This was a compelling demonstration of the literally blinding power of extreme forms of dissociation, a condition in which the psyche gives rise to multiple, operationally separate centers of consciousness, each with its own private inner life.
Modern neuroimaging techniques have demonstrated that DID is real: in a 2014 study, doctors performed functional brain scans on both DID patients and actors simulating DID. The scans of the actual patients displayed clear differences when compared to those of the actors, showing that dissociation has an identifiable neural activity fingerprint. In other words, there is something rather particular that dissociative processes look like in the brain.
There is also compelling clinical data showing that different alters can be concurrently conscious and see themselves as distinct identities. One of us has written an extensive treatment of evidence for this distinctness of identity and the complex forms of interactive memory that accompany it, particularly in those extreme cases of DID that are usually referred to as multiple personality disorder.
The history of this condition dates back to the early 19th century, with a flurry of cases in the 1880s through the 1920s, and again from the 1960s to the late 1990s. The massive literature on the subject confirms the consistent and uncompromising sense of separateness experienced by the alter personalities. It also displays compelling evidence that the human psyche is constantly active in producing personal units of perception and action that might be needed to deal with the challenges of life.
Although we may be at a loss to explain precisely how this creative process occurs (because it unfolds almost totally beyond the reach of self-reflective introspection) the clinical evidence nevertheless forces us to acknowledge something is happening that has important implications for our views about what is and is not possible in nature.
Now, a newly published paper by one of us posits that dissociation can offer a solution to a critical problem in our current understanding of the nature of reality. This requires some background, so bear with us.
According to the mainstream metaphysical view of physicalism, reality is fundamentally constituted by physical stuff outside and independent of mind. Mental states, in turn, should be explainable in terms of the parameters of physical processes in the brain.
A key problem of physicalism, however, is its inability to make sense of how our subjective experience of qualities - what it is like to feel the warmth of fire, the redness of an apple, the bitterness of disappointment and so on - could arise from mere arrangements of physical stuff.
Physical entities such as subatomic particles possess abstract relational properties, such as mass, spin, momentum and charge. But there is nothing about these properties, or in the way particles are arranged in a brain, in terms of which one could deduce what the warmth of fire, the redness of an apple or the bitterness of disappointment feel like. This is known as the hard problem of consciousness.
To circumvent this problem, some philosophers have proposed an alternative: that experience is inherent to every fundamental physical entity in nature. Under this view, called "constitutive panpsychism," matter already has experience from the get-go, not just when it arranges itself in the form of brains. Even subatomic particles possess some very simple form of consciousness. Our own human consciousness is then (allegedly) constituted by a combination of the subjective inner lives of the countless physical particles that make up our nervous system.
However, constitutive panpsychism has a critical problem of its own: there is arguably no coherent, non-magical way in which lower-level subjective points of view - such as those of subatomic particles or neurons in the brain, if they have these points of view - could combine to form higher-level subjective points of view, such as yours and ours. This is called the combination problem and it appears just as insoluble as the hard problem of consciousness.
The obvious way around the combination problem is to posit that, although consciousness is indeed fundamental in nature, it isn't fragmented like matter. The idea is to extend consciousness to the entire fabric of spacetime, as opposed to limiting it to the boundaries of individual subatomic particles. This view - called "cosmopsychism" in modern philosophy, although our preferred formulation of it boils down to what has classically been called "idealism" - is that there is only one, universal, consciousness. The physical universe as a whole is the extrinsic appearance of universal inner life, just as a living brain and body are the extrinsic appearance of a person's inner life.
You don't need to be a philosopher to realize the obvious problem with this idea: people have private, separate fields of experience. We can't normally read your thoughts and, presumably, neither can you read ours. Moreover, we are not normally aware of what's going on across the universe and, presumably, neither are you. So, for idealism to be tenable, one must explain - at least in principle - how one universal consciousness gives rise to multiple, private but concurrently conscious centers of cognition, each with a distinct personality and sense of identity.
And here is where dissociation comes in. We know empirically from DID that consciousness can give rise to many operationally distinct centers of concurrent experience, each with its own personality and sense of identity. Therefore, if something analogous to DID happens at a universal level, the one universal consciousness could, as a result, give rise to many alters with private inner lives like yours and ours. As such, we may all be alters - dissociated personalities - of universal consciousness.
Moreover, as we've seen earlier, there is something dissociative processes look like in the brain of a patient with DID. So, if some form of universal-level DID happens, the alters of universal consciousness must also have an extrinsic appearance. We posit that this appearance is life itself: metabolizing organisms are simply what universal-level dissociative processes look like.
Idealism is a tantalizing view of the nature of reality, in that it elegantly circumvents two arguably insoluble problems: the hard problem of consciousness and the combination problem. Insofar as dissociation offers a path to explaining how, under idealism, one universal consciousness can become many individual minds, we may now have at our disposal an unprecedentedly coherent and empirically grounded way of making sense of life, the universe and everything.
Bernardo Kastrup has a Ph.D. in computer engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology and specializations in artificial intelligence and reconfigurable computing. He has worked as a scientist in some of the world's foremost research laboratories, including the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories. Bernardo has authored many academic papers and books on philosophy and science. His most recent book is "The Idea of the World: A multi-disciplinary argument for the mental nature of reality," based on rigorous analytic argument and empirical evidence. For more information, freely downloadable papers, videos, etc., please visit www.bernardokastrup.com.
Adam Crabtree is on the faculty of the Centre for Training in Psychotherapy, Toronto. He is a clinician who has treated many cases of severe forms of DID overs the past 30 years. He has written extensively about the history of psychodynamic psychotherapy from the time of Franz Anton Mesmer to the present, tracing the development of ideas about dissociation in the West, particularly in his book From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (1993).
Edward F. Kelly is a professor in the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), a research unit within the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia Medical School. He served as lead author of Irreducible Mind (2007) and Beyond Physicalism (2015), which systematically explore empirical and theoretical topics related to the primacy of mind in nature. His research interests currently focus on intensive neuroimaging studies of altered states of consciousness in exceptional subjects of various kinds.
Reader Comments
You can say "...what is above us..." if it's meaning that we exist within it( Consciousness ).
You can 'prove' it too to yourself...so long as you don't prove it with your intellect of the mind.
You may take what I write in the spirit of you namesake. That is - a front row seat in the mad-house. They say seeing is believing but that is backwards - and so to recognize the insane beliefs that make up an insane world is to open the freedom NOT to give them belief - as the innate power of a sanity that never truly left you - no matter what.
'Its just a shadow that he's seeing that you're chasing' - B Dylan
I think, therefore I am. - Descartes
Mind being one, leaves the segregative belief and experience in a mutually self-reinforcing fig-leaf thinking over the naked emperor or indeed lack of true substance for the identity in fear of invalidity - or indeed sinfulness. However this undoing of 'ego-dynamic; is not an engagement of ego dynamics but the result of a simple willingness opening to innocence of being.
Jesus' healing of a lawless and feared man whose name/nature was legion is of the same truth.
Regardless the ways of approaching it - I see that we are effectively engaged in a dissociated reversal 'consciousness' - and all attempts to fit the truth or new wine into the paradigm of 'define, predict and control, deliver our firstborn to Herod - metaphocically speaking.
What we call beliefs tend to be personality or identity -maskings or presentations.
But belief equals reality experience - because we GIVE reality TO relationships, situations, objects and events.
Such is the primary function of One Meaning given to All - infinitely expressed.
(Looking at Victor Frankl's T shirt quote on the right side of the page).
But the decision or wish to give private meanings for a self-alone and apart is to 'separate giving and receiving' that is - to deny a truly shared inherence for a private inheritance that conflicts us with Reality - by engaging in imaged forms invested with emotional energy.
"I WANT IT THUS!". In what way DOESN'T this 'set us up for a fall'?
But reality doesn't conflict with anything and assigning a destructive intent or function to truth is merely projecting our own wishing onto an IMAGE of God, truth or Reality - defended against AS a source of terror. In other words, dissociated and denied under magical, mythical and rationalised masking.
Mind is One in shared being - and seems alone and apart in unshared or withheld (private) thinking. The Voice for One in All is the undoing of the miscreations of the Voice for one apart and set over in judgement - and thus generating the experience of subjection as the cost of 'winning'. But you are the whole Cast of personae - even though the mind and world are predicated to cast out the hated or feared - as if to have got rid of them or mitigated their pain.
The idea of entanglement as a mutually reinforcing nightmare - contrasts with the recognition and gratitude for share being - or the miracle as witness to love as unified purpose. Shared purpose is shared mind. Hate by definition cannot actually share - though joining in hate will reinforce the decision to separate against what we most fear or hate to acknowledge in ourself.
Opening awareness of such a choice - AS a choice - is the 'upstream' or prior recognition from which and as which to flow naturally as a more truly aligned choice.
the ego hopes to regain control or get a better handle on the world - and that is its remit - but reacting within the framing of a problem always reinforces the framing as the determiner or limiter of outcomes. So we become ingenious at protecting the problem by our attempts to solve it - as well as fragmenting into ever more powerless experience of limitation, depletion, of conflict and its suppression.
Persona disorder is identifying exclusively in our masking strategies. This is not unlike identifying in our own private reflections that take meaning from relational communications as violating our 'peace' or interfering with our plans or failing our fantasy of how our life should be. Wilful possession operates a self dispossessing intent as if to add to our 'self' but this is where the mind usurps a true willingness.
Vigilance against deceit is not cynical and suspicious so much as self-honest to our own proclivities relative to awakening responsibility for a greater love. At some point we are simply not available for (double-)thinking or perceptions that once seemed meaningful. But only as a result of aligning in a true choice that allows the false to fade by non use. This is different from assigning the false with a negative charge and seeking to oppose, deny or eradicate it. THAT is how we 'came in'.
Multiple personalities are unhealed pastlives vying for healing.... (kinda like stuck in purgatory, they know not they are alive/they know not they are dead). Manytimes they are one's clanmember lives acting as "entities" ... not necessarily malefic, just in need of FLOW (movement in the River of Time herself).
When people talk/act differently than what "they naturally would"... an entity has taken over.
Could be beneficial too. (AS .. there is no bad nor good).
This spirit stuff /past lives could be real, but for the time being let's use real data instead of inventing things to explain behaviors.
Thoughts are expressions of purpose, intent, desire and focus of accepted value.
All of which is intimate to your being and explicate in your results or feedback as experience that they bring forth.
I see spirit as purpose - and the personification of split purpose as the conflicted mind - that operates through the mask of persona.
That we have our physical world experience through such a means is forgotten in the attempt to find out what physical reality is - or rather find out how it works so as to manipulate and control it.
Well one of the ways it works is for form to follow function, and for networks of communication to establish neural pathways that can then enable a stable focusing within an otherwise overwhelming ego-alien experience. In other words the brain-body is used as a limiter or transducer of stepped down frequencies and intensities to a trickle in which some sense of a private control can seem real - and serve as a model of consciousness development.
Past lives do not have to be 'past' so much as entangled personality themes.
Multiple focus within a body is a different form than multiple focus assigned to many bodies - but of the same theme of conflicted themes worked out upon or through the body.
Imagination can serve a negative or limiting and self-conflicting agenda - unless serving a unified purpose.
Perhaps you may appreciate that unified purpose is aligned with true function - rather than generating conditions in which to follow ideas that are dysfunctional.
Data in and of itself is completely neutral or meaningless - until given meaning by purpose (spirit) in terms that are recognisable or coherent to who you are in terms of what you have explored and experienced.
If you are considering that you are in a simulated reality - then all the data needed to make it real to you is included within that reality experience. But if that simulation is your own making - even if seeming to be at the hand of others - then it must be possible for you to catch yourself in the act of making it - rather than a default reaction in its 'movie' script. Opening curiosity and willingness to question is not the same as wanting to make it true or untrue. Though it is natural to want to be free of illegitimate limitations that have negative results so as to come back into a true and truly shared appreciation.
Of course anyone conditioned so as to acquire a second nature that usurps or masks and covers over the first - has to wake up to a more direct and intimate appreciation or recognition than what thinking has made under emotionally backed 'incentives'. In this sense we have to meet our fears and pass their 'stop signs' and this is an inner readiness that has outer reflections or synchronicities.
It is unwise for the infant to leave the boundaries of its parent protected environment before the responsibilities have developed to support doing so. Therefore challenging or questioning our reality experience is not 'breaking it' to set a new world order - as if freedom is without relational integrity, and can make itself 'lord' or power by means of seeing how things behave so as to manipulate them.
The brain does funny things in certain states that could make you feel things are real. Just woke up today from a dream where I was convinced that I had already retired and didn't have to go to work. I had to willingly convince myself that it wasn't real. This is the exact problem with the mind and in dreams it's understandable, but if you go around claiming this stuff is real, I might as well declare that my dream was real because it felt real. See my problem with all of this stuff? It's not a thing that you can test properly. Meanwhile, I was able to wake up and see my work clothes ready and schedule on my computer to tell me that the dream was not real.
Consciousness: A battle between your beliefs and perceptions?
Imagine you're at a magic show, in which the performer suddenly vanishes. Of course, you ultimately know that the person is probably just hiding somewhere. Yet it continues to look as if the...It is important to remember that behavioral disorders as listed in the DSM are arbitrary diagnosis with no foundation in testable organic disease. ("...the various versions of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual rest only on consensus." --p3 Lexicon of Lunacy) This is why the APA has co-opted MRI scans to "prove" their presumption behavior has an organic source.
As Dr Szasz pointed out to me several years ago, MRIs only show something is happening in the brain with behavioral changes, and such physicians as these are confusing apparent correlation with causation, thinking that if they can identify the locus of brain activity controlling behavior--a function of the mind which is a metaphysical thing, they can then arbitrarily force socially acceptable behavior upon people by screwing with their brain chemistry. That was the entire point of Dr Ewen Cameron's psychic driving as the foundation for MK Ultra and its descendants. All he succeeded in doing was messing with apparent behavioral changes through the use of terror, trauma, and twisted perceptions of reality (Bourne Identity).
"For three centuries, the idea that every "mental illness" will prove to be a bona fide brain disease was a hypothesis that could be supported or opposed. However, after the 1960s, this hypothesis became increasingly accepted as a scientific fact. Of course, it is still possible to say that mental illnesses do not exist. But since only a charlatan, a fool, or a fanatic disputes facts or opposes science, such a critic is likely to be dismissed as irrational, or worse.
Thus, for the time being at least, psychiatrists and their powerful allies have succeeded in persuading the scientific community, the courts, the media, and the general public that the conditions they call "mental disorders" are diseases-that is, phenomena independent of human
motivation or will. This is a curious development, for, until recently, only psychiatrists-who know little about medicine and less about science embraced such blind physical reductionism. Most scientists knew better. Michael Polanyi wrote:
We can see then that, though rooted in the body, the mind is free in its actions-exactly as our common sense knows it to be free. The mind harnesses neuro-physiological mechanisms; though it depends on them, it is not determined by them." p5 Lexicon of Lunacy, 1993