From private exchange with woodside, published with auhorization

woodside:

I'm leaning heavily towards viewing this as a (not necessarily destructive) mental disorder but I'm keeping an open mind because it seems obvious that multiplicity is possible in a general sense (multiple emulations could obviously be simultaneously run on a "single" piece of fast enough hardware) but it seems like there are tons of problems when you think about a human brain doing the same.

It's not surprising that most multiples (this is my gut instinct) also have non-standard sexual orientations because so much of sexuality is tied up with hormone and chemical levels in the brain that are seperate from the map of your neural connections and these levels wouldn't appreciably change between one personality and another.

Also I'm extremely skeptical that the brain has sufficient resources from a hardware perspective to run multiple "complete" people. It seems like evolution would have preened away that much excess processing power.

MixedNuts:

How complex is it to run extra people? Most functions are certainly shared. I don't think I've heard of a case where perceptions, reflexes or language skills differed between members, motor skills are shared more often than not, and memory is a coin toss. It'd be interesting to see if disturbances at low level (e.g. strokes) affect members differently. (Meds do, but there are lots of psychological effects here.) I'd assume that most systems have just enough differences between members to make them different people, or a little less, whence medians.

I have a pet theory that multiplicity is caused by empathy going overboard. This is suggested by fictives (characters from works of fictions appearing in a system) and a few cases of people from one system joining another.

I'd say I'm reasonably confident that there is something interesting going on, but I wouldn't go as far as to say they are genuinely different people to the extent of having equal moral weight to standard human personalities.

I would guess they are closer to different patterns of accessing the same mental resources than fully different. (You could make an analogy with operating systems/programmes/user interfaces on a computer.)