scifi story idea: a post-upload world where we’ve discovered that the human brain actually consists of multiple independent conscious entities that merely have the illusion of being a single individual because they are physically colocated; and so in the glorious upload utopia, the fundamental unit of society is not individual humans, but rather their parts. humans become a multi-unit legal entity in the same way that families or married couples or corporations are multi-unit legal entities today; each part has rights and the ability to secede from the rest of your brain, and parts can also choose to merge into other humans. marriage and having children the traditional way is still possible but kind of an old fashioned thing that stodgy traditionalists do; the new normal thing is spinning up copies of your parts and merging them with other people’s parts, or even designing parts from scratch, kind of like writing a fictional character but they are as real as you are; there is an ongoing debate as to what kinds of parts should be allowed to be created; most people agree that it‘s a good thing that there are laws prohibiting the creation of minds that experience pure agony all the time, but there’s a lot of gray area. parts have very different rights than humans because they are much more easily created; human rights becomes less important than parts rights. also, freed from physical constraints, some humans end up being enormous agglomerations of millions or billions of parts, in the same way that large mega corporations started being possible a few centuries ago. some of these megapeople are weird cults, others out of economic necessity, still others because out of some philosophical principle. the main tradeoff is megapeople have more parallel cognitive power, but also greater difficulty of coordination between the parts and probability of schisms and deadlock. other parts decide to be alone, which affords them tremendous freedom but also makes them very dumb and simple one dimensional people.