The Main Person Fallacy

Many people believe that plural collectives must have a ‘main person’, or ‘host’, who identifies with the body’s characteristics and was born to it. This idea appears to stem from the traditional psychological view of multiplicity, which is described as the result of a single person splitting into many because of severe childhood trauma.

Unfortunately, because of the lack of mainstream scientific interest in ‘unorthodox’ plurality, many people extrapolate these interpretations to apply them to other sorts of multiplicity. The idea also is related to the idea that all deviations from a prescribed neurological norm are pathological in themselves, rather than being pathological because of real effects on people’s lives. Suggesting that there must be a main person assumes that the brain must always harbour one consciousness, and all deviations from that norm are inherently pathological. That is akin to assuming that all of those who deviate from a particular neurological norm are suffering.

By that logic, people with intelligence higher than the population average suffer from a ‘disorder’, when it is clear that augmented intelligence is a beneficial deviation. At the time of writing, scientists have not pinpointed the origin of consciousness or personality, and both ideas are still not fully understood. There have been no conclusive results showing that every brain truly has a single consciousness, or that every brain is born with only one. It is also true that the idea of plurality being pathological is more of a Western cultural trope than a scientific truth, for the reasons given earlier. It is merely a cultural prejudice, and one that needs to be laid to rest. It is philosophically very similar to homophobia and transphobia. Even if a single consciousness is a scientific norm, rather than a cultural trope that has to be adhered to in order to not look ‘mad’, deviating from it is not pathological in itself.