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Could Multiple Personality Disorder Explain Life, the Universe and Everything?
Hraness cites a source capture. The source author remains the source.
gist
Bernardo Kastrup, Adam Crabtree, and Edward F. Kelly use clinical dissociative identity disorder as an analogy for idealism: one universal consciousness could split into many private minds the way one psyche forms alters. Physicalism fails the hard problem; constitutive panpsychism fails the combination problem. Cosmopsychist idealism needs an account of private selves—and DID shows consciousness can host concurrent distinct identities. They posit that metabolizing life is what universal-level dissociation looks like from outside.
ideas
- DID is neurally real. Blind alters suppress visual EEG; patient scans differ from actors simulating DID.
- Physicalism stalls on qualities. Mass, spin, and charge do not entail what warmth or redness feel like—the hard problem.
- Constitutive panpsychism stalls on combination. Tiny subjectivities do not coherently fuse into one human point of view.
- Idealism needs many-from-one. Universal consciousness must explain private concurrent minds; DID supplies the empirical pattern.
- Life as extrinsic dissociation. Organisms are what universal-level alters look like from outside, as brains show DID signatures.
quotes
“we may all be alters—dissociated personalities—of universal consciousness.”
“metabolizing organisms are simply what universal-level dissociative processes look like.”
“there is something rather particular that dissociative processes look like in the brain.”
“A key problem of physicalism, however, is its inability to make sense of how our subjective experience of qualities”