ScientificAmerican:
By Bernardo Kastrup, Adam Crabtree, Edward F. Kelly
The condition now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder) can help us understand the fundamental nature (nature, essence) of reality.
In 2015, doctors in Germany reported the extraordinary case of a woman who suffered from what was traditionally called "multiple personality disorder" and is today known as "dissociative personality disorder" (DID). The woman showed many different personalities ("changing"), some of whom claimed to be blind. Using the EEG, doctors were able to establish that the brain activity normally associated with vision was absent when a blind person (one of the personalities) controlled a woman's body even though her eyes were open. It is noteworthy that when the sighted (other person) took control of the woman's body, normal brain activity returned.
It was a convincing demonstration of the literally blinding power of extreme forms of dissociation, a state in which the psyche generates many, functionally separate centers of consciousness, each with its own personal inner life.
Modern neuroimaging techniques have demonstrated that DID is real: In a 2014 study, doctors performed functional brain scans of both patients and actors who faked DID. Scans of real patients showed clear differences compared to actors, showing that dissociation has an identifiable imprint of neural activity. In other words, there is something special about how dissociative processes look in the brain.
There is also strong clinical evidence that various changes can be simultaneously conscious and consider themselves as individuals. One of us described extensive research and evaluation of the evidence for this distinct self-awareness (identity) and the complex forms of interactive memory that accompany it, especially in those extreme cases of DID commonly referred to as multiple personality disorder.
The history of this condition dates back to the early 19th century, with a flurry of cases from the 1880s to the 1920s, and again from the 1960s to the late 1990s. The mainstream literature on this issue confirms the consistent and uncompromising sense of separateness experienced by changing personalities. It also shows strong evidence that the human psyche is constantly active in creating the personal units of perception and action that may be required to solve life's problems.
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While we may be at a loss to explain exactly how this creative process takes place (because it unfolds almost entirely outside of reflection and introspection), clinical evidence still compels us to admit that something is happening that has important consequences for our ideas about what is possible and not possible in nature.
Now, a recently published paper by one of us argues that dissociation can offer a solution to a critical problem in our current understanding of the nature of reality. This requires some explanation.
According to the mainstream metaphysical view of physicalism, reality is fundamentally physical things outside and independent of consciousness. The mental state, in turn, must be explained in terms of the parameters of physical processes in the brain.
However, the key problem of physicalism is its inability to understand how our subjective experience of qualities - what it is, how it feels to feel the warmth of a fire, the redness of an apple, the bitterness of disappointment, and so on - can arise from simple mechanisms of a physical nature.
Physical objects, such as subatomic particles, have abstract relational properties such as mass, rotation, momentum, and charge. But there is nothing about these properties, or about how the particles are located in the brain, in terms of which one can define what the warmth of a fire, the reddening of an apple or the bitterness of disappointment is. This is known as the hard problem of consciousness.
To get around this problem, some philosophers have proposed an alternative: this experience is inherent in every fundamental physical entity in nature. Under this point of view, called "constitutive panpsychism," matter already has experience from the very beginning, and not only when it forms itself in the form of brains. Even subatomic particles have a very simple form of consciousness. Then, our own human consciousness is (supposedly) composed of the subjective inner lives of the countless physical particles that make up our nervous system.
However, constitutive panpsychism has its own critical problem: there is no single coherent explanation in what way, physical, magical or otherwise, subjective viewpoints of a lower level, such as subatomic particles or neurons in the brain, if they have these views, can unite. to form subjective points of view of a higher level, such as yours and ours. This is called the problem of combining, and it seems as insoluble as the difficult problem of consciousness.
The obvious way to solve the problem of combination is that although consciousness is indeed fundamental in nature, it is not fragmented like matter. The idea is to extend consciousness to the entire fabric of space-time, not to limit the boundaries of individual subatomic particles. This view is called "cosmopsychism" in modern philosophy, although our preferred formulation comes down to what is classically called "idealism" - this is that there is only one, universal consciousness. The physical universe as a whole is the external manifestation of the universal inner life, just as the living brain and body are the outer appearance of the inner life of a person.
You don't need to be a philosopher to grasp the obvious problem with this idea: people have their own, separate areas of experience. We cannot read your mind, you cannot read our mind. Moreover, we usually do not know what is happening in the universe, and presumably you do not know either. Thus, in order for idealism to be convincing, it is necessary to explain - at least in principle - how one universal consciousness gives rise to multiple, partial, but at the same time conscious centers of knowledge, each of which has a separate personality and a sense of identity.
And this is where dissociation comes in. We know empirically from DID that consciousness can give rise to many operationally different centers of parallel experience, each with its own personality and sense of identity. Therefore, if something similar to DID occurs at a universal level, then one universal consciousness can, as a result, give rise to many changes in its own inner life, such as yours and ours. Thus, we can all be changing-dissociated personalities of universal (universal) consciousness.
Moreover, as we saw earlier, something appears in the brain of a patient with DID that looks like dissociative processes. Thus, if something happens to the form of the universal level of DID, then changes in the universal consciousness should also have an appearance. We believe that this appearance is life itself: metabolizing organisms are simply what the dissociative processes of the universal (universal) level look like.
Idealism is a tantalizing view of the nature of reality because it elegantly bypasses two possibly intractable problems: the difficult problem of consciousness and the problem of combination. Since dissociation opens the door to explaining how, under idealism, one universal consciousness can become many individual minds, we can now have at our disposal an unprecedentedly consistent and empirically grounded way of thinking about Life, the Universe and Everything.
