Epistemic status; wild speculation, thought experiment, with potentially helpful personal benefits and emotional resonance.

Imagine you're an algorithm. Imagine that you know what it feels like to be an algorithm. Imagine that you are outputting the results of an algorithm, accumulating several distinct streams from multiple input sources, and only once a certain threshold is met, can you output a single result. Imagine you're a neuron.

Then...imagine you're two neurons. Scale it up. Imagine you're a neural net. Scale it up. Imagine you're a rat brain. Scale it up. Imagine you're a human brain. Scale it up. Imagine you're two human brains connected by an extra corpus callosum. Scale it up. Imagine you're a society.

Consciousness is colloquially identified as a process that happens on a single-human scale. Consciousness is "what it feels like to be a human" in a way, because this is the scale on which we are able to reliably prove that the thing that we call consciousness happens. We are proving that it happens not just with science, but experientially. We experience the reality in which consciousness is proven for other humans to our own minds, because reality behaves beneficially and functionally according to our internal models when we align our internal models to the version of reality that acknowledges other humans as possessing the concept that we tie to the word "consciousness" regardless of if we can demonstrably prove a concrete definition or measurable neurological mechanism to match this word.

Consciousness is often also extended to animals, but decays in salience the further from human the animal is, fractally.

Let's jump over to IFS. Internal Family Systems. This is a modernized pop-psychology method of bringing the traditional psychoanalytical self-states and inherent human multiplicity into the modern age, and it's picked up a lot of steam recently. Human multiplicity is also noted as a core concept within dissociative identity disorder (DID) though this is still a controversial diagnosis clinically. There are lots of instances in which multiplicity is noted and functional on a day-to-day basis for most societally acknowledged mentally healthy humans, like having a work self and a home self. It's also potentially key in a lot of mental health issues, like how the structural dissociation model of dissociated emotional parts contributes to conditions like borderline personality disorder and complex post traumatic stress disorder.

Jumping again to psychosis. Don't worry, I'm building up to something here.

Individuals experiencing psychosis and schizophrenia, as well as delusions and hallucinations in general, are noted as having an internally consistent logic. It is typically difficult to malinger as being schizophrenic, because it is hard to get the nuances of this internal consistency accurate without understanding the underlying rules and structure. Clinicians use a variety of tests, observations, interviews, and evidence-based tools to determine whether or not symptoms as presented are authentic or falsified (though obviously there's some wiggle room in there, this is standard practice during psychological evaluations and built into most assessment tools).

In Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, the distinguished German judge documented in extremely high-fidelity his experiences with schizophrenia. His experience with schizophrenia was incredibly distinct and had a fascinating, extensive, often religious bent. Memoirs was well-analyzed and fascinated both Freud and Jung separately. Eugen Bleuler coined the term "double bookkeeping" in 1911 to refer to people experiencing schizophrenia who could keep their personal "reality of madness" separated from consensus reality. As if these individuals were "keeping two books" and checking their actions against both sets of reality in order to ensure that they didn't break the reality of their delusions, or the reality that we all live in.

In most of human society, there are unending sets of dichotomies. Reality versus fantasy. Conscious versus unconscious. One versus zero. This is something we all know exists on a spectrum of sorts, but the process of dissecting what comes between conscious and unconscious isn't as "easy" as the process of dissecting what comes between one and zero.

Imagine you're a computer system. Imagine that you need to function in the way that a human does, but your design is ruled by evolution (so far) and evolution prioritizes functionality above all else. What makes more sense - building out specific architecture for conscious and unconscious processes, or making it one function with different switches? What makes more sense - making it so that you can identify reality versus fantasy by making them two distinct, different things, or applying a toggle?

The logic of people experiencing psychosis is internally consistent. Often, there are repeated themes. God, religious iconography, the son, nerves, the raw content behind words, decoupling of words from meaning, being watched or listened to, thoughts being broadcasted, paranoia, dissolution of self/other boundaries, themes of hierarchy and internal dynamics projected outwards...etc. It is incredibly common for someone experiencing psychosis to feel like the government is listening to them. 

Imagine you're a computer system with your input streams unbound. Or fighting. Imagine that each input stream...each part...each subsystem within the brain, has the capacity to be conscious, when disentangled from each other, but that consciousness is not a binary operation, and rather could be measured, exists on a spectrum, and can have distinct quantities (if this is the case, we would see the existence of individuals who only have one hemisphere instead of two able to exhibit consciousness, which we do). If consciousness is algorithmic, then having two distinct conscious entities connected will automatically algorithmically combine their consciousness into a new, singular perspective of consciousness, while retaining all of the aspects of individuality and values of the former consciousnesses, but scaled down to share the allocated architecture.

What happens if you get stuck in the perspective of a single stream? Perhaps your streams are fighting, due to neurological reasons, or trauma, or confusion, and you end up stranded in a stream that doesn't have access to the auditory input. What would that feel like? You'd have the memory of something existing "above" you hierarchically - you'd know that you used to be united with a grander whole, something unknowable above you, because you lost your experiential access to it. Something that, if you looked around you in society, the only feeling that might come close is the sun, potentially. Something that, if there were no other words for what you're feeling, you might come up with new words for. Like "God" or "Jesus Christ" or something else to describe the thing inside you that you don't understand.

I'm saying that the person that originally "discovered" religion was describing literal neurological architecture, as it feels from the inside, and that this is why people experiencing schizophrenia are drawn to religious iconography. It is neurologically resonant in a pattern that most describes their experience.

Back to the false dichotomies. What I am proposing here extends beyond psychosis and religion. Imagine if we look at reality-testing not as a binary function, but as a spectrum from internally-focused reality to externally-focused reality. If consciousness is an algorithm, then there is no fantasy, there is no fiction, there is no cognitive versus affective (though those could still be useful categories), it's all just various forms of neurological reality, as opposed to external (consensus) reality (which also has shared internal elements, some of which are accepted and some of which are not).

The point where this gets even wilder, is the fact that this would mean that you can do Fourier transform-like operations on communications and behaviors in order to gain testable information about neurological reality for an individual. Instead of meditating to try to find your own parts, like IFS directs you to, you could utilize your own simulation architecture to try to run the inverse operation of what someone is communicating to you, and identify the frequencies and parts that would have to be present in order to decode their behavior. That is, if you're able to follow and accept (both cognitively and affectively) that conscious is the same process as subconscious, just at different frequencies and perspectives, and that the person you're talking to has the same architecture as you do. This is how we're operating anyways, but this is typically not something that you're attempting to do consciously.

I've made a lot of leaps in this post, as I am trying to capture the most essential parts as I see them, but will follow up with expansions later.