The Brain Pilots theory predicts multiple locations capable of supporting root level consciousness and that the seat of consciousness moves. The brain is a system of agents and some agents are capable of being Pilots—of driving root level consciousness.

Sometimes you go to bed one person and wakeup someone else. The brain pilot swapped in the night. These swaps then continue subconsciously throughout the day.

The Brain Pilots theory is not about the exceptions, that some people with their callosums cut develop two consciousnesses, or that some of the population have multiple personalities. Rather that multiple consciousnesses is the rule and a feature of how all human minds work.

I should note that the term "Brain Pilots Theory", does not come from the field. It's a term I started using to get to the essence of the big idea. I am sure there is a better term for it, and a more fully developed theory, and hopefully a more knowledgeable reader can point me to that. Until then, I'll stick to calling it the Brain Pilots Theory.

This is a theory of the mind that blows my mind. I stumbled into it while programming multi-agent simulations and thinking "wait, what if the mind is a multi-agent system"? I quickly found that a lot of neuroscientists have been going this way for decades and writing about it. My favorites so far being The Society of Mind (Minsky 1988), A Thousand Brains (Hawkins 2021), and LessWrong's collection on Subagents.

What are the odds that this theory is right? I am not in the field and have no clue yet (10%? .1%?). I do feel confident saying that if true, this seems like it would have dramatic implications for how we understand the brain, ourselves, other people, and society, not to mention how it would lead to new technologies for the brain.

Inside Out is primarily a movie and not a scientific model, of course. To make it a better model we need to drop the personification of the agents. Instead of looking like tiny humans and being as capable as humans, in reality Brain Pilots would look like tangles of roots and globs of cells, and would likely have a very different and incomplete set of capabilities and behaviors. It's very important to keep in mind that the agents in your brain are very limited by themselves. It's why in your dream an elephant can start talking to you and your current brain pilot isn't taken aback, because that current might not have access to other agents that would detect the absurdity of the situation.

My working hypothesis is that pilots could be found in various parts of the brain. Perhaps you have Pilots in the Cerebrum, Pilots in the Thalamus, and so on. Perhaps a Pilot consists of a network that extends into multiple regions of the brain. Different pilots could be located on opposite sides of the brain or perhaps microns apart from each other.

If MinPilotMaterials == BrainMaterials then there would be room for only 1 consciousness in 1 brain. Similarly, a pilot may not have a fixed min size but instead is programmed to grow to assume control of all relevant materials in the brain.

Alternatively, MinPilotMaterials could be a fraction of BrainMaterials. Perhaps 10%-50% of BrainMaterials, meaning there would be room for just a few pilots. Or perhaps a pilot needs 1% of BrainMaterials, and there could be 100 in a brain.

What practitioners in dissociative identity disorder call Identities might be brain pilots, and the average population per person is ~16, with some patients reporting over 100.

There are ~150,000 cortical columns, so perhaps there are that many Brain Pilots.

Perhaps I'm wrong that it takes a network of multiple cells, and a single neuron with many synapses could take charge, in which case there could be millions (or more) brain pilots per brain.

With 150,000 cortical columns, 100 billion neurons, as many as a quadrillion synapses, it seems highly likely to me that there is enough material in the human brain to support many brain pilots. Neuroscientists have not identified some small singular control room, rather point to the "seat of consciousness" being roughly in the 10-20 billion neurons that make up the cerebral cortex. If one brain pilot could arise there, why not many?

As many have experienced, there are certain chemicals that if you ingest just a minuscule amount, millions of times smaller than your brain, your whole consciousness can change within the hour. Perhaps what is happening is a different pilot is taking over? Or perhaps a new one is being formed?

But it's not just chemicals that can swap pilots. You would have a HungerPilot that increasingly angles for control if deprived of food; a ThirstPilot angling to drink; a SleepPilot that makes her moves as the night gets late, and so on. Perhaps mindfulness is the practice of learning to detect which pilots are currently in control, which are vying for control, and perhaps achieving Enlightenment is being able to choose who is piloting. Perhaps one role of sleep is to ensure that no matter what there is at least one pilot rotation per day, to prevent any one pilot from becoming too powerful.

If I've gotten across one thing to you so far, it should be that I am a complete amateur in neuroscience and have a lot to learn before I can write well on the topic. So let me postpone the question of whether the the theory is true and address the implications, to demonstrate why I think this is a valuable theory to investigate. As the saying goes: All models are wrong. Some are useful.

I wonder if the norm in life is to pretty rapidly pilot swap, and if "Flow State" would be when instead you are able to have the same pilot running the show for an extended period of time.

We also often categorize people as "bad" or "good". But that often serves as a bad model for predicting future behavior. Instead if you modeled a person as a collection of agents, you might find that it is not the person as a whole that you disapprove of, but certain of their agents (or perhaps it could be meta things, like their inability to form new agents, or too rapid agent switching).

One thing I like about the Brain Pilots theory is that it provides a way to explain discrepancies. Like, how can a person be Catholic and an evolutionary biologist? With the Brain Pilots Theory, it's easy to see how they might have two distinct pilots who somehow peacefully coexist and alternate control.

Similar to how we use multi-agent simulations to model epidemics, perhaps through brain imaging coupled with introspective therapy one might be able to build an agent map of all the brain pilots in someone's mind, and run experiments on that model to figure out more effective plans of attack.

If the Brain Pilots Model holds, I'd be curious whether most mental health difficulties stem from undesirable pilots, or from the higher level problem of pilot switching. Perhaps folks higher on the introverted or self-centered scales have high populations of active pilots, and are low in time for others because they are metaphorically herding cats in their head.

Would productivity be more a product of having some exceptionally talented pilots, or the result of being able to stay with one pilot longer, or perhaps have a low population of bad pilots?

There are 1.4 billion cars in the world. Vehicle count is important, but more often we are concerned with how many agents are traveling in those vehicles, and that is 8 billion.

But if each human brain contains a population of brain pilots, then the Earth's population of agents would be far larger. If the average human has 10 brain pilots, then we are a planet with 80 billion agents. If the average is closer to 1,000 pilots per person, then there are 8 trillion consciousnesses around right now.