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When you split the brain, do you split the person?

aeon.co

31–40 of 78 posts

Re: When you split the brain, do you split the person?

#31

>How does a brain, consisting of many modules, create just one person? The same way a population, consisting of many people, creates just one state? The state is not the people and the people are not the state, yet both exist.

But a state isn't conscious

[deleted]

Re: When you split the brain, do you split the person?

#32
Here's a thought experiment.

Say you had more than one RNN trained for the same task (say, generating text). How would you couple them?

You could just, character by character, have each RNN generate its output on its own, and then take a majority vote or do some weighted average to combine the output, but otherwise let each RNN operate independently. But wouldn't it be strange for those RNNs whose output was not ultimately selected to continue processing along the same lines, uncorrected by what was actually selected?

Another possibility is to include a "ultimately selected" input to each RNN so they can be privy to the group's decisions. Yes, your internal state said that "e" should be selected, but the group selected "r"- what will you do now?

Yet another possibility would be to perform "retroactive justification". Let us say that one RNN (with an internal state S) selected "e", but the group selected "r". Under retroactive justification, the state used for the next character is a state (maybe the one closest to S) that would have instead produced "r" as output.

Split brains are coupled by their shared access to the body and act within the same environment. How do the hemispheres use that coupling?

Re: When you split the brain, do you split the person?

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a state isn't conscious

By what metric do you make that declaration? I submit that any empirical model of consciousness applies equally to states as it does to human minds.

If complexity is consciousness, then NYC's sewer system is conscious too.

Re: When you split the brain, do you split the person?

#36
Fascinating subject. Much more is address in Iain Mc Gilchrist's book

"The Master and his Emissary : the divided brain and the making of the western world"

http://iainmcgilchrist.com/

ps: put short, the book explains how pop psychology belief that left is maths and right is arts (you get the idea), was wrong, and yet.. there is a physiologically noticable difference as well as observable differences in how each hemispheres processes reality. In short, each hemisphere attends to the world with a different kind of attention, left is narrow and focused for what we commonly see as intellectual acvitivites, left deals with a map of the world. Right hemispheres takes the world as one whole, it's broad attention required to survive in our environment, but it's also necessary for empathy, etc. The book then tries to show how the over relianceo n our left hemisphere in today's world has roots in the last few centuries, and that perhaps it is not in our best interest. BOTH hemispheres are always needed, but we are increasingly acting in the world from the left hemisphere (hence the book title "the master and his emissary").

Re: When you split the brain, do you split the person?

#37

> But without the corpus callosum the hemispheres have virtually no means of exchanging information They can communicate physically though. Each half of the brain can access the eyes and control various parts of the body, they could make the body do things that they could see/hear in order to act as a basic messaging channel. The conscious part of the brain could be completely oblivious to these subtle physical chann…

I am completely ignorant of anatomy, but isn't the 'brain' still 'joined' at the spinal column? Could communication be going on in there?

Re: When you split the brain, do you split the person?

#38

>How does a brain, consisting of many modules, create just one person? The same way a population, consisting of many people, creates just one state? The state is not the people and the people are not the state, yet both exist.

But a state isn't conscious

State is the wrong entity here. A population tends to create a culture, and a culture's interplay of ideas runs on its human network. Which is not to say that a culture is conscious either, and in all likelihood if it does have a kind of consciousness it's one that we will not be able to understand.

Re: When you split the brain, do you split the person?

#40
post #3

Conversely, when you combine two brains, do you "merge" the people?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krista_and_Tatiana_Hogan

Wow.

"There is evidence that the twins can see through each other's eyes due to brain conjoining."

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