He’s been off-line for the best part of six hours and is getting a panicky butterfly stomach at the idea of not being in touch with everything that’s… - Charles Stross

The Republic of Mhari contains five thousand times more cells than there are humans on earth, but is somehow both more and less than the sum of her parts. If all those cells die, then I am, by definition, dead. But the relationship between cell-citizens and the Republic of Me is less obvious than you might think.
At any point in time some of my cells are dying and being replaced, and the me that exist today consists almost entirely of different cells from the me of a couple of years ago—although I’m still me. But if you were to separate all my cells and then keep them alive in a mad scientist’s test-tube collection, I’d be dead, though all my bits live on. The Republic of Self can be dissolved, or taken over in a coup, or drastically reformed. I harbor this illusion of unitary identity—but in reality I’m what biologists call a superorganism, a swarm, and ensemble entity. I am not me: I am Hobbes’s Leviathan, or Leviathan’s Representative.

Yup, that pretty much confirms the diagnosis. This is the desk of a diseased mind, hugely ambitious, prone to taking insanely dangerous risks. He’s not ashamed of boasting about it—he clearly believes in better alpha-primate dominance displays through carpentry.

His Infernal Majesty leans towards me confidingly. “You have imposter syndrome,” He says, “but paradoxically, that’s often a sign of competence. Only people who understand their work well enough to be intimidated by it can be terrified by their own ignorance. It’s the opposite of Dunning-Kruger syndrome, where the miserably incompetent think they’re on top of the job because they don’t understand it.”