"How can there be more than one person in your brain?"
It's often confusing to certain kinds of people, especially the ones who identify as being more "scientifically minded". Usually that's because they tend to have a very materialist (or Monist, to use the proper philosophical term) view of the self. A body + a brain + consciousness = a person. And obviously you only have one brain so everything in it is you or your subconscious.
But I don't have a materialist view of personhood, and I've long struggled to explain it, but I think I finally hit on the perfect metaphor to do so.
Obviously a book is a physical object. (Let's pretend ebooks don't exist, for the sake of the metaphor.) It's got a physical cover and physical pages with words physically written on it.
A materialist would say that the book is equivalent to a person. It and all its contents are a person and belong to that person. Even if the book is divided up into chapters or even separate stories, it's still one book.
But an immaterialist (or Dualist) would say that the book is equivalent to someone's body, but the real person isn't the physical thing, but the thing contained within the pages of the book. Not the exact words, not the physical ink and white space that forms the pattern we see as text and pictures. No, the person is equivalent to the story. That intangible object formed out of the physical, but that is itself not a physical thing but a conceptual thing, a collection of ideas held together in a certain pattern. The ideas, the feelings, the concepts - those are the story.
And people are just a more complex kind of ongoing story printed with neuron-ink into brain-pages, and writing and rewriting itself all the time.
And just like a book can contain multiple, independent stories, so can a brain.
People are not their bodies and brains. We have bodies and brains, but what we intrinsically are, is a kind of incredibly complex story. The intangible mind and its contents - memories, ideas, feelings, patterns of behavior - that's a person.
That's how an immaterialist like we-Shea see it, anyway. When we're talking about there being multiple people in our head, we're talking about the intangible collection of thoughts, feelings, and patterns that we call a person.
For us, the idea that a person IS their body and brain is almost inconceivable. We don't treat or see anyone, especially not ourselves, as physical objects, but rather, intangible ones.
To paraphrase George MacDonald and Walter Miller, Jr*: I don't have a mind. I am a mind, and I have a body.
And my body just so happens to contain several minds. Several persons - at least, according to how we define person anyway.
* The quote "You don't have a soul. You are a soul, you have a body," is often misattributed to C. S. Lewis. But he never said that. George and Walter didn't either, not exactly, but both said very similar things.
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