Forgive me for putting this old Lounge thread on General blast, but, it's too good.
viewtopic.php?p=159493#p159493
Which led to...
IanEye wrote:Anyway, in terms of the more metaphysical aspects of this thread, i have a theory about multi personality disorder. i think a "normal" personality is made up of hundreds of personas, and when life poses a puzzle to an individual, these personas attack the puzzle all at once in a big blur and what emerges is a sort of consensus about the best possible way forward.
I think the "defect" of those with multiple personality disorder is that what happens to them is this approach breaks down and they tend to get "stuck" in one personality for much longer than "normal" people do. So, their problem is not that they have more personalities than average, but that they spend much too long in any one mask, where as the average person applies many personas to the puzzle.
Not sure if I am explaining that as well as i could.
FourthBase wrote:Not a bad theory. The personae wouldn't necessarily be only self-generated, but possibly a composite of self-generated personae and the surface personae borrowed from other people, right? And wouldn't it be more likely for the number to be in the range of, like, 5-15 personae instead of hundreds? Or am I misunderstanding what you're saying? Also, I imagine there would be certain strong-willed people whose personae over the course of a lifetime would be compressed into even fewer masks, maybe even down to one mask?
("Not a bad theory", jeezuz, what an unjustifiably-cocky condescending dick...ugh.)
Ziggin' and a Zaggin' wrote:IanEye said:Anyway, in terms of the more metaphysical aspects of this thread, I have a theory about multi personality disorder. I think a "normal" personality is made up of hundreds of personas, and when life poses a puzzle to an individual, these personas attack the puzzle all at once in a big blur and what emerges is a sort of consensus about the best possible way forward.
I find your theory very interesting. From what I've read of mind control techniques, personas play an important role. For example, a person lacking confidence would be trained - I guess hypnotized - to create or imagine a self-assured alter ego. I would think that this type of behaviour modification would have been used in the training of soldiers, i.e. turning men into killing machines. More knowledgeable people on this board could provide background information documenting the long relationship between the military/intelligence apparatus and psychiatry (What were the US Army precursors of the CIA's MK-Ultra program?). I've been watching reruns of the PBS series "The Fifties" (1997) and I was again reminded of the social engineering aspects of "public service" short films, especially as it related to family life... a model exemplified by the Cleaver family of the "Leave It to Beaver" (1957) series. One can only wonder the extent to which government entities made use of "advances" in the fileds of psychology and psychiatry.
IanEye wrote:FourthBase wrote: And wouldn't it be more likely for the number to be in the range of, like, 5-15 personae instead of hundreds?
indeed, hundreds may be too many - I don't know, it is just an idea i have.
brainpanhandler wrote:IanEye,
"What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before." - Mark Twain
Not too long ago I read a very similar theory that we all have multiple personalities. But I think that thoery was that we rapidly switch between them. I'll see if I can find that again.
chillin wrote:FourthBase wrote:... more likely for the number to be in the range of, like, 5-15 personae instead of hundreds?
For personal reasons that sentence made me shit a brick lol, but in "spirit math" one and infinity seem to pop up frequently. A little slice of the pie for each sentient being ( EVRY1 in txtspeek?). I suck at math.Or am I misunderstanding what you're saying? Also, I imagine there would be certain strong-willed people whose personae over the course of a lifetime would be compressed into even fewer masks, maybe even down to one mask?
Yah maybe. I'm not clear on the specifics but thinking instead of a guy in a shell, I'm a shell on a thread that's something like a computer network but composed of sentience, spanning 'time'. Some frames for me, some frames for T-Rex and the one he's chasing, some for the Orca, some for the Nazis and some for their victims. It can get pretty ugly, but I think that's why Dick Cheney was wearing the 'Staff' hat at the Holocaust memorial.
brainpanhandler wrote:IanEye wrote:Anyway, in terms of the more metaphysical aspects of this thread, i have a theory about multi personality disorder. i think a "normal" personality is made up of hundreds of personas, and when life poses a puzzle to an individual, these personas attack the puzzle all at once in a big blur and what emerges is a sort of consensus about the best possible way forward.
I think the "defect" of those with multiple personality disorder is that what happens to them is this approach breaks down and they tend to get "stuck" in one personality for much longer than "normal" people do. So, their problem is not that they have more personalities than average, but that they spend much too long in any one mask, where as the average person applies many personas to the puzzle.
Not sure if I am explaining that as well as i could.
I can't figure out where I read something similar to this. Appropriately enough, my reading lately has been so schizophrenic and disjointed that I don't whether I'm coming or going. I've got stacks of books scattered all over my apartment. And I'm one of those people that will go to look up a word and get sidetracked and spend a half an hour reading the dictionary so my online reading wanders all over the place. If I find the article I'll post a link to it. If I remember correctly the similarity is in the idea that having multiple personalities is the normal state and that we switch between them so quickly that we do not perceive ourselves as having more than one personality. I have to admit this has a ring of truth to me.
Of course we run the risk of trivializing what I believe is a very real and debilitating psychological disorder with our metaphysical musings, but this is the lounge so hopefully there will be no shouting here. MPD is still a very contentious diagnosis. There is lots of disagreement on it's origins, the diagnostic criteria to be used and even whether it exists at all. It's an interesting theory that the dysfunction of mpd arises as a result of getting stuck in a personality. Maybe this is because this is indicative of trauma based mpd... partitioning off parts of our psyches as a defensive measure. Literally we are "stuck" in the past.Kurzweil wrote:Computer neural net simulations have been limited by two factors: the number of neural connections that can be simulated in real time and the capacity of computer memories. While human neurons are slow (a million times slower than electronic circuits), every neuron and every interneuronal connection is operating simultaneously. With about 100 billion neurons and an average of 1000 connections per neuron, there are about 100 trillion computations being performed at the same time. At about 200 computations per second, that comes to 20 million billion (2 x 1016) calculations per second.
link:The Paradigms and Paradoxes of Intelligence: Building a Brain
It seems there is plenty of computing power to cycle through hundreds of personalities per second. I'm curious how you came by this theory. How do you experience this?
Please, everyone, keep that last bolded thing in mind. And if there's any yelling, let it all be at me for resurrecting an old Lounge thread and plopping it anew in General Discussion. But as far as I can tell, as far as I know, IanEye is the originator of a very strange theory, one that's not only "not bad" but quite good and possibly great and maybe even revolutionary.