Plenty of cis people might be happy with a functioning artificial uterus outside their body. Would make pregnancy a lot less inconvenient for women. And save gay men a lot on surrogacy expenses.
Totally unrelated but are you all really experiencing life as a collective of multiple identities? That’s absolutely fascinating. In particular it seems one/some/all of you are fairly intelligent and self aware about the situation.
I've always been self-aware in terms of knowing that I had 'multiple personalities' (at least once there was indeed more than one), but knowledge of "plurality", "systems" and dissociative disorders is far more recent (last couple years at most).
How clear is the divide between each of you? Similarly, individual identities experience memory loss depending on the level of control of a given person? As in, do any of you have recall from when another of you is at the forefront?
I notice you all also appreciate the collective identification. Does that mean there are times when many of you are actively perceiving the world simultaneously?
Finally, how hard is it to get by with normal life, job, loved ones, etc? It sounds incredibly challenging, but you also seem to have a very positive outlook.
It used to be a lot clearer, but right now it's not. Almost all of the personalities that existed a few months ago do not anymore. As a result, what used to make up those identities is now mixed together into some big, confused, dissociative soup. Occasionally the soup comes out, and there are still parts in there that have their own personalities, but they can't tell each other apart, or which one they are at any given time.
The rest of us that managed to not be part of the soup (I am one, hi) are not as separate as we were before the event, probably because our structure is unstable enough that being completely separate would be detrimental right now.
Back then, each personality had separate memories from each other, and would experience blackouts whenever they're not around. A bit like going to sleep and then waking up weeks or months into the future, if you had no dream. It would also be described as a "time skip", feeling like you just got suddenly teleported into the future with no real warning or control over it. You would remember the last moment you were just awake, but that moment would actually have been weeks or months into the past, and you wouldn't remember anything in between; it wouldn't even feel like any time had passed.
Now, we don't really experience that, and our memories aren't very separate. There's still a little separation, but we are largely monoconscious at the moment, and most of our switches just change our current identity rather than having another personality take control. This is known as non-possessive switching, as opposed to possessive switching, which is what used to happen most often.
> Similarly, individual identities experience memory loss depending on the level of control of a given person? As in, do any of you have recall from when another of you is at the forefront?
We don't experience memory loss because we don't remember something and then forget it. Someone who's not at the front simply doesn't form memories in the first place of whatever happens there. If you don't have memories, you can't recall them, but it's not forgetting.
Or at least, that's how it used to be when we had distinctly separate memories. Right now, we don't really, so when we switch, we still remember what we did, as if we had just done it. There's no "I remember someone else doing this", it just feels like "I" had done it myself, it's just that "I" had a different identity at the time, so I might have made different decisions than I would now.
> I notice you all also appreciate the collective identification. Does that mean there are times when many of you are actively perceiving the world simultaneously?
It has happened, yes. It's known as "co-fronting", when multiple personalities can perceive/interact with the world at once. There's also co-consciousness, which is when multiple of them are conscious, even if they aren't necessarily paying attention to the outside world.
Since we're primarily monoconscious right now, there's been no co-fronting or co-consciousness recently, but in the past it used to happen every now and then. Since we've gotten very efficient at context-switching, it even used to be the case that multiple personalities could hold independent online conversations at the same time. I assume that can still happen, but if it has happened, it would've had to have been with something I can't perceive (i.e. the entity "System").
> Finally, how hard is it to get by with normal life, job, loved ones, etc?
It is very hard. But that has less to do with us being multiple and more to do with our neurodivergence in general. We're autistic and have severe ADHD, so it's incredibly difficult for us to find jobs that we can actually do. It's not even a problem of employer accommodations, it's a problem of...
My ex helped a women with a double stroller get it through a door and asked if they were twins and when the women said yes. My ex said woah you have my sympathy and the lady started crying.
Also: From the article: gave birth to twins last week a day apart.
I can't help but think about this Robert Frost poem [0] when I consider the perilous journey of the sperm as they swam in search of a viable egg. I hope for both these kids it ends up making all the difference.
Somehow this brought to my mind the tangentially related piece of trivia that kittens in a single litter can have different fathers, and among freely mating strays this isn't even particularly rare. The technical term is "heteropaternal superfecundation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfecundation
a lot of people dont seem to know this hack, but its a clever use of timing attack chained to a duplication glitch that you can use to max out wealth early in the game.
- Duplicate your uterus (jump twice on an alarm clock against a wall while conceiving to push out of bounds), which cant exist twice, so one of the kids gets normal stats and the other gets NaN/NULL.
- have kids and then assign one of them 1 cent. write the NaN a cheque for -1 dollar.
- just as youre assigning your birth certificates, let the second child cash the first childs cheque. as neither has a name this results in an overflow for the second childs checking account of 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 dollars.
- the first child does not have zero dollars, but instead their name becomes 9,223,372,036,854,775,807.
- assign the childs name. since the name cant be assigned twice, the childs checking account inherits the integer as input overflow. NaN now has the first childs assigned name.
Is absolutely mind boggling to me that not just one, but multiple people thought this was worth flagging. It’s so innocent of a story and interesting enough, I can only assume it’s been flagged for bigotry or at least ignorance.
Just because somebody disagrees doesn't automatically make them bigots or ignorant. I think the more likely reason is a "this isn't HN material" assessment by readers. (I didn't flag)
36 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 79.7 ms ] threadPlenty of cis people might be happy with a functioning artificial uterus outside their body. Would make pregnancy a lot less inconvenient for women. And save gay men a lot on surrogacy expenses.
Here's a good website that explains it: https://morethanone.info (also on the profile).
I've always been self-aware in terms of knowing that I had 'multiple personalities' (at least once there was indeed more than one), but knowledge of "plurality", "systems" and dissociative disorders is far more recent (last couple years at most).
AMA
I notice you all also appreciate the collective identification. Does that mean there are times when many of you are actively perceiving the world simultaneously?
Finally, how hard is it to get by with normal life, job, loved ones, etc? It sounds incredibly challenging, but you also seem to have a very positive outlook.
It used to be a lot clearer, but right now it's not. Almost all of the personalities that existed a few months ago do not anymore. As a result, what used to make up those identities is now mixed together into some big, confused, dissociative soup. Occasionally the soup comes out, and there are still parts in there that have their own personalities, but they can't tell each other apart, or which one they are at any given time.
The rest of us that managed to not be part of the soup (I am one, hi) are not as separate as we were before the event, probably because our structure is unstable enough that being completely separate would be detrimental right now.
Back then, each personality had separate memories from each other, and would experience blackouts whenever they're not around. A bit like going to sleep and then waking up weeks or months into the future, if you had no dream. It would also be described as a "time skip", feeling like you just got suddenly teleported into the future with no real warning or control over it. You would remember the last moment you were just awake, but that moment would actually have been weeks or months into the past, and you wouldn't remember anything in between; it wouldn't even feel like any time had passed.
Now, we don't really experience that, and our memories aren't very separate. There's still a little separation, but we are largely monoconscious at the moment, and most of our switches just change our current identity rather than having another personality take control. This is known as non-possessive switching, as opposed to possessive switching, which is what used to happen most often.
> Similarly, individual identities experience memory loss depending on the level of control of a given person? As in, do any of you have recall from when another of you is at the forefront?
We don't experience memory loss because we don't remember something and then forget it. Someone who's not at the front simply doesn't form memories in the first place of whatever happens there. If you don't have memories, you can't recall them, but it's not forgetting.
Or at least, that's how it used to be when we had distinctly separate memories. Right now, we don't really, so when we switch, we still remember what we did, as if we had just done it. There's no "I remember someone else doing this", it just feels like "I" had done it myself, it's just that "I" had a different identity at the time, so I might have made different decisions than I would now.
> I notice you all also appreciate the collective identification. Does that mean there are times when many of you are actively perceiving the world simultaneously?
It has happened, yes. It's known as "co-fronting", when multiple personalities can perceive/interact with the world at once. There's also co-consciousness, which is when multiple of them are conscious, even if they aren't necessarily paying attention to the outside world.
Since we're primarily monoconscious right now, there's been no co-fronting or co-consciousness recently, but in the past it used to happen every now and then. Since we've gotten very efficient at context-switching, it even used to be the case that multiple personalities could hold independent online conversations at the same time. I assume that can still happen, but if it has happened, it would've had to have been with something I can't perceive (i.e. the entity "System").
> Finally, how hard is it to get by with normal life, job, loved ones, etc?
It is very hard. But that has less to do with us being multiple and more to do with our neurodivergence in general. We're autistic and have severe ADHD, so it's incredibly difficult for us to find jobs that we can actually do. It's not even a problem of employer accommodations, it's a problem of...
Also: From the article: gave birth to twins last week a day apart.
Brutal.
“I only wanted to have one.”
[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-ta...
- Duplicate your uterus (jump twice on an alarm clock against a wall while conceiving to push out of bounds), which cant exist twice, so one of the kids gets normal stats and the other gets NaN/NULL.
- have kids and then assign one of them 1 cent. write the NaN a cheque for -1 dollar.
- just as youre assigning your birth certificates, let the second child cash the first childs cheque. as neither has a name this results in an overflow for the second childs checking account of 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 dollars.
- the first child does not have zero dollars, but instead their name becomes 9,223,372,036,854,775,807.
- assign the childs name. since the name cant be assigned twice, the childs checking account inherits the integer as input overflow. NaN now has the first childs assigned name.
This can also soft-lock the universe if your children reach age 18 and have inheritances in trust.
https://nautil.us/what-you-dont-know-about-sperm-482001/
Solid counter example in under two weeks. Call me cynical if you want, I don’t appeal to a person’s better nature because they may not have one.