User:Laxystem/Consciousness

Consciousness:Consciousness is where internal communication and thought happens within a plural system. Some systems share a consciousness while others may have multiple. For example, a monoconscious system with a walk-in would have two consciousnesses.

In monoconsciouses, headmates share internal awareness (if they have it) as well as external awareness. In polyconsciouses, each headmate has their own full awareness. There are many -consciousness types in between, those are merely the most known ones (arguably because of their simplicity, rather than how common they're), and any system may have any number of consciousness types (including consciousflux).

A headmate can be a member of one or more than one consciousness and choosing which one to use is often intuitive. It may be possible for a headmate to think inside two consciousnesses simultaneously, depending on the system's layout.

Headmates in the same consciousness can usually communicate with each other easily, being able to hear and feel each other's thoughts and feelings. It's much harder to communicate cross-consciousnesses than within one, as it is often easier to know in what consciousness something was thought than to know who said it which sometimes causes subsystems to form around consciousnesses that find it harder to communicate. It is possible to have communication difficulties within one consciousness, often due to dissociation, but they resolve differently than cross-conscious communication issues.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Find a source for this] A consciousness can be either linear, only capable of thinking about one thing at a time, or concurrent, capable of thinking about multiple things at a time. Regardless, consciousnesses can think at the same time, independently, since each consciousness has its own line(s) of thoughts.

Consciousnesses also affect fronting - some systems have specific consciousnesses headmates need to enter in order to front (Fixumconscious), and some can front from every consciousness (Raconscious). This can change over time, and may be the reason [How? Sources?] for why systems in early stages of syscovery find it difficult to switch or communicatie internally, and why do they sometimes feel monoconscious although they're not.

Singlets have a single consciousness, usually a linear one.

Some consciousness can (Dynaconcious) be joined and left by headmates, and some cannot (Seraconscious)

Related Terms

 * Terms with the -conscious suffix describe the varius consciousness types.
 * Memory management types commonly overlap with consciousness types, making both hard to define individually.