RE: Defining The Mind #2: Is Consciousness Divisible?
I have not heard of the concept of Tulpas, but I find the concept of dissociative identity disorder (multiple personalities) to be very fascinating. I think that it is amazing how personalities within an individual with this disorder can have different handwriting styles, different dominant hands and even different allergies. I have heard of cases where one personality could be severely allergic to bees whereas other personalities within the same person are not. Its amazing how powerful our brains are. Unfortunately, the disorder tends to manifest itself within individuals who experience extremely traumatic upbringings. Such events force the mind to split so that the trauma can be compartmentalized among different individuals. This is why the norm for individuals with the disorder is to have upwards of 17 - 40 personalities. Repeated trauma keeps splitting the identities. Very sad but interesting as well.
In the case of imaginary friends, or Tulpas, maybe these are manifestations of our own subconscious. A persona of a portion of our own mind, like the people we experience within our dreams. Or maybe they are beings from another dimension - who knows.
Great post :)
Wow I havent heard about the allergy thing. That is really interesting.
There are some psychologists who suggest that we all have multiple personalities. Buisness you and causual you, happy you and sad you all fighting for control. But these come with little dissassociation keeping them all pretty similar.
It isnt untill these personalities have a reason to dissassociate inorder to escape the trauma that we get the disorder. Escaping the trauma means the personalities are forced to build new lives with an incomplete set of memories. Which is why the personalities tend to be so different from eachother.
That's very interesting.
I agree that we have different personas depending on the situation that we are in or who we are with. We certainly tend to act differently around our co-workers vs our family vs our friends. There is an interesting book about that sort of thing called the self illusion. Its basically a tour through psychological research on identity, memory and overall how our brains function. Basically its overall message is that the "self" is constantly shifting, adapting and changing overtime and to fit the current situation. There is no permanent "self" though we tend to believe that there is.