@aroacemagicalnerd basically "if every cell is individually concious, what happens to their conciousness when they are combined into a larger concious entity? does each cell stop being a subject?"

ní anse: the ego is an illusion, a kind of always arising and dissolving focal point of a distributed system of sensing and relating. when you burn your finger, the cells there are experiencing pain as subjects in themselves, but because they are closely entangled with all other cells, passing information between them thru nerves and chemicals and hormones, the entire gestalt organism that is a body like us becomes aware of that pain too, and if it happens to be arranged into a "self" at that particular moment, the self, who is focal to a distant patch of other cells, may see itself as being the one experiencing the pain. not all cells are communicating to the ones who are involved in ego-patterning. you have not much awareness of what your killer T cells are doing at any given moment, because they don't need the ego's involvement. but because they act in a system that is deeply connected, what they do has effects, and those effects are felt

one can see a society as a kind of gestalt creature likewise. one that, uniquely, doesn't always have a centralized ego, exactly, though in the case of a very centralized authoritarian society where the whims of a small body of politicians (or even a single dictator/monarch) determine what the social-body does, it certainly can be said to have one. each of us are like cells in that social-body (or rather, social bodies, because it's never just one, it's many competing or cooperating relational organisms, gestalts within gestalts, in a dance of sociality). when one of us suffers, the pain may be felt (or ignored, or only indirectly experienced) in other parts of the social-body.

the other aspect of the combination problem, i saw it put as "if the rock has rock-conciousness, does the rock touching a blade of grass have rock-plus-blade-of-grass conciousness?" to which i would say, yeah. (and of course, rock conciousness is very different from human conciousness; we aren't talking about a rock sitting there thinking human thoughts and feeling human feelings; the rock has its own rock feelings that emerge out of the inhherent beingness that is existing in the field of conciousness. it must be both very alien and also very familiar to be a rock). when one uses a tool intimately and is in close contact with it, it can become a part of who you are. at some point while playing a musical instrument, the distinction between me and the tin whistle dissolves, and i know it intimately, like a part of my body, our two ways of existing have become closely-entangled, have combined; the whistle experiences its own self, we experience our own self, but we have formed a cohesive organism too, and if i was permanently affixed to the whistle, we would start to forget what it was like to not have a tin whistle in our body-layout at all times (a very strange thought experiment, but not that strange; those who rely on external tools for disability reasons know the feeling of a tool, for better or worse, being a 'permanent', part of your body)

we think again that it's just a result of people having a very limited perspective about their own selves borne of cultural individualism. when you are immersed in water, the water is having a profound effect on you, on the way you are, what you are seeing and feeling, you can feel currents, feel the coolth of the water. but anyone with a very tightly bound sense of self is afraid to let it then be true that, in a way, they have become a part of the larger body of water, for a little bit. therapists try to treat mental illnesses like depression or anxiety as though its just a personal individual problem, your neurotransmitters being wrong, but they're caused in large part because the social-body of our world is depressed and anxious because it is disintigrating and anihilating itself and since we are entangled with it and feeling what it is feeling, like how when we get stressed our cells start to deteriorate in health too. every place-time acts on you.

and about that blade of grass, the example we saw put all the focus on the rock, because it's very odd to a western frame of mind that a rock might be a creature. but beccause western culture is also very plant-blind, they don't consider that the grass is also having a relationship to the rock, is changing how it grows in response to the rock. the grass is experiencing being grass-plus-rock, while the rock experiences being rock-plus-grass. maybe, if we change the idea to a tree, you can see how eventually the tree might grow around the rock in a way that they can't be separated anymore. you can see this happen sometimes, trees growing around objects, the objects becoming parts of them.

how all this relates to plurality is that it's very similar, being a median plural system, each of our facets has its own experience of the world but because they are in tight, constant contact with other facets, they also form one gestalt "whole" that is, depending on how "in sync" we are, easier or harder for us 'individually' to relate to.

sorry for the long reply, and sorry if i sound lost in the sauce, i promise at least that all i'm on right now is a cup of milky tea and good ol' AuDHD + Other Brain Spicyes. hope you found it interesting.