Interaction self

Calling it the true self marks it against the alternatives, the object self and the endoself, which are what a person becomes when the network is replaced by possession or by reflection. If interactions are the base unit and selves are what interactions cluster into, then the interaction self is simply the self correctly described, and everything else is an artefact of endoreality. Marsh's formulation for how it works is that self is the result of a multitude of perspectives reflected back onto the individual, which is why self perception changes with environment and interactions rather than staying fixed. Someone perfectly confident in one setting is a different self in another, and this is a fact about what a self is rather than about inconsistency. Two consequences follow that matter elsewhere in the framework. Integrity becomes a network property, since a self composed of interactions is as strong as the network composing it, which is why breadth of conduits is what produces the strength to be trusted under pressure. And persistence changes character, since the interactions that make up an exoself will always exist in the time and space they occurred in, which is the basis for Marsh's claim that an exoself is immortal in a way that an endoself, existing only in its reflection, is not.

The relational self is a well developed position. Mead's social self arises through taking the attitude of others, Cooley's looking-glass self makes self-perception a reflection of how one is seen and Hermans' dialogical self treats the person as a multiplicity of positions in conversation. Buddhist anatta denies a substantial self entirely and Hume reached a similar conclusion by introspection. Marsh's version is close to Cooley in mechanism and departs from all of them in ontology, since for her the interactions are real physical events rather than social processes or perceptions, which makes the self a genuinely existing distributed object rather than a construct or an illusion.