Here is an interesting thought experiment that came to me: some persons live with only half a brain, for example after a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemisphere

Here is an interesting thought experiment that came to me: some persons live with only half a brain, for example after a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispherectomy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemispherectomy. And they can sometimes still execute actions that the missing hemisphere was normally responsible for, like speech or motor control, because the other hemisphere learns how to do it due to plasticity. What if we had the medical ability to take the hemisphere that is removed from person A and to transplant it into another person, B? Would the consciousness of the original person now be 2 independently functioning consciousnesses, A and B? Would your memories be split, eg. person A remembering half of your life, and person B remembering the other half? Would A and B feel they have the same consciousness? Could we go further and split a brain in 4? Would splitting a brain more and more progressively degrade the quality/complexity of consciousness? If so what is the smallest part of the brain that can still be capable of self-awareness, introspection, etc? So many questions... On an unrelated note, I have a crazy idea, but bear with me for a second: A central point of the New Testament is that the "Holy Spirit" was given to men when Jesus died. Could the "Holy Spirit" be a term used by people to describe what it felt like to have consciousness appear in their mind? Jaynes says consciousness appeared ~3000 years ago, but if he is right, if society caused consciousness to appear, then it did so at different points in time for different societies, because each society develops at a different pace. So it could be that to the people living around Jerusalem consciousness appeared 2000, not 3000, years ago.