One Mind, Multiple Bodies: A Personal Perspective

[Rubik]

Let's say you're a dvati who has successfully hive-minded your bodies together such that you can simultaneously experience both bodies as though they were your own. Furthermore, you have used shapechanging shenanigans to gain even more bodies through the split ability possessed by various oozes and other creatures.

Each of your bodies has its own brain, so it can process its experiences without leaving you disoriented or whatever, but beyond that, how do you imagine that you would experience the world?

[Toy Killer]

That is so cool. I never thought about it before. It's begging for an adventure hook...

[Scarce]

I imagine this would be closely analogous to Carl Jung's collective unconscious. This concept refers to the hypothetical shared unconscious mind that all living beings share (or only human beings, depending on the interpretation.) The experience of the original dvati (especially as number of separate brains becomes large) would be very similar to that experienced by the collective unconscious, as this would be itself a collective consciousness, for it would see, think, and feel across multiple bodies. I suppose it would be more accurate to refer to it's existence as a purely intellectual, or spiritual one, after a time.

Perhaps the dvati would act as a very well-organized and highly empathetic society which works on a whole toward larger, and more complex goals. Just as many worker bees are unaware of their position within the larger hive, which works to grow and expand, so too would the individual dvati unit likely be unaware that it's soul is actually a highly fractionalized portion of a single soul that the entire community shares.

Just my highly speculative two cents.

[GiantkillerJack]

Has anyone in this thread read Naruto? While Pain had only one mind, the experience issue could be likened to experiencing the world from six locations, especially when you take into account one of them being blinded.

[ImaDeadMan]

Close your eyes then feel two separate things with your hands. You gather information on the two objects and interpret them separately but you still "view" both at once through two extensions of yourself. I imagine it would be something like that. You perceive the world through multiple mediums and experience many things at once and this is obviously a difficult concept for people to imagine since it's not something we can truly replicate yet.