The Human Question

Pinker uses the fact that a person with a severed corpus callosum will show signs of being of two minds, as it were. One side will act according to one inclination and the other according to another. The side responsible for saying why one acts as one does ingeniously fabricate a pseudo holistic account. I can't get into the details now, b/c it's a while since I heard it, but it's a very worthwhile argument against the position I hold. My question to SP would be, however, as follows: since we use neurons not only in the brain but also in the stomach (to help direct churning activity), does he think that our stomach thinks? Perhaps the maxim "follow your guts" has special significance for Pinker... Furthermore, in basing his theory of mind on this exceptional case, Pinker is behaving like the Chinese astronomers who noted only the exceptional events (e.g., super novae), not the regular ones. He still needs to give an account for the normal unity of human th...