BoM/TWS Message Forum

This is a question the presupposes clear answers to certain questions about the nature of the mind. Never mind the answers: I wonder if those "certain questions" can even be asked with any clarity.

So, I approach this issue by asking what it would look like, from a story/writing perspective, if you could make such a mind blend.

To start with, when I write about Will having someone else's brain inside with his, I try to make it clear that, to him, this is just like having an "inside" mask that he take on and off. Or like switching between looking through a red-filter lens and a green-filter lens. He can think with one of the brains, or with the other. Sometimes, he finds himself slipping from one to the other without realizing it, and sometimes he might not be sure which brain is influencing him. But in all cases, there is a pretty strong difference between the memories and personality that are his, and those that are of the mind band.

First question: Would it be possible to create a mind band that contained two discrete mind/personalities, so that wearing such a thing would allow Will to flip between his mind, and each of the others? In other words, a mind-band that would give him three brains to flip between in the above way? I suppose so. It would be just like the above case, but with three choices of minds to think/look with, rather than two.

But I don't take that to be the question here, which asks about a "blend."

How would such an experience be written?

Someone more ingenious than me might be able to pull it off, but I don't think I could. Because, for a start, all the memories would be jumbled up. What would that be like? When I remember my sixth birthday party, I remember it as being something that happened to me. If I had someone else's brain inside mine (as above) I could "remember" it as happening to "me", but the "me" would be that other person. But if I blended two other people, shuffling memories, etc., together, what would be the "me" that goes with the memory of a sixth birthday party? Particularly if there are two different birthday parties? Would I (wearing the band) know that one party went with the "me" that was Jenny and the other went with the "me" that was Yumi? In that case, the two personalities aren't blended, they're just chaotically jumbled up, without any kind of pattern. But if they are blended, then the "Yeni" "me" would remember two very different birthday parties as being "mine."

And so on for all the other memories.

The result would be a confusing mess, hard to write and unprofitable to wrestle with.

Through these reflections, one might begin to glimpse the philosophical problems that the question points toward. Memories are like the colors on a surface: there is not only a "color" there, but a surface that is that color. Similarly, there are not just memories, but there is (at least in one's own experience) a person whose memories those are. But memories don't "blend" -- how can one have a memory of a birthday party that was held both in California and in Texas, in February and also in November, where there were ten friends in attendance and also no more than eight? And if memories can't blend, how can the people whose memories those are blend?

This isn't meant to settle the question decisively. It is only to suggest that it would be too hard to write. For that reason -- to put the thing beyond temptation -- I am strongly inclined to rule the answer as: No, this couldn't be done even via magic.