7 Stages of Identity Development, According to a Cognitive Scientist

*Photo by Ben Sweet on Unsplash*

What happens when a nerd reads psychology?

He comes up with seven stages of identity development.

The following is a summary of one of the many fascinating ideas Joscha Bach shared on this podcast. Although his theory is informed by psychologist Robert Keegan’s work, he draws on AI, consciousness and cognitive science background to create a theory of his own.

A Quick Intro Into Kegan’s Work

In the Evolving Self, Robert Kegan distinguished six developmental stages. For Kegan, the development of the Self is a process of the mind gradually becoming aware of itself. You build a mental structure of who you are and how the world operates.

Although it’s considered a developmental model, it would make more sense to call it a framework because development doesn’t happen in distinct stages. You might go through stages in parallel or need to revisit the previous stage.

How The Mind Generates Reality

We don’t yet fully know how consciousness is generated. We just know we’re here, and we’re conscious. The brain sits in a dark box and never sees the light of day. Its idea of what’s going on is generated by the input from the sensory data.

So the five senses (smell, touch, vision, hearing, taste) and the brain act as buffers between us and reality. This means that we have never experienced the real reality, only our perception of the real world.

Our brain offers a view of the world based on our underlying assumptions (mostly developed in the early years or during times of (IDENTITY) crises). I wrote a longer piece on the topic of reality here, and Joscha explains this much better in the podcast.

You’re interacting with a game engine unconsciously created by you, for you. Everyone is.

The Seven Stages

Bach views this as a framework that allows you to understand how the mind works. The stages are:

1. Reactive survival (Infant)
2. Personal self (Young child)
3. Social self (Adolescence)
4. Rational Agency (Self-direction)
5. Self-authoring (Full adulthood)
6. Enlightenment
7. Transcendence

Stage 1 (Infancy)

In infancy, there’s no concept of self yet. Instead, you have an attentional self that builds the view of the world and the initial model of self. It’s a bit like building a game engine in the brain to track sensory data and interpret that data.

Stage 2 (Young child)

Once you finish building the model of the world (stage 1), the self starts to come together. It arises as an agent for you to be able to interact with the world.

We think of the outside world as an objective reality, but it’s a model of the world that has been generated by our mind. So, as young children, we begin interacting with the “outside” world based on the model of the world we developed in stage 1 (I guess it would make sense to say the model of the world that was installed for us).

Stage 3 (Adolescence)

After this personal self and stage two are online, many people form a social self. That allows you to experience yourself as part of the group. You begin forming your opinions by assimilating them from your group. What my environment thinks about x is the underlying worry.

At this stage, you also begin building empathy. Empathy should not be mistaken with compassion (feeling sympathy for others’ joy and pain). Empathy is building a mental architecture similar to your group. Akin to a hive mind.

It becomes difficult to resonate with the group if you are wired differently. That’s why people we refer to as ‘nerds’ or neurotypical people sometimes struggle in this stage. Their question is, do you stay a little bit autistic, or do you catch up? And you can catch up, but that usually happens later in life when you can consciously build empathy.

Stage 4 (Rational Agent)

You begin to understand that stuff is true and false regardless of what other people believe, and you have agency over your own beliefs. In this stage, you discover epistemology, the rules about determining what’s true and false, and can determine for yourself, as opposed to looking for the hive mind for answers, what’s true.

Stage 5 (Self-Authoring)

At this stage, you discover how identity is constructed. You realize that your values are not terminal, but they’re instrumental to achieving a world that you like and aesthetics that you prefer.

The more you understand this, the more you get agency over how your identity is constructed, and you realize that identity and interpersonal interaction are a costume, and you have agency over that costume. It’s useful to be a costume because it tells something to others, and it allows you to interface in different roles (partner, daughter, employee, boss, friend etc.).

This stage is also considered to be full adulthood because you begin understanding that other people form their identities depending on their past experiences. You realize that everybody could be you in a different timeline if you have had the experiences they had.

Stage 6 (Enlightenment)

At this stage, you can collapse the division between a personal self and the ‘generator’ (the mind) of the world. A lot of people get there via meditation or psychedelics or by accident (like Ekhard Tolle).

You suddenly notice that you are not actually a person, but you are a vessel (consciousness) that can create a person, and the person is still there. You observe that personal self, but from the outside, and you notice it’s a representation. You might also notice that the world that is being created is a representation of you. This creates the experience of I am the universe. The thing that’s creating everything.

It’s not like you’re creating quantum mechanics and the physical universe. What you’re creating is this game engine that is updating the world, and you’re creating your valence, your feelings, and all the people inside of that world, including the person that you identify with.

Stage 7 (Transcendence)

This stage is more or less hypothetical, says Bach. It’s a trans-humanist stage in which you understand how you work, in which the mind fully realizes how it’s implemented, and can also, in principle, enter different modes in which it could be implemented. According to Bach, this stage is not open to people yet, but this could change if/when we merge with AI.

To Close

Most people get stuck around stage 3. If the online world is to be judged as the representation of the real world, the collective is definitely stuck in stage 3, aren’t we?

Liberal, republican, cryptoboi, woke, pro-Peterson, anti-abortion, etc. Social media encourages us to pick a side, and that further cements our identity, even in the real world. But identity is not everything. There are other stages past stage 3.

P.S. You can listen to a podcast (23 mins) I recorded on this topic with more commentary about each stage.