Psychological Counseling Transcript: Self-Identity and the Explorer Worldview

【The following content was organized by AI based on the recording, with no modifications made】

1. Dialogue Background and Core Topics Review

Setting: Deep psychological counseling and career coaching session.
Participants: Male (client, an entrepreneur with a strong academic background in computer science and artificial intelligence) and female (counselor/coach).
Core topic: How to enhance “self-identity” (Self-Identity/Consistency).

Previous groundwork: In the prior discussion, they had already touched on the phenomenon of “lack of identity” and the distress it caused.
Current goal: To delve into the roots of this sense of fragmentation—especially from the dimensions of childhood experiences, origins of academic thought, and worldview—in order to find concrete paths to integrate the self, reduce regret, and achieve inner consistency.

2. The Dilemma of Choice and Multiple Definitions of the Self

2.1 Choice as Definition: Who Are You?

The man’s confusion:
When facing life crossroads (such as option A versus option B), he often falls into a kind of paralysis. No matter which path he takes, there are always two completely different voices battling in his head, causing him to feel regret and remorse regardless of his choice.

The woman’s insight:

Choice is a projection of identity: Every choice is essentially a declaration to the world of “who I am.”
Expression of values: Once you choose A (for example, pursuing career achievement), it means that in that moment, you are defining yourself as someone “who values career.” If you choose B (for example, returning to a stable family life), then you are defining yourself as someone “who values intimate relationships.”
Root of vagueness: So-called “regret” or “indecision” often stems from blurred self-knowledge. When a person doesn’t know who they really are or what they truly value, any choice will feel like gain-and-loss anxiety.
The essence of identity: Genuine identity is the ability, at the very moment of making a choice, to firmly affirm “this is the road I want to take,” and calmly accept the price that comes with it (that is, the cost of giving up the other road).

2.2 The “Observer” Perspective: Hovering Outside Human Society

The man’s self-awareness:
He has a unique understanding of the ultimate question “Who am I?” He mentioned that deep down, he doesn’t fully feel like a member of human society, but more like a cool-headed, detached “observer.”

The Three-Body metaphor: He referenced the concept in the sci‑fi novel The Three-Body Problem, describing himself as somewhat like the “Adventists” (Eto/Adventists). This doesn’t mean being anti-human, but rather standing outside the system and coldly observing human civilization from a higher-dimensional perspective.
Sense of detachment: This “observer” mindset makes him always carry a sense of estrangement when facing mundane choices (like buying a house, having children, settling down), as if he were watching someone else’s life rather than truly immersing himself in his own. This is also a deep reason why he finds it hard to gain a fully coherent “identity” in any specific role (such as husband, father, or CEO).

2.3 The Complexity of Reality: Multidimensional Calculation

The man pushed back against simplistic “binary opposition” choice theories. He believes reality is not just “power or beauty,” but is constrained by the concrete parameters of external conditions.

Case analysis: Suppose one is choosing between “a job” and “an apartment in Beijing.” This is not only about values, but also about how good the job actually is (salary, prospects) and how good the apartment actually is (location, appreciation potential). It’s a complex calculation based on real-world parameters, not purely an identity-recognition issue.

3. The “Impossible Triangle” Theory of Career Development

The man elaborated on a core model he developed in his career, which explains why he feels a certain degree of “lack” and “dissatisfaction” in any position. He believes that for top talents, there is an “impossible triangle” in the modern workplace: one can typically only get two of the three and cannot have all at once:

Freedom: Control over time, space, and research direction; flexibility in lifestyle.
Challenge/Impact: Working on the most cutting-edge and difficult technical explorations, gaining a high sense of achievement and rewards.
High-density talent team: Collaborating with the smartest, top-tier people in the world, enjoying the thrill of intellectual collisions.

3.1 The Elegy of History and the Helplessness of the Present

Golden age (past): Looking back, he believes that in certain monopolistic periods (such as the famed Bell Labs era), these three elements did miraculously coexist. Scientists then had funding and freedom, worked with top minds, and solved world-class problems.
Down cycle (present): In the current economic climate, with resources tightening, the three cannot be obtained simultaneously; one can only choose two. This forms the root of his career anguish.

3.2 In-Depth Analysis of Specific Options

Path One: Top Frontier Labs (e.g., OpenAI)

Possesses: Challenge + High-density talent.
Lacks: Freedom.
Characteristics:
- This is currently the hottest track. You can tackle the hardest problems, surrounded by Turing Award–level colleagues.
- Cost: Extreme pressure and constraint. Work intensity is often 9‑9‑6 or even 0‑0‑7, running like a machine.
- Confidentiality: You sign strict NDAs, cannot publish papers externally, cannot communicate openly—working as if in a “black box.”

Path Two: University Professor

Possesses: Freedom + Challenge.
Lacks: High-density talent.
Characteristics:
- University faculty generally enjoy relatively free time and can choose frontier topics.
- Cost: Lack of a top-tier team that can fight side by side. Students’ abilities vary greatly and they are still in the learning stage.
- Sense of drain: The man feels that mentoring students involves “more output than input.” Teaching them yields little new knowledge for him; it’s a continuous one-way drain, lacking the “intellectual resonance” of masters sparring with each other.

Path Three: Government/Nonprofit Research Institutes (e.g., Certain Eras of Corporate Research Labs)

Possesses: Freedom + High-density talent.
Lacks: Challenge/result orientation.
Characteristics:
- Similar to a “retirement home for geniuses.” Everyone has a shiny background and high IQ, and the work is relaxed and free.
- Cost: Lack of real commercial pressure and challenge.
- Experience review: The man mentioned his feelings during his PhD at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA). Although he was surrounded by smart people, much of the research was just for publishing papers, with little real industrial impact or urgency in solving real-world problems, resulting in limited outcomes.

Conclusion: No matter which corner he chooses, he will feel regret over the missing one. This structural absence makes him always feel he is “not in the right place.”

4. Lifestyle Conflict: Family Responsibility vs. Nomadic Longing

Beyond career, the man also faces major internal conflict in lifestyle, closely related to his “observer” identity.

4.1 The “Restricted Feeling” Brought by Family

Current situation: Married, with a wife holding a stable job in Beijing and a stable family structure.
Points of conflict:
- Hypothesis: If he were single, he says he would unhesitatingly choose to go to Shanghai, Silicon Valley in the U.S., or anywhere else, experiencing different ways of life, even changing cities every two or three years.
- Reality: Because of family (wife’s job being immovable, children’s educational needs), he must settle in Beijing.
- Psychological experience: This settlement is not out of love for Beijing but a forced compromise. He likens it to “having signed an agreement”; while his rational mind accepts it, at a subconscious level he always feels “trapped.”

4.2 Two Voices in Opposition

Voice A (happiness): The conventional happiness of “a warm home with wife and children,” the security and support brought by intimate relationships.
Voice B (constraint): Having to sacrifice mobility for the family, being forced to “stay put” in a fixed physical space.
The man’s struggle: Rationally he knows family is important, but in the depths of his “explorer” soul, such stability is equivalent to stagnation. He is not just choosing a place to live; he is choosing a fate of being bound.

5. Deep Psychological Roots: Childhood Enlightenment and the Origins of Academic Thought

Under the counselor’s guidance, the man revisited his childhood. This not only explains his current distress, but also reveals the origins of his academic thinking as an AI scientist.

5.1 Grandfather’s Enlightenment and the “Pale Blue Dot”

The man’s worldview derives directly from his grandfather’s early education:

Enlightenment content: His grandfather often told him stories of the Age of Exploration (Magellan, Columbus, Captain Cook) and astronomy.
Core image: “Pale Blue Dot.”
- This image influenced him profoundly: when Voyager 1 was leaving the solar system and looked back at Earth, our planet was just an insignificant, pixel-sized blue dot in the universe.
- Insight: Since humans are so tiny in the cosmos, all the trivial matters on Earth (wars, politics, housing prices) seem insignificant. If one spends an entire life stuck in some small place (like an apartment in Beijing), life loses its grand meaning.
Self-positioning: This cosmic perspective led him, from childhood, to establish a self-positioning as an “Explorer”, and also to develop his aforementioned “observer/Adventist” mentality.

5.2 Definition and Conflict of Worldview

The counselor helped him clarify the difference between worldview and values:

Values: Judgments about “what is important” (e.g., money vs. happiness).
Worldview: Ontological cognition about “what the world is like.”
- Jungle assumption: Some believe the world is a dark forest full of danger and competition, so one must hoard resources and seek security.
- Playground assumption: Some believe the world is a playground full of adventures, where the goal is experience.
- The man’s worldview: The Large World Assumption.

5.3 Origins of Academic Thought: From Childhood to AI Theory

The man was surprised to discover that his childhood experiences directly shaped his core understanding of artificial intelligence, and these theories in turn explain his life dilemmas.

A. Reward Prediction Error

Theoretical origin: A concept at the intersection of neuroscience and reinforcement learning.
Mechanism: The brain’s secretion of dopamine (pleasure) does not depend on the absolute reward you receive, but on the difference between actual reward and expected reward.
- If you expected to earn 0 and actually earned 100 → large positive error → dopamine release (pleasure).
- If you expected to earn 100 and actually earned 100 → zero error → no dopamine (no particular feeling).
Life mapping: This explains why “steady success” bores him. In an “exploitation” mode, everything is predictable, the prediction error is zero, thus no joy. Only when “exploring” the unknown can one experience unexpected surprises (Positive Prediction Error), which in turn brings dopamine.

B. 大世界假设（Large World Assumption）

Theoretical origin: Reinforcement learning and cognitive science.
Small World: Rules are closed, known, and static (such as Go, exams). Here, mastering static knowledge and specific capabilities is enough to win.
Large World: The world is infinite, open, and dynamically changing (such as real life, the Age of Discovery).
Definition of intelligence: He firmly believes that under the “Large World Assumption,” the measure of intelligence is not how much static knowledge it currently holds, but its learning ability and adaptability.
Current AI hotspot: This is exactly the cutting-edge direction in today’s AI field: Continuous Learning.
Life mapping: Because he holds the “Large World Assumption,” he believes that clinging to a particular skill or a specific place is foolish. True wisdom lies in constantly moving, continuously adapting to new environments, and endlessly reshaping oneself.

5.4 Fundamental conflict: Exploration vs. Exploitation in Reinforcement Learning

He uses the classic dilemma of Reinforcement Learning (RL) to summarize his life:

Exploration:
- Definition: Trying unknown paths in order to discover new possibilities and gain information.
- Driving force: Corresponds to his “explorer” soul and dopamine needs.
- Cost: Low short-term returns, high risk, instability.
Exploitation:
- Definition: Repeatedly investing in known effective paths to obtain maximal cumulative returns.
- Characteristics: Only focus, repetition, and deep cultivation (such as staying in one company for 10 years, settling in one city) can produce massive success in the conventional sense (wealth, status).
- Real-world pain point: Both entrepreneurial success and family responsibility essentially demand extremely high-intensity Exploitation.
Conflict: His nature (Soul) longs for Exploration (great voyages, changing maps), but his rational goals (winning, being responsible) force him into Exploitation (tedious execution, settling down).

6. Integration and acceptance: Moving toward a higher-dimensional identity

6.1 Cognitive restructuring: Constraints are part of choosing

Therapist’s feedback: The pain does not come from the choice itself, but from the obsession with “omnipotence.” He needs to realize that “being constrained” is an inherent attribute of the act of “choosing.”
Spirit of contract: Since he has chosen the worldly goal of “entrepreneurial success,” it means he has signed a contract to “give up part of his freedom.” This is like wanting the high returns of Exploitation but having to pay “tedium” as the price.
Paying tuition: He mentioned that his first startup failed because he only explored technology (Exploration) and did not understand operations and management (Exploitation). The current tedium and constraints are the “tuition” he must pay to make up for his weaknesses and to “win.”

6.2 A phased life strategy

Dynamic balance: Even AI Agents need to tune parameters (such as temperature) to balance Exploration and Exploitation. Life is the same: it cannot be all exploration (that’s like a monkey picking corn, constantly switching), nor can it be all exploitation (that’s stagnant water).
Solution:
1. Phased strategy: Acknowledge that the current stage (startup offensive phase, kids being very young) is a period with a high Exploitation weight. This is not eternal imprisonment, but a tactical, time-bound choice.
2. Local exploration: While keeping the main storyline stable, preserve the spark of Exploration through thought experiments, short trips, or academic thinking to satisfy the “observer” within.
3. Ultimate integration: Understand that the current “Exploitation” is precisely to accumulate sufficient resources (wealth, influence, capabilities), so that in the future he will have the capital for larger-scale, purer “Exploration.”

7. Summary

This conversation deeply reveals the essence of his inner conflict: an observer with a “Large World Assumption” and an “explorer” soul is forced, for worldly responsibilities, to compress himself into a role that requires a stable “Small World.”

Path to reconstructing identity:
No longer viewing “constraints” as shackles imposed by the outside world, but redefining them as “a strategy that an intelligent agent voluntarily chooses at a specific stage in order to maximize long-term returns.” By accepting the psychological gap based on the “reward prediction error” mechanism, he can find a new balance between “gazing at the stars” (the explorer’s worldview) and “having his feet on the ground” (the practical executor).