Someone on the Pluribus subreddit suggested that certain quirks of the collective consciousness comes from how it needs to stay functional despite a vast array of minds that are individually quite different, and how those different personalities and experiences need to be merged together somehow.
There are empathetic people and completely obtuse people inside the the consciousness, highly intelligent people and those with regressive mental disorders, or more importantly; abusers and abuse victims.
In order to keep cohesion, they literally cannot deal with negative emotions. Imagine an abuser and their abuse victim merging into a single consciousness. How would they even function?
They wouldn’t.
So whenever the collective consciousness is forced to deal with negative emotions, it goes into a seizure.
I’m not sure I’m convinced. They don’t seem to be struggling with consensus on any other matters, so that kind of implies they’re just one single consciousness rather than a gestalt of conflicting ones. I don’t think the individuals are still in there, or they’re so completely subsumed they might as well be gone.
As for their vulnerability to emotional outbursts I’m betting that whatever happened with the immune survivors has made them into transmitters but not receivers for whatever psychic frequency the collective operates on. Which is why they cannot disobey or lie to her about anything except their “biological imperatives” (and even then only passively) and cannot handle her negative emotions since it disrupts the positive emotions they’re using to keep everyone’s consciousnesses subdued.
Someone on the Pluribus subreddit suggested that certain quirks of the collective consciousness comes from how it needs to stay functional despite a vast array of minds that are individually quite different, and how those different personalities and experiences need to be merged together somehow.
There are empathetic people and completely obtuse people inside the the consciousness, highly intelligent people and those with regressive mental disorders, or more importantly; abusers and abuse victims.
In order to keep cohesion, they literally cannot deal with negative emotions. Imagine an abuser and their abuse victim merging into a single consciousness. How would they even function?
They wouldn’t.
So whenever the collective consciousness is forced to deal with negative emotions, it goes into a seizure.
I’m not sure I’m convinced. They don’t seem to be struggling with consensus on any other matters, so that kind of implies they’re just one single consciousness rather than a gestalt of conflicting ones. I don’t think the individuals are still in there, or they’re so completely subsumed they might as well be gone.
As for their vulnerability to emotional outbursts I’m betting that whatever happened with the immune survivors has made them into transmitters but not receivers for whatever psychic frequency the collective operates on. Which is why they cannot disobey or lie to her about anything except their “biological imperatives” (and even then only passively) and cannot handle her negative emotions since it disrupts the positive emotions they’re using to keep everyone’s consciousnesses subdued.