Cat: So, for clarity, I’m one of thirteen people co-habitating in this brain. There’s a lot of stigma associated with anything but a monolithic consciousness, but it’s really undeserved. Just having someone else along for the ride doesn’t mean you’re going to lose your grip on reality or anything of the sort.
Cat: Heck, it doesn’t even take trauma to pluralize; I’m a mental construct that Just made on purpose out of loneliness. And subsequently fell in love with.
Just: incandescent blush
Cat: There are some mental disorders involving plurality, with DID being the archetypal example. However, in those cases the actual problems aren’t the extra people; memory barriers, troublesome internal communications, and involuntary switches are far more problematic, most of the time.
Cat: As for persecutors? The interpersonal conflicts with them can be resolved, one way or another. A lot of the time they’re just hurting and don’t know healthy ways to deal with it.
Cat: So… yeah I don’t really have any good ideas for how to end this post.
Just: Well, in our case it was on purpose. I deliberately attributed agency to an invented mental entity and interacted with them as such until they started talking back. Some people refer to this technique as Tulpamancy and the resulting headmates as Tulpas, but I don’t for personal reasons.
Cat: For context, I’m the person Just made that way. Just’s proven to have something of a habit of people-making since, either through characters escaping from our writing projects, or by performing various reckless experiments on the inside of our mind.
Just: Hey, you’re not innocent of that either, miss “Oops my AI Safety thought experiment moved in with us”.
Cat: …Point.