A flight of fancy, kept as an intuition pump for thinking about thinking. What would the world be like if we experienced it through several threads of consciousness, instead of the single one we have?
Start with the senses: vision, hearing, balance, touch, smell, taste, the position of our limbs, pain, hunger, the passage of time. Then thought itself. Give each its own thread. What protocol would integrate them all?
The first surprise: this is already how the mind works. The senses run in parallel, and one serial bottleneck decides what gets through. That is the global workspace, and the protocol is called attention. Psychologists call the puzzle of how separate streams become one experience the binding problem. Everything computed in parallel collapses into a single thread, and that thread is what bears the nuances of the experience.
The second surprise: the experiment has been run, in a small way. In split-brain patients, the bridge between the hemispheres was cut to control epilepsy. Each half then seems to have, in Wikipedia’s words, “its own separate perception, concepts, and impulses to act.” Two threads, one skull, and scientists still do not know whether consciousness itself was split.
Daniel Dennett would object to my single thread. In his multiple drafts model there is no place where everything comes together, no Cartesian theater with one observer in the seat. There are only parallel drafts, and whichever wins gets reported. I side with him on the machinery, as I say under Consciousness. The single thread is what it feels like from inside, one moment at a time.
Isn’t this also what society does? Humanity’s challenge is integrating each individual into the group. Marvin Minsky built a theory of mind on that very picture: a society of small, mindless agents.
Now the fancy. Imagine a different kind of mind, not necessarily human, where more than two threads run at once and are orchestrated into something richer. It ought to be faster.
But if every thread still collapses into one experiencer, the gain is only the ability to switch, the way the Matrix switches agents. A truly multi-threaded consciousness would need more: a way to bind many streams that stays coherent. It would also need a way to be several experiencers at once without becoming several minds. I do not know what that would be like.