Stages of Self-Development: A Psychological Framework

Robert Kegan's stages of self-development illustrate how individuals evolve in their understanding of identity and agency.

### Stages of Self-Development: A Framework by Robert Kegan
* 👶 Stage one, Reactive Survival, represents the infant's initial attentional self, focused on **building a world model and understanding sensory data**, akin to a game engine like **Minecraft**.
* 👦 In stage two, Personal Self, the individual begins to interact with the outside world, forming an agent that **experiences emotions and solves problems** based on **internal needs and aversions**.
* 👥 Stage three, Social Self, allows individuals to see themselves as part of a group, shaping opinions through **collective interaction** and resonating with the **group's spirit**, akin to a **hive mind**.
* 🧠 At stage four, Is Rational Agency, individuals develop the ability to **discern truth independently** and gain **agency over their beliefs**, marking a significant advancement in **epistemology and critical thinking**.
* 🌱 Stage five, Is Self-Authoring, signifies the realization that **identity is constructed through values that are instrumental rather than terminal**, allowing for a **deeper understanding of differing perspectives and fostering wisdom**.
* 🧘 In stage six, Enlightenment, individuals **collapse the division between personal self and world generator**, often achieved through meditation or psychedelics, recognizing their **role in creating their reality and feelings**.
* 🚀 Stage seven, **Transcendence**, remains hypothetical, suggesting a future where individuals can **fully understand their mental processes** and potentially **alter their implementation in the world**, possibly aided by technology.
* 🔄 Kegan's model emphasizes that these stages are **not strictly linear**; individuals may **revisit or experience them in parallel**, offering a philosophical framework for understanding the **complexities of self and mind interaction**.

Stage one: Reactive survival (infant). Stage two: Personal self (young child). Stage three: Social self (adolescence/domesticated adult). Stage four: Is rational agency (self-direction). Stage five: Is self-authoring (that's full adult; you've achieved wisdom, but there are two more stages). Stage six: Is Enlightenment.

Stage seven: Is Transcendence. Can you explain each, or the interesting parts of each of these stages? And what's your sense why there are stages? This model is derived from a concept by the psychologist Robert Kegan, and he talks about the development of the self as a

process that happens in principle by some kind of reverse engineering of a mind, where you gradually become aware of yourself and thereby build structure that allows you to interact deeper with the world and yourself. And I found myself using this model, not so much as a

developmental model (I'm not even sure if it's a very good developmental model because I saw my children not progressing exactly like that). And um, I also suspect that you don't go through these stages necessarily in succession, and it's not that you work through one

stage and then you get into the next one. Sometimes you revisit them; sometimes stuff is happening in parallel. But it's, I think, a useful framework to look at what's present in the structure of a person and how they interact with the world and how they relate to themselves.

So, uh, it's more like a philosophical framework that allows you to talk about how minds work. And at first, when we are born, we don't have a personal self yet. I think instead, we have an attentional self, and this attentional self is initially, in the infant, tasked with

building a world model and also an initial model of the self, but mostly it's building a game engine in the brain that is tracking sensory data and uses it to explain it. And in some sense, you could compare it to a game engine like Minecraft, or something like that, with colors and sounds.

People are all not physical objects; they are creations of our mind at a certain level of course graining models that are mathematical, that use geometry and, um, that use manipulation of objects and so on to create scenes in which we can find ourselves and interact with them. So, 

Minecraft, yeah. And this personal self is something that is more or less created after the world is finished, after it's trained into the system, after it has been constructed. And this personal self is an agent that interacts with the outside world, and the outside world is not the 

world of quantum mechanics, not the physical universe, but it's the model that has been generated in our own mind, right? And this is us, and we experience ourselves interacting with that outside world that is created outside of our own mind and outside of ourselves. There's 

feelings, and they present our interface with this outside world. They pose problems to us. These feelings are basic attitudes that our mind is computing that tell us what's needed in the world, the things that we are drawn to, the things that we are afraid of, and 

we are tasked with solving this problem of satisfying the needs, avoiding the aversions, following on our inner commitments, and so on. And, uh, also modeling ourselves and building the next stage. So, after we have this personal self, and stage through online, uh, many people form a social self, and this 

Social self allows the individual to experience themselves as part of a group. It's basically this thing that when you are playing in a team, for instance, you don't notice yourself just as a single note that is reaching out into the world, but you're also looking down; you're

looking down from this entire group and you see how this group is looking at this individual, and everybody in the group is in some sense emulating this group spirit to some degree. And in this state, people are forming their opinions by assimilating them from this group

mind.  Basically, you gain the ability to act a little bit like a hive mind, but do you also model the interaction of how opinion shapes and forms through the interaction of the individual nodes within the group? Yeah, it's basically the way in which people do it in this stage is

that they experience what are the opinions of my environment; they experience the relationship that they have to their environment and uh, they resonate with people around them and um, get more opinions in this through this interaction, through um, the way in which they relate to others. And at stage four

you basically understand that stuff is true and false independently, but other people believe, and you have agency over your own beliefs. In that stage, you basically discover epistemology, the rules about determining what's true and false. So you can, you start to learn how to think. Yes, I mean at some level you're

always thinking. You are constructing things, and I believe that this ability to reason about your mental representation is what we mean by thinking. It's an intrinsically reflexive process that requires consciousness. Without consciousness, you cannot think. You can generate the content of feelings

and so on. Outside of consciousness, it's very hard to be conscious of how your feelings emerge, at least in the early stages of development. But um, thoughts are something that you always control. At stage five, you discover how identity is constructed. You offer realize that your

values are not terminal, but they are instrumental to achieving a world that you like, an aesthetics that you prefer. Yeah, and um, the more you understand this, the more you get agency over how your identity is constructed. So this stage, in parentheses, you put F, full adult Karma

wisdom. Why is this full adult? Why would you say this is full, and why is it wisdom? It does allow you to understand um why other people have different identities from yours, and it allows you to understand that the difference between people who vote for different parties and might have very

different opinions and different value systems is often the accident of where they are born and what happened after them to uh, after that to them, and what traits they got um before they were born. And at some point, you realize a perspective where you understand that everybody could be you in a different

timeline if you just flip those bits. Stage six um, at some point, you can collapse the division between Z, a personal self and world generator, again. And a lot of people get there via meditation, or some of them get there via psychedelics, some of them by accident.

And you suddenly notice that you are not actually a person, but you are a vessel that can create a person. And the person is still there. You observe that personal self. But you observe the personal self from the outside. Mhm. And you notice it's a representation. And you might also

notice that the world that is being created is a representation. If not, then you might experience that I am the Universe. I am the thing that is creating everything. And of course, what you're creating is not quantum mechanics, um, and the physical Universe. What you're

creating is this game engine that is updating the world, and you're creating your feelings, your uh, and um, all the people inside of that world, including the person that you identify with yourself in this world, are are you creating the game engine or are you

noticing the game engine? Um, you noticed how you're generating the game engine. And I mean, when you are dreaming at night, you can uh, if you have a lucid dream, you can learn how to do this deliberately. And in principle, you can

also do it during the day. And the reason why we don't uh get to do this from the beginning and why we don't have agency of our feelings right away is because we would game it before we have the necessary amount of wisdom to uh, to deal

with creating this dream that you're in. You don't you don't want to get access to cheat codes too quickly, otherwise you won't enjoy it. So uh, stage five is already pretty rare, and stage six is even more rare. You'll mostly find this

with advanced uh Buddhist meditators and so on that are dropping into the stage and can induce it at will and spend time in it. So stage five requires a good therapist. Stage six requires a good uh Buddhist spiritual leader. It is for instance

Could be that is the right thing to do, but it's not that these stages give you scores or levels, uh, that you need to advance to. It's not that the next stage is better. You live your life in the M that works best at any given moment, and

when your mind decides that you should uh have a different configuration, then it's building that configuration. And for many people they uh stay happily at stage three and experience themselves as part of groups, and there's nothing wrong with this. And for some people this doesn't work, and they're forced to build

more agency over their rational beliefs than this and construct their norms rationally. And so they go to this level MH, and um stage seven is something that is more or less hypothetical that would be the stage in which it's basically a transhumanist stage in which you

understand how you work, in which the mind fully realizes how it's implemented and uh can also in principle enter different modes in which it could be implemented. And that's a stage that, as far as I understand, is not open to people yet. Oh, but it is possible through the

process of technology. Yes, and who knows if there are biological agents um that are working at different time scales than us that basically become aware of the way in which they're implemented on ecosystems and um can change that implementation and have agency over how they're implemented in the

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Kegan's Stages of Self-Development: Overview and Framework

Overview of seven stages: reactive survival, personal self, social self, rational agency, self-authoring, enlightenment, and transcendence.

The model is derived from Robert Kegan's work on self-development.

The model is viewed as a useful framework for understanding how minds work, not necessarily a strict developmental model.

Stages may not be sequential; revisiting and parallel progression are possible.

Stage one (infant) focuses on building a world model and an initial self-model, akin to a game engine processing sensory data.

Detailed Explanation of Stages Two Through Five

Stage two (young child): Development of a personal self interacting with a mentally constructed world model.

Stage two involves managing feelings and needs, solving problems, and building towards the next stage.

Stage three (adolescence/adult): Formation of a social self, integrating oneself into a group and assimilating group opinions.

Stage four: Understanding truth and falsehood independently, developing epistemology and agency over beliefs.

Stage five: Understanding identity construction, recognizing that values are instrumental in achieving desired outcomes.

Stages Six and Seven: Enlightenment and Transcendence

Stage six (enlightenment): Collapsing the division between the personal self and the world generator, realizing the self as a creator of the experience.

Stage six involves understanding the creation of the game engine, rather than just experiencing it.

Access to this level of understanding is delayed to allow for the development of wisdom.

Stage six is rare, often achieved through advanced meditation practices.

Stage seven (transcendence): A hypothetical transhumanist stage where the mind fully understands its implementation and can potentially alter it.