DID and neural networks
So, popular consensus is that DID is a mental illness caused by extreme trauma that causes a personality to fragment into segments.
I assume it is news to no one that while I do not consider $future_person[0] a alter, I do believe that I have DID, although normally my alters stay very far backgrounded. I do however think that they all contribute to the overall system – that is to say, I think that for example when I’m jamming with the band and making up lyrics on the fly but my conscious experience is only slightly engaged in creating the lyrics (a phrase or fragment or concept), some wordsmith part of my mind is creating bits that rhyme and turning this into full blown lyrics. For a example of this, check out this audio clip from band practice with Bruce, Art, and me – this was not a prewritten song, it was improv – clip
I think it is possible to have something that is a close kin to DID and have it be a more productive order than the average configuration rather than a disorder. The reason is that it enables the operator of the mind that is using this configuration to more effectively utilize the entire neural network.
Consider that normally, your conscious experience is only engaging with a few dozen threads at once – that’s all you can have ‘foregrounded’, or actively a part of your world. Now, obviously there are neural structures that do things like running a scheduler for running events at preset times, but if you have alters, you can also pass off foreground tasks that you don’t need to be actively engaged with to other bits of yourself – it’s kind of like the advantages of having multiple cores in a CPU. I don’t know if alters have a conscious experience, or just a head node and task list, or what – it would be fascinating to be able to look at the structure of my mind sufficiently to find out – but certainly they can be engaging neurons and neural subnets that would otherwise be completely idle.
Now, of course, I have no memory of what it might be like to *not* be this way. So it’s possible that I’m wrong and that I would simply be able to handle more threads if I wasn’t broken. I do seek certain types of reintegration, although with a fair amount of fear and trepidation because I’m hesitant to fuck too much with a running system.
February 10th, 2017 at 1:27 pm
In younger days, I considered that developing multiple personalities on purpose could improve overall function. However, my brain couldn’t ever get to parallel running by force of will alone. Due to the long standing fact of my oddly faulty memory, and attention failure, I have always hesitated to experiment with chemical methods outside of doctor advice. Lately, the single-core nature of my mind, running multiple threads as necessitated by employment, has seen too many thread losses due to memory fault. I certainly wish I had a “virtual assistant” persona running in the background keeping track of the things I’ve been losing, but I feel that my system isn’t configured for, and may not be configurable to, such functionality. My irony tracking subnet says I’d probably forget the alt, accidentally.