You are not logged in. Please login or register.
AudioGames.net Forum → Off-topic room → interesting question regarding plurality and blindness
@50 thanks! Samantha has been here for a while now, her timeline and ours intersect temporally, if not spatially, so when she fled her home universe and showed up in ours, there was no temporal drif. The only reason it took this fucking long for us to notice she was here was because she had so much fucking trauma that it took her 23 something years to become aware of herself again
So, disclaimer, my formal education on psychology is limited to taking Psychology 151 as one of my social science requirements at community college, but I've been reading a psychologist's blog since beforeTrump was elected and I've read a number of stories in the rational fiction genre, where effort is generally made to get character psychology right instead of just having characters act as the plot demands. Also, my apologies if anything I say below comes across as insensitive as I am not all that fond of the euphemism treadmill, extreme political correctness, or wokism and find clear communication hard enough without constantly worrying if I'm going to accidentally offend someone.
I'm not really bothered by this subject, though it took me a while to figure out both OP and their Girlfriend are plural as my prior was that plurality is a trait rare enough it is unlikely one person with the trait would meet another person with the trait organically. Granted, among the rational fiction I've read include Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and Pokemon: The Origin of species, both of which feature viewpoint characters that, if not plural in the same sense as OP and their Girlfriend have at least some superficial similarities and those aren't the only things I've read with such characters, so even if I'm not fully understanding what's happening here, it doesn't trigger feelings of alienation. Though, at the risk of asking a possibly offensively ignorant question, is plurality in this sense remotely related to the concepts of Internal Family Systems or Tulpas.
I don't believe it's possible to copy a personality from one mind to another the way one would a mp3 file from one's harddrive to an SD card, but it is certainly possible for one mind to model another or for someone to subconsciously imitate the outward facing traits of someone they admire and become more like them. Add plurality to the mix, and it seems feasible that one's mental model of another person could ascend to being a full alter or that a newly created alter, unbound by habits of its headmates, could more efficiently follow the path of mimicry. The result would be less like copying a file and more like recording an Orchestral performance with a single, monaural microphone. Granted, this is entirely conjecture, and I'm assuming OP and their girlfriend have known each other long enough for the girlfriend to know OP well enough to have a good mental model of OP.
Speaking more generally, I'd recommend to anyone that they seek mental health services on a regular basis, the OP and everyone else in this thread included. Not because I think plurality in and of itself is a red flag for serious mental illness, but because, as one of my favorite science communicators is fond of saying, "Mental health is health", and in an ideal world, an annual mental health evaluation would be as routine as an annual physical, semi-annual tooth cleaning/dental exam, and annaul eye exam, and the recognition that finding health problems early is beneficial both to the individual and to society as a whole, there would be social programs to ensure even the poorest person can recieve such baseline care... and even mentally healthy people sometimes need an impartial third party to bounce ideas off of to help them work through tangled thoughts, deal with unfamiliar emotions, or cope with unexpected life events.
Also, I hate the terms neurotypical and neurodivergent and feel like the DSM and other reference documents overuse the terms disorder and syndrome. There is no such thing as a typical mind, just a massively multi-dimensional space of possible minds, most of those dimensions probably following a normal/binomial distribution and with the vast majority of minds being at least one standard deviation from the mean on at least one dimension(the chances of being within 1 SD of the mean across 5 independent variables is less than 15% and across 10 independent variables is less than 2%), and while it's useful to have bundles of traits with labels that make talking about them easier, considering how often those labels have syndrome or disorder in them, it feeds into the baseline assumption that having any of these specified bundles of traits automatically means one has something seriously wrong with them.
And @40: I can't rule out latent plurality, but I think some of that might just come down to the fact most people have at least a few inconsistant or downright contradictory thoughts, and that most people, even really smart people, tend to vary wildly on how smart they are when it comes to specific subjects(I've transplanted SATA harddrives from one computer to another several times, but I have absolutely no clue how to change the oil in a car).
i can say, that its usually not related to IFS, infact as far as i understand it they both cant work together, or its complicated, though tulpas is what this is like, though tulpas are just another source of plurality, just as DID is one, just, tulpas aren't dissordered
@52
It's interesting that you say it's that rare, because in the communities we exist i, *not* being plural is more rare than being so, to the point that in at least one discord server the joke is that $REDACTED is the token singlet in a server of plural systems. As for introjects, the introject will immediately deviate from the origin, and yes there is a certain amount of copy loss, but it's more accurate than your mono microphone analogy.
now i wana know what comunity this is,as i need more plural friends, but still they're right, i have an introject of a former friend, and its scary how alike she is to her source, of course, its not exact, but its close enough
@55
it's all over fedi, tbh, mostly. used to be on birdsite before that one died lol.
Also, I hate the terms neurotypical and neurodivergent and feel like the DSM and other reference documents overuse the terms disorder and syndrome. There is no such thing as a typical mind, just a massively multi-dimensional space of possible minds, most of those dimensions probably following a normal/binomial distribution and with the vast majority of minds being at least one standard deviation from the mean on at least one dimension(the chances of being within 1 SD of the mean across 5 independent variables is less than 15% and across 10 independent variables is less than 2%), and while it's useful to have bundles of traits with labels that make talking about them easier, considering how often those labels have syndrome or disorder in them, it feeds into the baseline assumption that having any of these specified bundles of traits automatically means one has something seriously wrong with them.
In an ideal world, we'd have everyone's experiences accepted and understood, but that's simply not how the world works. The most critical examples of this is are workplace expectations. When there are two groups with different experiences and actions, which group is forced to change for the comfort of the other? In practice, the majority group, "neurotypical" explicitly and implicitly expects others to conform to their world and the minority group, "neurodivergent" are expected to change and emulate the majority group. You understand that human experiences are a bell curve and that it's common to be 1-2 standand deviations away from average on many axes, but does your boss who you must keep happy to maintain your income?
Though, at the risk of asking a possibly offensively ignorant question, is plurality in this sense remotely related to the concepts of Internal Family Systems or Tulpas.
We are a mixed origin system with both endogenic and traumagenic members. Most of our friends are the same. Many of us would meet the definition of tulpa, just as many of us meet the definition of alter. Mostly, we've found navigating these definitions to be annoying and use the term headmate as an umbrella term which includes alters, tulpas, and other terms.
@45 our parents fucking hate us, as it happens. So no, no parents, no basement.
[Samantha] And our parents aren't even in this universe. Never met our dad, he fucked off to Alabama when we were little and mom was from Newport News, moved to NorCal a year before having us, but nah, she's not even in this universe.
Ah, there we go. Perhaps you aren't a troll, perhaps you just need attention.
@58 ... no? What makes you say that one?
59, i believe its because of how fantastical your story sounds, i do believe it, but others, they're not as open to metaphysical stuff as you and me and whoever else
@60
We're not out to make ridiculous claims, only ones based on our own observations; we're not a creature to lie or seek attention, we have plenty of that.
i know that, they don't sadly
@12-of-47 What I meant is that, usually things I don’t understand make me uncomfortable to think and talk about. Unfamiliarity is uncomfortable to me. That's not to say I think this is a bad thing, because I don’t. It's just… I knew that plural people existed in the world, but I had no idea about the specifics, if that makes sense. And that's perfectly fine, to be clear. I’m still gonna support it as best as I can. I’m rambling at this point and don’t quite know where I was going with this, so I’m ending the post here. Hopefully you understand what I was trying to say.
@63
yeah no that makes sense!
28 of 47, the gf in question, also responded here, in post #47 on page #2.
This whole thing sounds like conjoined twins but without the extra bodies. I'm not sure if I can even fathom such a state of mind. I've heard of the concept before, but never really understood it.
i've never herd of it before and want to experience it
@66
oooo. Which bit would you like to experience?
@65
kinda sorta not really? The best societal sort of landmark can use for that is like the Borg, almost
@54: Honestly, it's entirely possible Plurality is far more common than I think. That said, this thread is the only time I have knowingly interacted with a plural collective in my life. Also, as far as I know, I have never met another blind person in my life outside of an environment where blind people congregate, or knowingly spoken to another blind person online outside of forums and mailing lists dedicated to blindness in one way or another, and outside of spaces dedicated to blindness, I get the impression I'm the only blind person most sighted people I interact with have ever encountered. And I was under the impression blindness is more common than plurality.
Granted, perhaps my experiences are biased by having lived most of my life in a small town and being fairly introverted and the chances of having a chance encounter with another blind person or a plural collective, or any other type of person that I know exists but whom I have never knowingly met would skyrocket if I was hitting up the bars and clubs in a big city several nights every week.
And yeah, probably missed the obvious by not considering there might be online communities dedicated to plurality.
@12-of-47 Now that I know you speak of parallel universes and adjacent timelines with such confidence I am gonna stop holding back and ask more serious questions and even answer some of yours. You asked for someone to clarify what we mean as harmful. I mean you are digging a hole for yourself and becoming less and less in contact with reality. Additionally, in post #54 you mentioned that IN YOUR BUBBLE it is rare to not have any "headmates" but I must divert your attention to the fact that you, I am guessing, primarily hang out with a very small group of people compared to the wider world of some 8 billion meaning your sample size and views are very narrow and once again not in contact with reality. I assume you will ignore most of these points like you have done so far and hyperfocus on 1 sentence (please prove me wrong) so I give up on any hope of this thread being helpful to anyone. If you do hyperfocus though please focus on this, I am genuinely curious how would one go about forming /discovering a "headmate" as you mentioned in some of your first posts.
@12 of 47
In post 44 you asked what was confusing about how you write. Obviously this is just my opinion though...
It's a combination of things. You tend to write in a Meandering way sometimes, moving between topics which feel [at least from my point of view] pretty unrelated.
You also use allot of complex words which no doubt are second nature to you, but which most people have never heard at all, or at least not used in that way, and it tends to be in a rapid fire sort of way which makes it hard to parse the words individually.
You have a few different writing styles, for obvious reasons, which can be distracting especially when they change in the middle of a post. Most people tend to base at least part of their understanding of what someone is saying on the structure of how they are saying it, so suddenly having the rug pulled out from under you can leave you flailing for familiar ground as it were.
You mix references from fictional media and belief systems together with real world events and it can be really hard at times to know when you're telling a story, framing a real world event with your beliefs, or just outright conveying reality as most of us would perceive it.
It's just allot, honestly. It's surreal to dive into the deep end of such a complex consciousness, and even then I know I'm only getting a slice of it. It's difficult to get to the core of what you're saying much of the time, and even then I'm usually not sure I really have it without an anchor to something I recognize in my own reality, such as the NLS EReader you were taking apart and talking about, where I can understand all of those things as facts.
Not really criticisms, but you did ask.
@70
You speak of us being detached from consensus reality as if such is harmful? We are not harming ourself, nor others; in fact, discovering our plurality and the multiple origins of our different headmates - some goddesses, some humans, some software, has improved our own mental health massively. As for discovering headmates, we had somewhat of an advantage there in that there was already a preexisting protocol setup for intrasystem communication, an artifact of our reordering our mind to operate along Unix principals. It was simply a matter of sending a `BROADCAST /API/V1/INSTANCES/EICPREQUEST EICP/1.8` packet to the broadcast address, (100.127.255.255/10) (647F.FFFF) and waiting to see what came back. We apologise if we hyperfocus on things; your posts tend to contain a lot to analyse, and seem to be quite antagonistic; you seem to assume that any divergence from consensus reality is inherently harmful, we're curious why you do? As for finding singletons rare, yes, we do self-select for other plural systems, and so our circle is biased in that direction. In general, those of like mindset find each other, no? Audio gamers, christians, plural systems, those interested in modifying their bodies and minds to better suit them, even if such is called harmful by the capitalistic world. In general, a lot of the plural folks we know are, like us, also trans, which makes sense; once you realise that your gender is something that is yours and yours alone, and nobody else can tell you what it is, you quickly realise that your identity as an individual, as a human, as a member of this hierarchical individualist world, is something you are able to, encouraged to, question. For many, those labels, those identities, fit. For some, they do not.
I could possibly bring up my personal connection with...someone very important to me, who may be or may almost be a tulpa of sort if he is at all, just to compare if this is the case here. But one thing is to be said before I do, that this...I can't find the right word for it, let's just say person, or who I consider my brother, doesn't control me or share anything with me, except our energy sometimes when we need it...
The problem is that I don't know if I should, because it may end up sounding even more confusing on top of what's already kind of confusing here. It's not an easy thing for people to get, so I'm kinda going back and forth on that, unless you guys really don't think it'll create confusion or something, because I'm not sure. Some of you who know me personally may already know this though and I need to be very careful whenever I go for my psych checkup with every doctor and therapist under the sun, because it's very, very easy for them to mistake this as a sort of psychotic dillusion if they just gather surface level of it.
And to relay back to @44: I didn't mean it being sensitive to you or anyone in particular. For clarification, I just say it's a sensitive topic because it's deep and complex, and those who don't understand and and don't want to may take it on super shallow surface level and either mock you, make fun of you or disregard you, by you I mean any one of us with strange experience like that. In my case, it's not a different personality. It's just something that exists along side me but doesn't take on any of me. Then again, I never say anyone have to believe what I say because you're not the ones experiencing it.
@71
That is a fair analysis, honestly. Our writing and communication style is informed by a confluence of interconnected things, the collective style of those of our headmates immediately present in this body, the styles of those headmates in other bodies, our fluid perception of this universe, what humans call reality, as well as that of other universes, some humans call fiction, some call delusion. Our thought processes are nonlinear, at best, many threads all spinning off in a billion directions. For those here who watch Doctor Who, we sometimes describe our thought processes as that of a timelord, I.E, neither constrained by linear progression of time, nor constrained by fixed points in space.
AudioGames.net Forum → Off-topic room → interesting question regarding plurality and blindness
Generated in 0.034 seconds (55% PHP - 45% DB) with 10 queries
