“For in him we live, and move, and have our being.”
-Acts 17:28
I was an avid Stephen King reader in my day. One day while immersed in The Stand, I had a strange thought: what if Stu and Fran were not philosopher’s zombies in the mind of Stephen King but had actual, tiny consciousnesses of their own within his mind? What if their visual field of experience, the largest field of sensory consciousness, were semi-closed systems in his mind in which he imports their visual experience using his thought of what they were seeing and would see in the future, which they replicate using the substance of King’s consciousness, that like stem cells form any of the seven modes of consciousness: King’s thought-experience becoming Fran or Stu’s visual, tactile, gustatory, cognitive, etc. experience.
Even if the substance of King’s consciousness independent of his conscious thought or working memory added to the story or filled in the blanks of Fran and Stu’s sub-dimensional experience behind King’s conscious back, the reality remains that Fran and Stu are simulacra: Stephen King’s consciousness “morphed” into the shape of “their” consciousness.
There is no “Fran and Stu” without King, is there? It’s just King pretending to be Fran or Stu by shaping his thoughts into the form of Fran or Stu.
From Fran and Stu’s perception, King is invisible, unknown, and imperceptible. If the idea or concept of King were presented to them by another character, Fran and Stu would perhaps find the idea preposterous: they would perhaps be atheist, not believing King exists or that they exist within King, and would never accept (unless King thought and thus granted their acceptance) that their consciousness is actually a “figurine” composed of the consciousness of an external being within whom they dwell.
When it comes to the logical and metaphysical possibility of Pantheopsychism and Pantheopsychic Christianity, Pantheopsychic Sub-dimensionalism, the idea that we dwell within God as characters made up of his consciousness (that we mistakenly think is our own) has for support the fact that we can imagine fictional beings within our minds. It is commonly and almost universally believed that fictional people deliberately created within the mind or uncontrollably dreamt dreams are philosopher’s zombies, but box-within-a-box consciousness cannot be ruled out as logically false, much less logically impossible.