On 03 Oct 2017, at 15:52, David Nyman wrote:
Interesting, Telmo.
My take would be along the following lines. In the first place, I
take the view that questions of identity, personal history,
localisation in space and time etc. are necessarily a consequence of
locally-bounded neurocognition, leading to the somewhat imprecise
but still tractable notion of the observer moment. Let us then
assume the persistence in the split-brain case of substantial
hemispheric integration of both immediate experience and short and
longer-term memory. Presumably this could occur via ongoing
bilateral sensory input and surviving cross-hemispheric connections,
the corpus callosum apparently not being the exclusive, even if the
principal, such pathway. In such a case, I would still expect the
net experience to persist as that of a single person, even if not
entirely seamlessly.
Interesting. I can conceive this, but I can conceive this to be false
in some local sense, like in experience where the two hemispheres
relates different perceptions.
As a hypothetical test of this speculation, consider the phenomenon
of multiple personality, in which there is reportedly, by contrast,
considerable disruption and disjointedness to the memories available
within each personal 'compartment'. Here we would have a situation
where, from the perspective of different such groupings of observer
moments, there would be inexplicable lapses of memory and even third-
party reports of unrecalled, 'uncharacteristic' behaviour. In these
cases, any one of the 'compartments' might conclude that the best
explanation was, in effect, that some 'other person' must have been
in command of the same body. Between this and the split-brain case,
one can envisage a sort of sliding scale of integration of memory
and agency, associated with a correspondingly variable sense of
personal integrity.
Yes, that is the case where some scaling should be introduced.
In point of fact, since none of us are 100% fully integrated in the
sense I'm developing here, this is to some extent our common
existential situation.
Very plausibly.
Strikingly similar effects to the split-brain case have been
produced as a consequence of deliberate post-hypnotic suggestion.
For example, someone is told under hypnosis that they will perform a
certain action on hearing a trigger word. Post-hypnotic amnesia
leaves them unaware of the existence of the trigger, but they
respond to it with the suggested action nonetheless. But when asked
why, they don't reply with "I have no idea" or "I can't remember".
Instead, they confabulate something plausible. And this in fact is
what we all do at least some of the time, split-brain or not, in
response to environmental 'triggers' or 'priming' about whose
origins we have no explicit knowledge.
I note my dreams since a long time, and it happened four times that I
wake up with the feeling of having done two distinct dreams at the
same time. Eventually I discovered that Louis Jouvet (the REM sleep
discoverer) mentionned similar happening (by him and some patient/
cobaye in his laboratory). Louis Jouvet suggested that this was due to
the corpus callosum remaining sleepy during some REM phase. That makes
sense, and illustrate how the left and right hemisphere can
"interpret" quite differently the activity of the cerebral stem (which
trigger the dream phenomenon according to Hobson theory of dreams).
Now, a bit like in the WM-duplication, it is the same person which is
enacted, yet put in different "virtual" environment. Here, the "normal
person" will fuse easlity those memories, by the fact that they are
dreams. But at the moment of those dreams, distinct happenings are
lived. In only one of such parallel dream, they was complete
disconnection. the three others mixed some elements, which is somehow
even more bizarre. One such element was a cat, acting similarly in
both dream, but the memory was very vague. I mention this as it put
some weight (to me at least) to the scaling for the difference between
the personal identities.
Bruno
David
On 3 October 2017 at 14:11, 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.
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