If the Trinity blows your mind, hang on for this new article from Scientific American, which posits that multiple personalities may be the key to the “hard problem of consciousness”, i.e. how the capacity for subjective experience can arise from purely physical processes. Computer engineer and philosopher Bernardo Kastrup, psychotherapist and historian Adam Crabtree, and neuropsychiatry professor Edward F. Kelly argue in the affirmative for the question, “Could Multiple Personality Disorder Explain Life, the Universe and Everything?”

To summarize: Brain imaging shows real physical state changes corresponding to dissociated identities, compared to no changes in a control group of actors pretending that they had multiple personalities or “alters”. For instance, sight receptors were switched off in the brain of a sighted woman when her blind alter was in charge. “There is also compelling clinical data showing that different alters can be concurrently conscious and see themselves as distinct identities… The massive literature on the subject confirms the consistent and uncompromising sense of separateness experienced by the alter personalities. It also displays compelling evidence that the human psyche is constantly active in producing personal units of perception and action that might be needed to deal with the challenges of life.”

Meanwhile, philosophers of science have been at a loss to explain how the brain produces the mind. If we have to describe everything in terms of physical causes (no magical or supernatural dualism), how could consciousness arise from combining particles that lack this quality? Some philosophers have posited that all matter does possess awareness. But then how do these billions of fragments cohere into higher-level unified beings? We don’t experience ourselves as a multitude of self-aware electrons.

This is where it gets wonderfully weird:

The obvious way around the combination problem is to posit that, although consciousness is indeed fundamental in nature, it isn’t fragmented like matter. The idea is to extend consciousness to the entire fabric of spacetime, as opposed to limiting it to the boundaries of individual subatomic particles. This view—called “cosmopsychism” in modern philosophy, although our preferred formulation of it boils down to what has classically been called “idealism”—is that there is only one, universal, consciousness. The physical universe as a whole is the extrinsic appearance of universal inner life, just as a living brain and body are the extrinsic appearance of a person’s inner life.

You don’t need to be a philosopher to realize the obvious problem with this idea: people have private, separate fields of experience. We can’t normally read your thoughts and, presumably, neither can you read ours. Moreover, we are not normally aware of what’s going on across the universe and, presumably, neither are you. So, for idealism to be tenable, one must explain—at least in principle—how one universal consciousness gives rise to multiple, private but concurrently conscious centers of cognition, each with a distinct personality and sense of identity.

And here is where dissociation comes in. We know empirically from DID that consciousness can give rise to many operationally distinct centers of concurrent experience, each with its own personality and sense of identity. Therefore, if something analogous to DID happens at a universal level, the one universal consciousness could, as a result, give rise to many alters with private inner lives like yours and ours. As such, we may all be alters—dissociated personalities—of universal consciousness.

Moreover, as we’ve seen earlier, there is something dissociative processes look like in the brain of a patient with DID. So, if some form of universal-level DID happens, the alters of universal consciousness must also have an extrinsic appearance. We posit that this appearance is life itself: metabolizing organisms are simply what universal-level dissociative processes look like.

This made me want to stand up and cheer. Is it heresy, for religions that believe that “God is One”? Not necessarily. This model still posits a universal consciousness that is, in some sense, more fundamental than the appearance of fragmentation. Many mystical traditions suggest that the divine unity voluntarily scattered into many forms to produce the created world, while retaining some overarching transcendent power.

For those who recoil from the idea of attributing a “negative” mental health diagnosis to God, it might help to learn that numerous folks in the multiple-personality community don’t see their condition as a disorder that should be cured by integration into a single “front” identity. The blog Ex Uno Plures and cartoonist LB Lee’s Healthy Multiplicity site are excellent sources of #ownvoices education on this topic. These authors offer philosophical and experience-based reasons why dissociation is not always, or only, a trauma symptom. Em Flynn’s piece “Plurality for Skeptics” is a good place to start:

The problem with “integration evangelism,” as many people here call the idea that all systems must integrate, is that there’s an assumption that everyone is born “normal,” and should be returned to “normal.” It’s similar to the fundamentalist Christian idea that gay people are “fallen heterosexuals,” and the cissexist idea that transgender people are altered members of their assigned gender, rather than members of their identified gender (or nongender, as the case may be). In this worldview, everyone belongs to a set of idealized “types” that are viewed as universal, and any variation from that type is either pathology or an attempt to be “different” to seek attention.

Besides, I wonder if the entire way that Western philosophy privileges monism is bound up with our besetting sins of imperialism, exclusionary religion, and totalitarian ideology. All these failures of empathy share the presumption that singularity is saner, purer, and holier than diversity. If dissociative identities are not a flaw in God, we don’t have to insist that everyone worship the same alter, or that the highest form of worship is to surrender and erase our personal wills within God’s will.

Trauma theology might be the most orthodox theology there is.