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Could a single human being ever have multiple conscious minds? Some
human beings do. The corpus callosum is a large pathway connecting
the two hemispheres of the brain. In the second half of the
twentieth century a number of people had this pathway cut through
as a treatment for epilepsy. They became colloquially known as
split-brain subjects. After the two hemispheres of the brain are
cortically separated in this way, they begin to operate unusually
independently of each other in the realm of thought, action, and
conscious experience, almost as if each hemisphere now had a mind
of its own. Philosophical discussion of the split-brain cases has
overwhelmingly focused on questions of psychological identity in
split-brain subjects, questions like: how many subjects of
experience is a split-brain subject? How many intentional agents?
How many persons? On the one hand, under experimental conditions,
split-brain subjects often act in ways difficult to understand
except in terms of each of them having two distinct streams or
centers of consciousness. Split-brain subjects thus evoke the
duality intuition: that a single split-brain human being is somehow
composed of two thinking, experiencing, and acting things. On the
other hand, a split-brain subject nonetheless seems like one of us,
at the end of the day, rather than like two people sharing one
body. In other words, split-brain subjects also evoke the unity
intuition: that a split-brain subject is one person. Elizabeth
Schechter argues that there are in fact two minds, subjects of
experience, and intentional agents inside each split-brain human
being: right and left. On the other hand, each split-brain subject
is nonetheless one of us. The key to reconciling these two claims
is to understand the ways in which each of us is transformed by
self-consciousness.
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