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[hexpiritus.livejournal.com]

"The style of resolution of inner conflicts is one of the strongest features of personality.

It is a common myth that each person is a unity, a kind of unitary organization with a will of its own. Quite the contrary, a person is an amalgamation of many subpersons, all with wills of their own. The "subpeople" are considerably less complex than the overall person, and consequently they have much less of a problem with internal discipline. If they are themselves split, probably their component parts are so simple that they are of a single mind-- and if not, you can continue down the line. This hierarchical organization of personality is something that does not much please our sense of dignity, but there is much evidence for it."

-from Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, specifically in a section written by Douglas Hofstadter (physicist, and professor of Cognitive Science, Computer Science, History, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology)

(x-posted)

Comments

[thehumangame.livejournal.com]

To my knowledge Hofstadter never actually talks about multiplicity (though he does come quite a bit closer than this in some of his other books). Daniel Dennett (the other author of The Mind's I) does talk about multiplicity elsewhere, in Speaking for Ourselves (http://pp.kpnet.fi/seirioa/cdenn/speaking.htm) and also in the 13th chapter of Consciousness Explained. The chapter in Consciousness Explained is probably worth reading: it's a lot better than the earlier Speaking, and to my mind it's one of the few acceptable philosophical considerations of multiplicity from a materialist viewpoint (i.e. not involving souls).

Cognitive scientists in general are probably going to have the view of the mind as recursively decomposable from modules into submodules into subsubmodules, because the field is greatly influenced by computer science and that is how computer programs look. This is even more true of artificial intelligence researchers like Hofstadter.