I thought I would just stick this here so write4u would see it.
I put you book recommendation to use in another forum where people were discussing multiple minds. Below is my post.
We have had several discussions of emergence here and even in physics it is controversial.
I would recommend that people read David Bohm’s “Wholeness and the Implicated Order”. Not because it offers answers but because it asks the right questions.
in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete, but which is in an unending process of movement and unfoldment.
Whatever the whole is, it is dependent on the properties of the parts. What makes life unique is that you can take pieces of the whole out and it will still function by adaptation. The definition of evolution is order through disorder. Every variant on which the process depends is an error in reproductive fidelity. Reproductive fidelity in a way is stasis or death. Every moment we are someone different than the moment before. As we move through space and time we are constantly adapting. The question of freewill is how much of that adaptation is conscious or intelligent. It turns out the entire process is “intelligent”. Intelligence can be defined as the ability to make choices. Choices define life. The ability to do one thing instead of another. To adapt to the environment. The process seems self-evident in terms of physical evolution but the same process plays out in what could be called abstract evolution.
We don’t think of simple organisms as having any abstract functions but that is not the case. You can think of abstraction as the simplification of a complex environment in which choices are made. You can think of intelligence then as the reduction of reality to its simplest practical form. A precondition for choice and a property of all life. In simple organisms the choices are fairly binary and more complex organisms as a multiplication of the process through colonization resulting in an exponential increase in choices. Despite the delusion we create consciousness is also a property of all life. Without self awareness no life would be possible. Higher consciousness is an elaboration through the colonial process both increasing creasing self awareness and distributing it throughout the colony in terms of specialization. Each part is only aware of what is next to it or its immediate environment. Again however that is elaborated in more complex organisms creating what we call the mind. The brain plus awareness of the environment.
The point as it relates to the original post is that multiple minds is the very definition of consciousness in complex organisms. Each neuron being a single celled organism in some sense making binary choices elaborated by the colonial process into what we call the mind. Is there wholeness and implicated order? You could say that is a delusion and many philosophers would agree, that however is just an artifact of the process’s abstract nature.