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Comment by vbuwivbiu | Hacker News Reader

and, as Scott Aaronson points out, why assume the brain only hosts a single consciousness* ? Maybe there are multiple consciousnesses hosted by each person's brain, and "you" are one of them at any given time - you'd have no idea the others are conscious.

* (not to be confused with multiple-personality disorder)

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Any normal person is able to remember, in any given moment, the "experience" (in a very broad sense - meaning cognitive and emotional processes) it had in its recent past (modulo memory limitations caused by various factors). Wouldn't that imply that there is a single consciousness inside each brain? i.e a single "state machine"?

Bladerunner did a fantastic job of challenging this idea. If your memories can't be trusted then who are you, really?

a thread of experience = a consciousness yes, but you'd have no consciousness of any other such threads of experience that may be instantiated by your brain

Multiple consciousnesses can have the same experience in parallel. Experiments with a split brain patients shows that they probably have two personalities concurrently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain#Case_studies_of_sp...

This is a good line of thought, and one recent practical utility I had for this was, while meditating, invite the others in your mind to meditate with you as you discover them. Another is to let them communicate with each other and empathize with each other subconsciously.

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