[montyf]

> Otherwise though, I found that his personas largely reflected his current emotional state. One persona would almost always be "out" when he was upset with a friend, or struggling with some stress. Another was more childlike and playful. He described them as always there, and even though he appeared to allow one of them to be "in charge" as he put it, he said the voices were always in the back of his mind, directing his thoughts.

That doesn't sound like a disorder. The abnormal thing about your friend is that he is more aware than the average person.

The illusion of a single, unified self is just that. When you talk to people in your dreams, who are you talking to? Their responses are quite intelligent, if you listen. When you say embarrassing things under anesthesia with no memory of it, who said those things? When you get irrationally angry, who the hell is it that comes out? Same with the alcoholic who swears one day he'll quit and forgets about it the next day -- different people.

Moreover, there are huge areas of your brain that work quietly and subconsciously (from your perspective). Not only are they conscious, they're smarter than you. They prove it through intuition and gut feeling, if you listen.

> while his condition lent itself to occasional mood swings, he made a point of _respecting_ his voices, allowed them to become a part of him, and I feel had largely learned to cope.

I'm sure you didn't mean it this way, but I found your tone somewhat condescending. It's not his alternate selves that he needs to "cope" with, but society's notion that something is wrong with him. This might sound too new-age for people, but the more aware you are, the more you realize just how sick everyone else is. We literally have conscious beings imprisoned within us.

> He had figured himself out for better or worse

Probably figured himself out better than the rest of us ever will.

[red75prime]

Broca's area is certainly expert in language, but when it runs on its own you get "embarrassing things under anesthesia". The central control of all subsystems is essential for coherent functioning.

[montyf]

Is central control necessary? I know it's a tough pill to swallow, but I encourage you to think about it some more. And don't think in terms of subsystems but rather real entities.

[red75prime]

The subsystems, which I perceive in myself, don't have interesting goals (food) or don't have separate goals at all (motion planning). What's the point of thinking of them as real entities? I don't have independently acting models of other people in my mind, only the model of myself.

Well, language generation subsystems sometimes generates ambiguous statements, which can be perceived as condescending or offensive, but I'm weeding that out.

[el_cid]

Well considering that a large sub-set of people who hear voices commit suicide and/or kill their relatives in cold blood I would say that yes, central control is necessary.

[creep]

We commit suicide because our parents, friends, and the community as a whole are trying to forcibly remove something that can never be wiped away, causing anxiety and fear which amplify every negative aspect of the voices/beings/visions. Suicide is never a risk for me when I have someone to talk to who will listen to me and take me seriously. It's a risk when I feel as though my existence is a mistake because almost everyone treats it as such. It's not a mistake. There's a reason why every sz person I know has a very spiritual aspect to their voices. I've accepted it and I listen, and I gain benefit, but most people with such experiences are told there is something inherently wrong with them and that their experiences are artificial. To that I say, it's no more artificial than your reality.

[creep]

Thanks for this, m8. Never thought I'd see something like this on HN that wasn't downvoted to hell.

I "hear voices" too. They tell me when to eat, they talk me down when I'm upset, they talk me into becoming upset, they tell me what to say in the moment, and many other things. Mostly they are distinguishable-- separate from "me" in ways that I still identify with an "I", but clearly also part of me in ways that I have no identity.

I still struggle a lot with identity because it seems that everyone has one even though I know, theoretically, that's not really the case. Identity is a tool, and it's always seemed to me that other people feel more cohesive than I do-- that they are nimble with the tool and it's natural, or automatic. It feels as though I'm composed of too many moving parts to really call myself one person. For a while there I was trying to find it, but I don't think it's really there. There are "higher" parts of me and "lower" parts of me, and all become relevant at one time or another, and they appear to me when relevant. I think we all get echoes from the past and future, from things that are/were/will be connected to us or are somehow more a part of us-- related to "us" by some common factor-- and so I have been trying to narrow those down. It helps a lot to just listen and to talk back. Maybe ultimately all of these parts culminate to one thing, synchronize in some way on some other level, and on this level here I am working in part to synchronize them. There are some kinks. Obviously the voices/selves/beings are not all in agreement. My ego feels less like a definition and more like a synthesizer now.

Then there is stuff to do in the "real world", and I have to find a way to balance the interests of every consciousness inside me to create something that represents some need, cohesively. And I have to do it all the time.

I probably sound sick to most people, but like you said I don't think I am. I think it's difficult to deal with, definitely, but it's a duty of a kind, and it's a challenge like anything else. There's healing to be done but not in the sense that I want to be free of the duty, but that the duty requires that I heal some parts. I think this is the natural state of things. Thank you for stating your thoughts on this, it's something I don't know how to express or spark in regular conversation so rarely do I get the chance to feel in communion in another way with another human on this.