Consciousness Splitting Options

[thosylve]

Hi all,

A few days ago I thought about consciousness and came up with a problem that I could not answer myself. Maybe this is a well known problem, if it is or you have some good answers please do reply

Ok my thought experiment is the following:

Imagine that i split my brain with my twin brother and with some future technology are able to merge the my right side brain with my twin brothers left side and my left side brain with my twin brothers right side. What will I expricence when i wake up after the operation? Which person will i wake up as?

The point of the thought experiement that when consciousness is a product of brain activity we should be able (with some fancy future technology) to split the brain into many pieces from many different individuals and merge the pieces into the same number of brains. When we wake up the people where will their consciousness have gone?

Many thanks in advance for your answers.

Kind Regards,

Thomas

[fredreload]

I thought of a similar problem. I think consciousness is comprised of all the neural activities that's going on in the brain. So if all the neural activities stop, then you lose consciousness. It is similar to a computer, if the internal battery on the CPU is missing, then you lose all the memory. So to answer your question, if the neural activities in the conscious region of your brain stops. Then the consciousness is gone. As for the memory, you and your twin brother should have a different set of memory. So switching the brain would simply be the memory you lose or gain during this process.

[thosylve]

Hi,

My brother stumbled upon the following youtube video, which is pretty much exactly what my question was about. youtube . com /watch?v=qjfaoe847qQ&feature=plcp

It seems like there is no answer to my question, but thanks for your answer.

T

[Marko]

Hi guys


I'm not sure what you mean by "right side" of the brain; it is known that people can survive resection of a whole hemisphere of telencephalon (the outermost part of brain) seemingly with no long term memory loss and much less than expected permanent impairment; I suspect that the structures related to the very consciousness are located in inner parts of the brain.


I've conceived a similar thought experiment myself: it seems that brain can function well with large amounts of neurons being removed over time (and perhaps slowly replaced).

It could be conceived that using some impossibly advanced technology, your brain could be disassembled into individual neurons, and with the addition of some extra neurons two whole new persons could be constructed while maintaining all their memories and qualities.

The two resulting patients, created from your brain are now brought into two different rooms to wake up in: red one and green one. The question is, which room do you wake up in?

Of course, it's hard to debate anything like this scientifically, since even if such nightmarish technology existed, there would be no scientifically analyzable results from the experiment, and we wouldn't get any more knowledge about the hard problem of consciousness than we already have.

Marko

[DragonFistAbysi]

It depends on your individuals strengths as to what would happen and what memories and information is stored where. If I remember right, memories are stored in the frontal lobes, but I'm probably wrong. The right side is the creative side and the left side is the calculating side. Let's say that you are predominantly creative and your twin is predominantly calculating. This process would create a two new individuals with contradicting memories, but I doubt that would have a major disconnect, but it would vary from person to person. With the switch, one individual would be gifted artistically and in calculations while the other would lack both. So, what would happen? Either an ego conflict would destroy both or both would be individuals which were completely unique compared to all other humans. One might be superior to most while the other the opposite.

It's not a bad mental exercise.