) third of the article focuses on his ideas on democracy and government, formulated in the immediate wake of WW2, while he was living in self-imposed exile in New Zealand, where he wrote The Open Society & Its Enemies (1945). I haven’t read it, and to be honest, I was unaware that he held strong views on it.
 
Popper was sceptical about revolution from any side of politics because it invariably resorts to violence, which, like everyone of his generation, he’d seen enough of in the previous decades of the first half of the 20th Century. He emphasises the importance of an ‘open’ society, meaning one that is open to new ideas and doesn’t attempt to ‘freeze’ it in time (the first term is his, but the second term is mine). All around the world there is a spectrum in politics which can be loosely categorised into 2 groups: conservatives and liberals or progressives. I think progressive is a misnomer in that they are only recognised in hindsight as being ‘progressive’. At the time, they are labelled radical or worse.
 
The thing is that there are people who want to maintain the status quo and there are people who want to change things. I think you need both, because eventually what was considered radical in the past becomes normal in the present. Obvious examples include abolition and suffrage. Gay marriage is an example in-progress.
 
I think this discussion is very relevant right now, especially in America, where democracy, as it’s practiced, is being challenged if not threatened. The author (King) makes this point while referencing Popper:
 
The propensity of utopian dictatorships to bend truth to conform to party or state interests undermines truth.
 
I don’t think Trump wants a utopian dictatorship, though he may try and sell it that way, but I think he’s demonstrating the inherent weakness of a democratic ‘open’ society. I could also point to what’s currently happening in my own city of Melbourne in Australia, where a neo-Nazi group are currently being constrained by the law, though some would argue, ineffectually.
 
The inherent weakness of an open society is that it allows groups to exploit that openness to express views of hatred and also act upon them, which is what we’ve recently witnessed. I should point out that Melbourne prides itself on being a pluralist, multicultural society. The irony is that, if the neo-Nazis had their way, the openness we take for granted would be suppressed, even eliminated, and Melbourne would be ethnically cleansed.
 
Speaking of ethnic cleansing, this is what Trump is doing in America with his ICE agents, though no one calls it that. I’m not equating Trump to neo-Nazism, but what these 2 phenomena (on opposites side of the world) have in common, is a fundamental belief, even if unexpressed, that ‘might is right’. Trump believes in a zero-sum-game: there are winners and losers, where the winners are ‘strong’ and the losers are ‘weak’. It’s why he feels a kinship with Vladimir Putin over Volodymyr Zelensky, and with Netanyahu over the Palestinians. If he ever manages a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine, I predict it will be by giving Russia everything it wants.
 
In his own country, he uses intimidation and extortion to get what he wants, by threatening to remove funding or filing law suits, many of which he knows he can’t win, but knows they scare the heck out of anyone who might oppose him.
 
While the vast majority of us prefer to resolve our differences without violence, people who have violent means at their disposal, take advantage of that. This extends to nations as well as a small group of neo-Nazis.
 
Trump is demonstrating why democracy works through its antithesis. A lot of his policies are harming the people who voted for him, with Medicaid being cut and cost of living not being helped by his tariff policies. If Trump had his way, he would replace the entire Board of the Federal Reserve, which would be devastating for America’s economy and would have ramifications worldwide. One only has to look at what happened in Turkey under Erdogan, when he did the same thing, and ended up with 80% inflation.
 
Trump’s entire political strategy, which got him into power, and is now driving his current agenda, is to stoke division. That’s why he’s putting troops on the streets of cities in Blue states. I know it sounds alarmist, but I think he’s hoping it will lead to violence. I might be wrong, but so far he’s exceeded my worst expectations. I believe his ultimate aim is to invoke the insurrectionist act so he can intervene legally instead of illegally. He’s made no secret of the fact that he wants to take control of the elections, which we know he attempted in his first term.
 
Having spent a working lifetime in engineering and construction, I’ve witnessed successful and unsuccessful projects, as well as being involved in a number of disputes. What I’ve learned is that the most successful projects arose out of collaboration rather than confrontation. It’s not that people had no differences of opinion, but they were resolved instead of degenerating into a blame game. In the latter case, you had stagnation, which only exacerbated the situation and made people dig their heels in.
 
One of the lessons I learned from disputes was that they inevitably arose from people lying to each other, where one party made promises they knew they couldn’t keep and the other party pretended they believed the lies to be true. A common thread running through this situation and the political scenarios I referenced above is the importance of trust. If people don’t trust their leaders the government is going to flail. This is why dictators take trust out of the equation altogether; they don’t need it. Dictators run a virtual protection racket: as long as you don’t oppose them they won’t prosecute you (or worse).
 

Godel and Wittgenstein; same goal, different approach

 The current issue of Philosophy Now (Issue 169, Aug/Sep 2025) has as its theme, The Sources of Knowledge Issue, with a clever graphic on the cover depicting bottles of ‘sauces’ of 4 famous philosophers in this area: Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, Kurt Godel and Edmund Gettier. The last one is possibly not as famous as the other 3, and I’m surprised they didn’t include Ludwig Wittgenstein, though there is at least one article featuring him inside.
 
I’ve already written a letter to the Editor over one article Challenging the Objectivity of Science by Sina Mirzaye Shirkoohi, who is a ‘PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Administrative Sciences of the University Laval in Quebec City’; and which I may feature in a future post if it gets published.
 
But this post is based on an article titled Godel, Wittgenstein & the Limits of Knowledge by Michael D McGranahan, who has a ‘BS in Geology from San Diego State and an MS in Geophysics from Stanford, with 10 years [experience] in oil and gas exploration before making a career change’, without specifying what that career change is. ‘He is a lifelong student of science, philosophy and history.’ So, on the face of it, we may have a bit in common, because I’ve also worked in oil and gas, though in a non-technical role and I have no qualifications in anything. I’ve also had a lifelong interest in science and more recently, philosophy, but I’m unsure I would call myself a student, except of the autodidactic kind, and certainly not of history. I’m probably best described as a dilettante.
 
That’s a long runup, but I like to give people their due credentials, especially when I have them at hand. McGranahan, in his own words, ‘wants to explore the convergence of Godel and Wittgenstein on the limits of knowledge’, whereas I prefer to point out the distinctions. I should say up front that I’m hardly a scholar on Wittgenstein, though I feel I’m familiar enough with his seminal ideas regarding the role of language in epistemology. It should also be pointed out that Wittgenstein was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th Century, especially in academia.
 
I will start with a quote cited by McGranahan: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
 
I once wrote a rather pretentious list titled, My philosophy in 24 dot points, where I paraphrase Wittgenstein: We think and conceptualise in a language. Axiomatically, this limits what we can conceive and think about. This is not exactly the same as the quote given above, and it has a subtly different emphasis. In effect, I think Wittgenstein has it back-to-front, based solely on his statement, obviously out-of-context, so I might be misrepresenting him, but I think it’s the limits of our knowledge of the world, that determines the limits of our language, rather than the other way round.
 
As I pointed out in my last post, we are continually creating new language to assimilate new knowledge. So, when I say, ‘this limits what we can conceive and think about’, it’s obvious that different cultures living in different environments will develop concepts that aren’t necessarily compatible with each other and this will be reflected in their respective languages. It’s one of the reasons all languages adopt new words from other languages when people from different cultures interact.
 
Humans are unique in that we think in a language. In fact, it’s not too much of a stretch to analogise it with software, remembering software is a concept that didn’t come into common parlance until after Wittgenstein died in 1951 (though Turing died in 1954).
 
To extend that metaphor, language becomes our ‘operating language’ for ‘thinking’, and note that it happens early in one’s childhood, well before we develop an ability to comprehend complex and abstract concepts. Just on that, arguably our exposure to stories is our first encounter with abstract concepts, if by abstract we mean entities that only exist in one’s mind.
 
I have a particular view, that as far as I know, is not shared with anyone else, which is that we have a unique ability to nest concepts within concepts ad infinitum, which allows us to create mental ‘black boxes’ in our thinking. To give an example, all the sentences I’m currently writing are made of distinct words, yet each sentence has a meaning that transcends the meaning of the individual words. Then, of course, the accumulation of sentences hopefully provides a cogent argument that you can follow. The same happens in a story which is arguably even more amazing, given a novel (like Elvene) contains close to 100k words, and will take up 8hrs of your life, but probably over 2 or 3 days. So we maintain mental continuity despite breaks and interruptions.
 
Wittgenstein once made the same point (regarding words and sentences), so that specific example is not original. Where my view differs is that I contend it also reflects our understanding of the physical world, which comprises entities within entities that have different physical representations at different levels. The example I like to give is a human body made up of individual cells, which themselves contain strands of DNA that provide the code for the construction and functioning of an individual. From memory, Douglas Hoffstadter made a similar point in Godel Escher Bach, so maybe not an original idea after all.
 
Time to talk about Godel. I’m not a logician, but I don’t believe you need to be to appreciate the far-reaching consequences of his groundbreaking theorem. In fact, as McGranahan points out, there are 2 theorems: Godel’s First Incompleteness Theorem and his Second Incompleteness Theorem. And it’s best to quote McGranahan directly:
 
Godel’s First Incompleteness Theorem proves mathematically that any consistent formal mathematical system within which a certain amount of elementary arithmetic can be carried out, is incomplete – meaning, there are one or more true statements that can be made in the language of the system which can neither be proved nor disproved in the system.
 
He then states the logical conclusion of this proof:
 
This finding leads to two alternatives: Alternative #1: If a set of axioms is consistent, then it is incomplete. Alternative #2: In a consistent system, not every statement can be proved in the language of that system.
 
Godel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem is simply this: No set of axioms can prove its own consistency.
 
It’s Alternative #2 that goes to the nub of the theorem: there are and always will be mathematical ‘truths’ that can’t be proved ‘true’ using the axioms of that system. Godel said himself that such truths (true statements) might be proved by expanding the system with new axioms. In other words, you may need to discover new mathematics to uncover new proofs, and this is what we’ve found in practice, and why some conjectures take so long to prove – like hundreds of years. The implication behind this is that our search for mathematical truths is neverending, meaning that mathematics is a neverending endeavour.
 
As McGranahan succinctly puts it: So knowing something is true, and proving it, are two different things.
 
This has led Roger Penrose to argue that Godel’s Theorems demonstrate the distinction between the human mind and a computer. Because a human mind can intuit a ‘truth’ that a computer can’t prove with logic. In a sense, he’s right, which is why we have conjectures like the ones I mentioned in my last post relating to prime numbers – the twin prime conjecture, the Goldbach conjecture and Riemann’s famous hypothesis. However, they also demonstrate the relationship between Godel’s Theorem and Turing’s famous Halting Problem, which Gregory Chaitin argues are really 2 manifestations of the same problem.
 
With each of those conjectures, you can create an algorithm to find all the solutions on a computer, but you can’t run the computer to infinity, so unless it ‘stops’, you don’t know if they’re true or not. The irony is that (for each conjecture): if it stops, it’s false and if it’s true, it never stops so it’s unknown. I covered this in another post where I argued that there is a relationship between infinity and the unknowable. The obvious connection here, that no one remarks on, is that Godel’s theorems only work because mathematics is infinite. If it was finite, it would be 'complete'. I came to an understanding of Godel’s Theorem through Turing’s Halting Problem, because it was easier to understand. A machine is unable to determine if a mathematical ‘truth’ is true or not through logic alone.
 
According to McGranahan, Wittgenstein said that “Tautology and contradiction are without sense.” He then said, “Tautology and contradiction are, however, nonsensical.” This implies that ‘without sense’ and ‘nonsensical’ have different meanings, “which illustrates the very language problem of which we speak” (McGranahan using Wittgenstein’s own language style to make his point). According to McGranahan, Wittgenstein then concluded: “that mathematics (if tautology and contradiction will be allowed to stand for mathematics), is nonsense.” (Parentheses in the original)
 
According to McGranahan, “…because in his logic, mathematical formulae are not bipolar (true or false) and hence cannot form pictures and elements and objects [which is how Wittgenstein defines language], and thus cannot describe actual states of affairs, and therefore, cannot describe the world.”
 
I feel that McGranahan doesn’t really resolve this, except to say: “There would seem to be a conflict… Who is right?” I actually think that if anyone is wrong, it’s Wittgenstein, though I admit a personal prejudice, in as much as I don’t think language defines the world.
 
On the other hand, everything we’ve learned about the world since the scientific revolution has come to us through mathematics, not language, and that was just as true in Wittgenstein’s time as it is now; after all, he lived through the 2 great scientific revolutions of quantum mechanics and relativity theory, both dependent on mathematics only discovered after Newton’s revolution.
 
The limits of our knowledge of the physical world are determined by the limits of our knowledge of mathematics (known as physics). And our language, while it ‘axiomatically limits what we can conceive and think about’, can also be (and continually is) expanded to adopt new concepts.