Right now I'm listening to Michael Gazzaniga's Who's in Charge, a delightful book on split-brain experiments by neurological pioneer lacking any pretentiousness but is instead, full of wit and cheer For reasons already discussed in this blog, I wouldn't reach the same reductionist conclusions as he does. But instead of going into those objections here, I will only point out that in basing his view of human nature, as he does, on an exceptional case he reminds me of the Chinese astronomers who noted only the irregular occurrences in the sky. That sort of information became useful centuries later to those who were trying to understand the lawfulness of nature. Split-brain experiments are similarly useful to one who is trying to understand human nature. But to take such experiments as the starting point is to proceed "bassackwards": the way human nature behaves most of the time is the primary source of our understanding of what sort of being we humans are. Split brain experiments have to fit into that regularity-based account rather than vice versa. That is, split-brain experiments can be used to falsify/confirm our hypothheses about how humans normally function, but they cannot, on their own serve as the basis of our understanding of how, on a good day, the brain operates. As GK Chesterton says, it's the fact that trains usually go on time (if that is a fact somewhere) that's most interesting and is most worth explaining. And it can't be explained on the basis of the fact that they are sometimes late or early.
To those who think the results of split brain experiments disprove the identity of the self, I would ask the following questions: do these results also imply that -- when the corpus callosam is intact, that there are two consciousnesses in one's skull that happen to communicate really well with each other? If there is just one, then isn't that unity an embarrassment to materialism? If there are two, then why not more--say, as many as there are neurons? And why not a new self for each neuron firing? In such a case, what would happen to our ability to make scientific observations?
To those who think the results of split brain experiments disprove the identity of the self, I would ask the following questions: do these results also imply that -- when the corpus callosam is intact, that there are two consciousnesses in one's skull that happen to communicate really well with each other? If there is just one, then isn't that unity an embarrassment to materialism? If there are two, then why not more--say, as many as there are neurons? And why not a new self for each neuron firing? In such a case, what would happen to our ability to make scientific observations?
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