Complex Numbers

Panpsychoticism

We should all know by now that when a headline asks a question, the answer is almost certainly "no."

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/could-multiple-personality-dis...

Could Multiple Personality Disorder Explain Life, the Universe and Everything?
A new paper argues the condition now known as “dissociative identity disorder” might help us understand the fundamental nature of reality

I will, however, give them credit for referencing Douglas Adams.

In 2015, doctors in Germany reported the extraordinary case of a woman who suffered from what has traditionally been called “multiple personality disorder” and today is known as “dissociative identity disorder” (DID). The woman exhibited a variety of dissociated personalities (“alters”), some of which claimed to be blind. Using EEGs, the doctors were able to ascertain that the brain activity normally associated with sight wasn’t present while a blind alter was in control of the woman’s body, even though her eyes were open. Remarkably, when a sighted alter assumed control, the usual brain activity returned.

That's actually pretty cool. I don't know much about psychology and even less about psychiatry, but it's still cool.

The article goes into some detail about DID, before getting into the question in the headline.

Now, a newly published paper by one of us posits that dissociation can offer a solution to a critical problem in our current understanding of the nature of reality. This requires some background, so bear with us.

Background? All the paragraphs leading up to this quote (most of which I didn't copy, but they're at the link) were background. But okay -- like I said, I know very little so that was a decent introduction.

According to the mainstream metaphysical view of physicalism, reality is fundamentally constituted by physical stuff outside and independent of mind. Mental states, in turn, should be explainable in terms of the parameters of physical processes in the brain.

Any essay that uses "metaphysical" unironically is suspect.

But there's a brief introduction there to the "hard problem of consciousness," which I'm pretty sure I've mentioned in here before, in connection with panpsychism -- a philosophy I provisionally reject. "Provisionally," because there's no real science behind it, only conjecture. Could be true. Could be false. Can't be tested at this time.

To circumvent this problem, some philosophers have proposed an alternative: that experience is inherent to every fundamental physical entity in nature.

Yep. Panpsychism. But okay, I'll bite.

However, constitutive panpsychism has a critical problem of its own: there is arguably no coherent, non-magical way in which lower-level subjective points of view—such as those of subatomic particles or neurons in the brain, if they have these points of view—could combine to form higher-level subjective points of view, such as yours and ours. This is called the combination problem and it appears just as insoluble as the hard problem of consciousness.

From my purely amateur perspective, it sounds more like the same problem, only stated differently.

The obvious way around the combination problem is to posit that, although consciousness is indeed fundamental in nature, it isn’t fragmented like matter. The idea is to extend consciousness to the entire fabric of spacetime, as opposed to limiting it to the boundaries of individual subatomic particles.

Ever seen a map of the universe? They've made some. Here's one.   I've noted a superficial similarity to a neural network   before. But physical similarity isn't support for this hypothesis; it could be coincidence.

And here is where dissociation comes in.

This view—called “cosmopsychism” in modern philosophy, although our preferred formulation of it boils down to what has classically been called “idealism”—is that there is only one, universal, consciousness.

Pretty sure philosophers have posited something similar since time immemorial. That's also the basis for at least one conception of the Divine. But just because a philosopher (or a scientist for that matter) says something, doesn't mean it's fact.

You don’t need to be a philosopher to realize the obvious problem with this idea: people have private, separate fields of experience.

Basically, if there's only one Universal Consciousness, how come we all appear to live separate existences?

So, for idealism to be tenable, one must explain—at least in principle—how one universal consciousness gives rise to multiple, private but concurrently conscious centers of cognition, each with a distinct personality and sense of identity.

That's not the only thing that "one must explain" to accept this, at least in theory. There's also the small matter of communication across vast distances, communication that can't be attributed to "quantum entanglement." Consciousness requires communication, and the speed of light is a hard limit; this has been supported by evidence as well as mathematics.

And here is where dissociation comes in. We know empirically from DID that consciousness can give rise to many operationally distinct centers of concurrent experience, each with its own personality and sense of identity. Therefore, if something analogous to DID happens at a universal level, the one universal consciousness could, as a result, give rise to many alters with private inner lives like yours and ours. As such, we may all be alters—dissociated personalities—of universal consciousness.

Okay, I have to admit here that although I categorically dismiss the idea, it is attractive to me. The idea of universal oneness, of breaking down barriers; that all is, indeed, One -- well, I think most people have to drop acid to get into that mindset, and I've never dropped acid. But I think a lot of problems would be ameliorated if we stopped thinking of things as separate entities but as parts of a whole.

That doesn't mean I'm going to embrace this stuff, of course. Just that, if it turns out to be the case, it would have beneficial implications. For instance, that there is no "us" and "them," only "us."

Moreover, as we’ve seen earlier, there is something dissociative processes look like in the brain of a patient with DID. So, if some form of universal-level DID happens, the alters of universal consciousness must also have an extrinsic appearance. We posit that this appearance is life itself: metabolizing organisms are simply what universal-level dissociative processes look like.

Whether factual or not, the other thing that appeals to me is its syncretic nature -- to take ideas from several different branches of science and philosophy and put them into a coherent whole. Wait -- that's just another aspect of universal oneness, isn't it? We make distinctions between, say, cosmology, psychology, biology, chemistry, physics... when in reality the boundaries are far more blurry, if they exist at all.

Insofar as dissociation offers a path to explaining how, under idealism, one universal consciousness can become many individual minds, we may now have at our disposal an unprecedentedly coherent and empirically grounded way of making sense of life, the universe and everything.

Insert "42" joke here. You know you want to.

Just remember: the key word in the last sentence I quoted is "may." I find it highly unlikely, personally. Just to be clear, though: I do believe that everything is One Thing; just not necessarily in the manner described here. Like I said, this stuff is appealing -- which is all the more reason to be skeptical about it.