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.<p>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.
Here's a thought experiment.<p>Say you had more than one RNN trained for the same task (say, generating text). How would you couple them?<p>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?<p>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?<p>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.<p>Split brains are coupled by their shared access to the body and act within the same environment. How do the hemispheres use that coupling?
>How does a brain, consisting of many modules, create just one person?<p>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 without the corpus callosum the hemispheres have virtually no means of exchanging information<p>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 channels.
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).
Fascinating subject. Much more is address in Iain Mc Gilchrist's book<p>"The Master and his Emissary : the divided brain and the making of the western world"<p><a href="http://iainmcgilchrist.com/" rel="nofollow">http://iainmcgilchrist.com/</a><p>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").
Video illustration of the previous experiments mentioned in the article:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8</a>
> the current understanding seems to only deepen the mystery of consciousness<p>Not sure I understand that.<p>What they appear to have established is that, if you sever the direct connection between the two brain halves, functions that required the direct communication between the two halves is impaired.<p>I mean, it's interesting to note what those functions are and the severity of the impairment. But there doesn't appear to be any effect on consciousness at all; at least not in the article's description of the effects. Am I missing something?
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?
The thing that has stuck with me is the career test that was given to someone with a split brain, and one side wanted to be a racecar driver and the other wanted to be something completely different. [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-superhuman-mind/201211/split-brains" rel="nofollow">https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-superhuman-mind/201...</a>
There is a video about a split brain patient (somewhere), while they are shopping.
The left hand might put a box of cereal into the shopping cart, but the right hand puts it right back on the shelf. I wish I cod find the video.