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

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

#41

Post by chimprich »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #12

>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.

> The state is not the people and the people are not the state, yet both exist.

A state does not exist in any physical form. It is entirely a fiction, existing only in the minds of humans. Such existence it does have is not independent of the problem of consciousness so this is not the most helpful comparison.

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

#42

Post by otakucode »

Dualism is wholly wrong. There is no mind-body split. Even speaking of 'the brain' is just a rough convenience. Individual neurons stretch from that tangled mass of them up in your skull all the way down your spine and to the soles of your feet. Every nerve fiber extends from nearly every point in your body right into your brain. Perception pours in from every point, and it is all extremely important. Emotion, for instance, primarily arises from biofeedback. Remove the feedback of feeling your 'expression' of emotion and you will cease to be capable of 'feeling' that emotion.

Consciousness is not a 'thing', it is a property. Thus far we know of only one sort of system that can hold the property (human beings in our environment) although we do gain some information from observing humans of different configurations (such as seeing that people with total facial paralysis experience significant emotional dulling and substantial changes to their subjective personal experience over time) that hints at what things are important for different aspects. So far as we have evidence for, there is no reason to think that you might be able to, for instance, simulate solely a brain and have anything akin to consciousness. Just removing patterned sensory input from a typical person via sensory deprivation quickly results in their consciousness dissolving. So how a brain without a body and without an environment to perceive might ever have a hope of consciousness I've no idea.

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

#43

Post by Roverlord »

rwmj wrote: post #35

Is he saying that the papers/experiments of Sperry (for which he won the Nobel Prize) were not reproducible? They only tested two new patients. How rare are split-brain patients? (I assume very rare indeed if they could only find two subjects).

I imagine the neurosurgeons doing it to reduce epilepsy also want to preserve as much connectivity as possible, so total severance of the tissue between the hemispheres may be rarer in present population of splitbrain patients as their technique improved?

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

#44

Post by otakucode »

jpfed wrote: post #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 ulti…

Unlike the metaphor you suggest, in the body decisions are not made by vote. Each half the brain controls particular pieces, with the other not participating. A closer metaphor would be separate RNN which each determine one bit of the response, with the response being observed by each.

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

#45

Post by peter303 »

This is part of the philosophical problem of identity. Is there a non-physical part of the mind? If you duplicate a body by cloning, matter relicator, or exact uploading into a computer, do you have multiple persons or souls? (Star Trek explored several variations) Does [any part of] the mind survive death?

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

#46

Post by amelius »

otakucode wrote: post #42

Dualism is wholly wrong. There is no mind-body split. Even speaking of 'the brain' is just a rough convenience. Individual neurons stretch from that tangled mass of them up in your skull all the way down your spine and to the soles of your feet. Every nerve fiber extends from nearly every point in your body right into your brain. Perception pours in from every point, and it is all extremely important. Emotion, for in…

> Consciousness is not a 'thing', it is a property.

But if consciousness is only a property that doesn't influence the actual physics, then how are we even able to talk about consciousness? Why would it occur to physical beings that something like consciousness exists?

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

#47

Post by mannykannot »

d33 wrote: post #13
have_faith wrote: post #9

> 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…

Not sure what would be the evolutionary purpose of that. I doubt that many of our ancestors survived brain split and managed to reproduce in order to pass the genes, so having that feature would probably mean it's necessary for something else... sounds like a long shot for me though.

It does not have to have an evolutionary purpose - it could easily be an accidental feature of a design that does have evolutionary purpose.

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

#48

Post by dpark »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #33
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No one said that complexity is consciousness.

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

#49

Post by kazagistar »

amelius wrote: post #46
otakucode wrote: post #42

Dualism is wholly wrong. There is no mind-body split. Even speaking of 'the brain' is just a rough convenience. Individual neurons stretch from that tangled mass of them up in your skull all the way down your spine and to the soles of your feet. Every nerve fiber extends from nearly every point in your body right into your brain. Perception pours in from every point, and it is all extremely important. Emotion, for in…

> Consciousness is not a 'thing', it is a property. But if consciousness is only a property that doesn't influence the actual physics, then how are we even able to talk about consciousness? Why would it occur to physical beings that something like consciousness exists?

Not sure what that question means. An ocean wave is something that emerges from the basic laws of physics, but its not actually a "thing", its just a bunch of water exhibiting a property. The only difference between that and the human mind (and properties of it like consciousness) is the level of complexity and thus completeness of our ability to model it. The mind is a wave in an ocean of brain.
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