I would suggest that if the brain was split at birth, the appearance that there were two persons inhabiting the same body would be harder to avoid. It would be like conjoined twins.
Due however to the fact that the brain is split in people who've already formed their identity - and assuming that the neural correlates for personal identity are distributed throughout the brain - it seems clear to me that even if it turns out to be true that split-brain folks really are two different persons, it's much harder to detect, since the personality would be encoded consistently in both halves prior to the operation. That said, it's easy for me to imagine that there could be two minds, supervening on the two halves, which over time could diverge and potentially develop conflicting goals with one another. Take the opening sentence of this article <http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/06/15/532920899/the-roots-of-consciousness-were-of-two-minds> : After surgery to treat her epilepsy severed the connection between the two > halves of her brain, Karen's left hand took on a mind of its own, acting > against her will to undress or even to slap her. Clearly the two halves are not entirely causally closed with respect to one another, but without the corpus callosum, there may be enough isolation to treat them *as if *they give rise to distinct persons. It's like a duplication experiment, without duplicating the body. And the asymmetries in terms of language processing and other left/right brain differences make it a rather imperfect duplication. But still it makes me wonder... is there FPI as a result of the surgery? On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 9:11 AM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote: > I think this is quite interesting, although the article is a bit > superficial. > > https://aeon.co/ideas/when-you-split-the-brain-do-you-split-the-person > > If the conclusions are valid, I would say they put emergentism in > trouble... > > Cheers, > Telmo. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
