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I posit that the human mind is made up of dozens, or perhaps even hundreds/thousands “smaller agents” that work together to create consciousness as an emergent property of the whole, which makes it impossible to isolate and say “this, THIS right here IS concsciousness”. That does not mean each of those has their own personality, per sé.
IIRC the “other consciousness” is the internal monologue or internal visualization you experience when thinking
There’s a potentially related theory too that the origin of religion is internal narrator thinkers having perceived the internal narrator as a second entity who was issuing them commands and beliefs rather than their own internal dialogue.
These people would claim to be “prophets” and basically evangelize whatever presence they ascribed responsibility for the internal narrator to. Leading to more people believing their internal narrators are also these divine forces speaking to them.
Not to dunk on rural americans, but a phenomena like this could also explain the recent evangelical movement in the US considering how much emphasis is placed on the personal relationship and communication with God, these people might actually just not realize their own thoughts and ascribe all thought process as the voice of the big man himself.
Makes sense, in a lot of spiritual practices I’ve been involved in, hearing such a voice is believed to be a higher power.
Unless you mean thoughts themselves, and not something similar but deeper…
I mean that for a lot of these people thought and that higher power are one in the same.
They believe God is a speaker who instructs them via their inner dialogue, or for seers, by “visions” which could be better identified as a similar phenomenon but involving visual thought rather than inner dialogue thought.
Huh, maybe this isn’t the “Higher Self” then… because when I think, I can “hear” a voice in my head, and I can literally make it say what I want…
But when I hear the “Higher Self” it’s just suddenly I know something or I’ll experience a different kind of silent voice where I can’t hear any words… but I suddenly know something I didn’t before and it doesn’t “feel” like me, it feels like it comes from much deeper in than a mere thought does, there’s no “Thought process” in the event of a higher self thing, just realization, and it’s usually shit I couldn’t possible know, but it’s not like I can summon it on command and what it tells me isn’t always useful.
Like, one time it told me I’d drink a regular Mountain Dew, not flavored, for the first time in literal years in a matter of minutes.
I disregard it as unlikely, but decide it may be a good idea to get some food as it had been a long day. So I go to Taco Bell, and get my usual drink, a Baja Blast (which is a flavored mountain dew, but the “higher self” specified that it wouldn’t be flavored, it’d be the OG mountain dew) They tell me they’re out, so absent mindedly I say “Regular mountain dew’s fine.”
Only after I say that do I go “Wait a god damn minute…”
Obviously this can’t be a different form of my thought process that I just don’t understand, because how the fuck was it supposed to know the inventory of that exact Taco Bell? Then again, why would a Higher Self care about what drinks I’m drinking… Weird shit like that happens, and since it’s always right, I always listen to it, and when it actually comes through in a time of need things seem to turn out fine. I can’t explain it, ironically you’d think this would make more really superstitious, but the sad truth is I lost my faith in such things ages ago, it’s just the higher self still functions as it does in spite of that.
If you’ve got an explanation I’d love to hear it
Honestly I’m more impressed by your categorical inventory of the exact kind of Mountain dew you’d been drinking for years.
As for explanation, not everything is owed an explanation. That’s part of my issue with the idea of god in the first place, it’s an act of trying to define what cannot be explained because for an unfortunate number of people having an answer is more important than not giving one unless you can confirm it’s correct or at least approximate or in the direction of a correct answer.
Maybe there is a higher power out there, maybe the supernatural is lurking behind every darkened window and hidden alley, maybe 40k is a prophecy of times to come sent in the form of a table top wargame fortelling the danger of beings worshipped as gods who lust after feasting on our souls, what matters is that all of that is just a story we tell ourselves to pretend those questions aren’t still there because an unanswered question is the true incarnation of madness and terror to most people.
God is the King In Yellow, a cloaked masked figure built to contain all the emptiness we fear in the universe.
Inside you there are two wolves
Both gay & both loud af, at the same time.
You’re not gonna give us a source?
It is proposed that it is possible that a person may develop two separate conscious entities within their one brain after undergoing a corpus callosotomy.
So unless you’ve had your brain cut in half to treat your epilepsy then you’re probably alright
No conclusive evidence of the proposed phenomenon has been discovered.
The one thing I can think of that approaches support for the idea is “Joe, the split-brain patient”'s case. You can show him stuff on the right side of his visual field, and he’ll tell you what it is. Show him something on the left side of his vision, and he can draw it and react to it, but can’t name it. The speech center of his brain is disconnected from the right hemisphere due to that procedure.
A disconnect doesn’t necessarily imply two separate conscious entities though, right?
In those experiments, the speaking portion of Joe has no clue what the other side is experiencing. Like they show it to him on the wrong side and say “can you see this?” “No”. Then they ask him to draw it, and to his amazement he does. It’s not just being unable to vocalize certain thoughts - they’re not even there to vocalize at all to that part of the brain. But the other half is happily chugging away with that info
Is this egg_irl?
This is science memes, what about this post do you find similar to egg_irl?
Trigger warning: explaining jokes in way too much detail.
The phrasing is a reference to the “Is this a pigeon?” meme (see: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/is-this-a-pigeon ). This is meant to indicate that this is clearly not egg_irl, but the topic of the original post seemed like something repressed trans people can relate to in hindsight. It reminded me of a common pattern among eggs where there’s a vague but insistent internal voice (not literally a voice, more like an occasional impulse) telling you to do things that you associate with your actual gender, rather than your assigned gender, with varying effects depending on the person. For example, it generally made me feel uncomfortable without understanding why, leading me to assume I simply didn’t like those things, when in fact that was more or less the opposite of the truth.
Anyway, these sorts of things can make the idea of an unknown, voiceless, internal personality separate from your surface-level persona resonate with trans people. Add the fact that when you’re deeply involved in gender issues and transitioning, it’s so much on your mind that there’s a tendency to interpret everything as being somehow related to gender even when it isn’t, and it seemed like a good fit for the pigeon meme.
