Yesterday I was playing N, after having some rum-n-root. I got to the fourth level of episode 04 ("curvaceous") and kept trying to beat it. This involves going through a puzzly level and dying a lot, sometimes getting zapped, sometimes shot, most of the time blown up.

I imagined what it was like to be the ninja. Each successive time you die, and each time you are born again. Each time you start from the beginning of the level, and yet you learn from the mistakes of the last ninja. You are one ninja, but you are also many ninjas. It struck me that this is a form of collective consciousness.

In real life we also experience something like this. We don't exactly get do-overs, but every day we shut down. Our thoughts die out of our main memory, and the exact person we were that day is gone. But our memories are reborn the next morning. Hopefully we are successful in cooperating with our future and past selves.