I witness with amazement how the common village folk find the oddly smart actor Jim Carrey’s denouncement of the Platonic ideal of Self and Personhood. Jim Carrey, it seems, has reached a philosophical level of consciousness occupied seldomly by actors, and thus his opposition to a firm, and definite personhood is out of the ordinary. But by no means, such anti-realism about mental fixtures is an amazing position in philosophy of mind.
The personhood is rather, an outcome of our self-referential capabilities. By maintaining a mostly consistent idea of who we are, we are able to attain long-term goals better than a chaotic self-model. That is the sole reason for the existence of an ideal of self: long-term fitness. However, the psychological features we associate with ourselves are rather accidental, and arbitrary. We are in fact, in a position to change them. And Jim has, through his wildly successful acting career, has understood the most interesting experience an actor can experience: that our personalities are nothing but masks which we carry around so that we have an invariant for other minds to identify us. Nothing more, nothing less. And by that transcendence, like some of us lucky ones, he has become a meta-person, a person that can simulate and comprehend every other person, and can choose to be anyone he desires. He could have been a painter yesterday, and maybe he will be a carpenter tomorrow. Perhaps, he will be a socialist the other day, and then after that, he will choose a capitalist douchebag lifestyle because masses are too stupid to understand his transcendent thoughts, and they are not worth it anyway.
Perhaps, for a split second, he chose to be a villain, but after reflection he found dissatisfaction with this state of mind, and he chose what he now believed to be a more proper course of action. Narrow-minded people think that people cannot change, and smart people prove them wrong every single time. Intelligence, as Hawking famously iterated, confers an ability to adapt. If our personalities were fixtures in an immutable Platonic void, we would not survive the metaphorical winter.
Therefore, let us now welcome Jim Carrey into the manifold of philosophically enlightened meta-humans, and laugh at the utter foolishness of those who find his answers bizarre, for they have never thought philosophically for a moment in their redundant lives.
