992
Am I? Who knows
(startrek.website)
Source Page. Credit is to SMBC-Comics and even more credit to @aperson@beehaw.org who noticed it was missing and found the credit in this comment. Sorry about that and thanks, you're awesome aperson <3
Ok, here's a fun one:
When people have their corpus callosum split, the part that connects the two brain hemispheres, there's often different personality traits that will emerge for each hemisphere, such as one being religious and the other atheistic.
So the question is - where do the emergent personality traits come from?
When the brain is connected, do you effectively have psyches that are simply sitting there suppressed waiting to come out? Or is the you right now a mixture of personality aspects located in both sides?
What about extending this to the concept of the soul?
Is it still one soul in the body split into two, such that the one hemisphere could doom the other with its disbelief, or is there now two souls in one body - and if so where did the other one come from?
Are we actually individuals, or just a hodgepodge of different subconscious identities that's fooled themselves into thinking they are a single mind, just an accident away from being thrust into their own isolated lobes to define themselves anew separate from the others?
And if that split were to happen, which side would the 'you' experiencing this moment right now end up on?
I subscribe to the emergent properties theory, that our consciousness is an emergent property, same with our intelligence and the two different personality traits that appear on the brain being split into two hemispheres are on that path.
I do wonder though if being split introduces any differences from being born with a split, as in does being part of a whole create those traits or if those would've happened regardless of when the split happened and being whole works like you described with some personality traits suppressing the others.
Easy.. Everyone is a mix of personalities acquired from people you spend time with and interact. It's way more than just 2. Each side might hold a huge chunk of partial information.
When they split, it's maybe two combination of personalities fighting each other. And each subconscious would create a different individual
But the real you can only be the complete mind where all emerges come from. I'm no expert but sounds like the soul would be a confused one and not a broken one.