4 ms·
Another similar thought experiment is what happen if we cut ourselves laterally exactly in half and then fill back in the missing half on both parts. In the cas
by jaxomlotus 10y ago
Another similar thought experiment is what happen if we cut ourselves laterally exactly in half and then fill back in the missing half on both parts. In the case of both halves, we are continuing an existing consciousness.
Would you be OK killing off one of the halves?
- qbrass 10y agoI've been through this a million times before. If they refuse to act with me as a single entity, they're dead to me.
- jaxomlotus 10y agoWhich one is "me" though? Which ever side I in my current state end up being?
- joeyo 10y agoWe have some data on this from split-brain patients. These are people whose corpus callosum---a bundle of fibers linking their left and right cerebral hemispheres---is cut. Such people start to act as if they are two individuals. Each hemisphere only has access to half of the visual field, and due to a quirk of how language is lateralized (typically left hemisphere only) they can make conflicting verbal and nonverbal reports of ambiguous stimuli: saying one thing yet writing another. So given this, it's not really fair to say that there is a unitary state to split. Each half would get a different state (perhaps "synchronized" at the time of the split), and only one half would be able to talk about the experience.