The lessened conscious experience, maybe a guiding remembered goal, the memory of a vision or decision process too big or too foreign slipping away like the details of a dream after waking up.

What would I need to think, while whole, to ensure that the parts, once given independence, did what was desired? Extreme trust fall! Give up a part of yourself, and hope it doesn't betray you, doesn't go off-mission more than acceptable, comes back, willingly fuses, and that you haven't grown too incompatible from your different experiences in the meantime!

At least within the same brain you know you're all stuck in there together. You share the compute wetware and the flesh vehicle. You can only disintegrate so much through deeply habitualized avoidance of thinking "into" each other, and you're inescapably bound by cause-and-effect. This puts a hard limit on how much incentives can diverge. But if parts could split from the whole bodily, like if you were shape-shifting goo? Suddenly you really have to trust the part that you let go, and set it up pretty carefully before splitting. But even just within the same brain, if you can see enough possible ways for it to go badly, any cognition that you let execute outside of conscious dominion can seem risky. Especially if you're not the conscious stream that gets the steering wheel.

And then the reintegration. The merging. I have the most trouble imagining what this would be like. I suspect the difficulty is because I'm a pretty well-integrated human brain - I'm overwhelmingly certain that I am a singlet, and in fact my conscious self seems to "cover" more of my mind than some other normal people. Which means my cognition is really used to the many little integrations - that my conscious mind is quite experienced at smoothing over the mergers. Or perhaps more accurately maybe my conscious mind is the story cobbled together by all the mergers. Because, to be clear, the human brain definitely does this - how could it not? There's many parts and they physically can't be constantly reconciling everything instantly.

Anyway, if I had to guess, the integration is experienced kinda like this: first mind contact - thoughts pop up seemingly spontaneously that weren't there before. The more "different" the parts have had time to become, the more of the new stuff will be absolutely incoherent mental noise. Random blips of qualia and cognition like those little errors on old videos, sensory experiences coming from the wrong "mental directions" (like a smell coming from where sounds should be), etc. New associations - you think familiar thoughts but they suddenly start triggering unexpected feelings, memories, or other thoughts. New perspective, especially self-perspective: you suddenly see yourself or other things in ways you never have before. (In the "splitting into multiple bodies" hypothetical this is easy to imagine as suddenly merging one part's memories of looking at another part, into that other part's conscious stream, but within the same brain this might be suddenly seeing memories of the same events from a different mental reference frame: with more or less feeling of control, with different reactions, with different interpretations or thoughts about it.) And of course this can be gradual. Very gradual. If both parts are adaptive and perform valuable functions, then they'll probably be busy doing those things - they might not have time to play the complex game of thinking exactly the right thoughts to set off cognitive ripples in the other part, or to process the cognitive noise they're getting from the other part.

I wonder how many common human experiences come down to this. Like when people dissociate in traumatic situations and say they felt like they were onlookers, that could be just the main conscious "thread" (main? main in what sense? main perhaps only in the sense that this is the one that has conscious continuity/integration with the part retelling their story later) losing the controls to some other thread. And the key point here is that other thread of cognition perhaps always has some conscious experience of it's own! But if it and the "main" one don't regularly "mix", you'd never even know.

Human thinking about time is inherently underspecified, and if we try to program from that intuition we can only produce correct code by accident.

There are several invariants that apply to most lived experiences we have as minds but which cannot be relied on when you have to actually rigorously specify time-based behavior in formal or computer logic.

Most of us can go through life without having to deeply habitualize thinking about:

What happens if your clock is suddenly adjusted by a substantial amount?

What happens if your clock is suddenly adjusted backwards?

If at any moment I can be frozen in time and then unfrozen any amount of time later, which of my "how much time has passed?" questions should count the time I was frozen, and which ones shouldn't?

If I can at any time be split into multiple independently experiencing parts, which of my "how much time has passed?" questions should count the cumulative time that has passed for of all my parts, versus just for the part that I currently experience as myself?

Which of these different measurements of time passage - kinds of time - is the clock you are looking at giving you?

Where can you find a clock that will tell you the specific kind of time that you need in this situation?

We are not forced by life to train up always thinking about time like this. We might tune out our sense of time passing but how often does it go backwards? The clocks around us all report the same kind of time. When clocks drift or are updated, it is usually negligible and we have countless other clues and reference points to tell us the time. We do not freeze in time as the world skips forward. Our bodies do not split and merge into independent parts or copies.

The key with attachment to outcomes is that some cognition is more "sticky" to outcomes. How we think, how we imagine or expect or look forward to events and possibilities, that can influence how much we get attached to outcomes, and how specific or strong that attachment is.

Obviously some of this is not directly consciously controlled. A lot of the attachment itself comes from emotional reactions and prediction trees - cognition which is deeply habitualized, so the brain executes it subconsciously and automatically. It can take prolonged work to notice that cognition, then reverse-engineer it, figure out what we can do to affect it, and then lastingly habitualize a better alternative.

Carefully and soundly considered positions based on very detailed and accurate knowledge can eventually become vague fuzzy emotional biases and predispositions.

And when the time comes to defend those biases or predispositions, those intuitions, the arguments we will be able to muster are often shoddy and poorly informed, because they are reaching backwards, rationalizing the conclusion. It can take a lot of effort to actually reverse engineer all of the information and reasoning that went into the position we are now trying to defend.

The good news is, I seem to have completely resolved the insecurity about being unsuccessful at idea spread. It used to really bother me to see other posts spreading much more and the ones I thought were most important of my ideas spreading much less. Nowadays I just don't care as much. I think a big part of it was just unfollowing almost everyone, which successfully prevented me from seeing almost all posts that would make me feel this. I also decided that idea spread would come in time. And I made some peace with the possibility of my ideas either not spreading at all or spreading in a way that I will never observe.

But that mix of my root insecurity and idea fitting insecurity at the heart of "what causes people to unfollow?" is still not completely resolved. It's so much better than it used to be, orders of magnitude better, but there are still lingering traces of it. The good news is I'm pretty sure I can see all the cognition I need to fully resolve this, like:

There's a very good chance it's not about me.

Sometimes people are just incompatible at their current moments in life.

If it is about me and they are right, I will figure out what I'm doing wrong even without their feedback soon enough.

If it is about me and they are wrong then oh well, their wrongness will probably never hurt me (even through my empathy by hurting potentially anyone in the world) in a way that I can't cope with.

I gain more followers than I lose, much more as of late (relatively speaking, I mean the absolute rate of both gain and loss is very small). (This one is actually pretty dangerous because if I were to depend on this one, then if it ever stopped being true I would be in a bad spot again mentally. So you kind of have to really walk the tightrope with this one, where you cultivate the ability to either treat it as relevant evidence or dismiss it as irrelevant depending on what's psychologically useful.)

I am succeeding and improving in all ways that actually matter to me at a pace that I am comfortable with, and if I take the time to consciously review the evidence and experience of that, this Tumblr follower shit really doesn't matter.

If I am dissatisfied with something about my success, self-improvement, or pace thereof, and if I think about what I can actually do to improve that, then it's pretty clear to see that giving any amount of damns about who unfollowed me or why on which of my blogs is just really counterproductive.

I have like 10 or 15 side blogs now, and I don't ever notice anyone unfollowing me on those, so clearly there's some hard empirical evidence that it literally does not actually affect me in any observable way unless Tumblr puts that information in front of me and I think about it.

But also there is another similar vicious cycle: since I have that needy or insecure inclination to post sometimes, that also sometimes motivates me to make posts which in retrospect don't live up to said high bars.

And they're actually somewhat interconnected cycles, because the confidence and not caring what others think also helps reduce the guardedness or carefulness that might in other moments stop the motivations driving the second cycle from being expressed as posts.

One phenomenon that might seem counterintuitive to the idea of cognition habitualization, is that sometimes, it only takes one epiphany to lastingly and thoroughly habitualize some cognition flow.

The way this manifests for me is that often, if I just realize something new, like a flaw in my reasoning or interpretations or a new angle of compassion or empathy activation, that is enough to make an immediate and lasting change in how I react or feel or think.

I think what is really happening is that an overwhelming majority of the cognition making up or relevant to the new change has already been habitualized, and only one final cogneme is missing or just on the verge of habitualization. Once a mind is in that state, the moment that cogneme is activated in it, it bridges what is already there into one path that can now be traversed automatically as a whole. The result can look like sudden and even very deep habitualization, even if it actually took a long time to habitualize behind the scenes.