The Sword and Laser discussion

I meant to say this the other day but listening to the podcast reminded me of it.

Gestalt was sort of the human version of the tines from A Fire Upon the Deep. Gestalt was slightly different in that it was a single mind with four (at first, and then five) bodies and tines each had their own personality which after merging ended up becoming a unique melded personality plus a more intelligent mind, but especially strong-willed tines could maintain their core personality/mind when two members formed a new pack with up to four new tines.

That was what the selective breeding gambit was all about for the tines: preserving the leaders' core personality as long as possible, until it devolved into madness from inbreeding.

Gestalt was doing the same thing by having the female 1/4 birth a baby fathered by one of the males. It's kind of a shame Gestalt got killed (or mostly killed, anyway), because it would have been interesting to see what would happen after a few generations of inbreeding. What sort of demented crazy personality might have developed as the original bodies aged and were replaced by sub-optimal ones? Would Gestalt eventually become a multiple-body idiot savant?

In the hilarious (and frequently gross) TV series Ash vs. Evil Dead, in one episode they do some time traveling and when they encounter the 1980s version of Ruby (Lucy Lawless), Ash's first instinct is to ask, "If we all slept together, would it be a threesome? You know, because you're both basically the same person." I kind of wonder how we would define what Gestalt did with itself. It's not incest, exactly, nor masturbation, but also kind of both.

That's the same question asked in The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold. In it, a man travels back and forth through time, meets and has sex with different male and female versions of himself. This was very mind expanding to me when I read it as a young Catholic teenager.

Are we even sure that the four-body Gestalt is the first one? From the comments it/they made upon learning that the female body was dead, I got the impression that it/they had been doing that for a while. Myfanwy even wonders how long the being known as Gestalt has been alive.

Gestalt is pretty much exactly the sort of mind described developing in Theodore Sturgeon's book More Than Human.