The Christian Vanguard

A few days ago, I wrote about multiple streams of consciousness and split brains . I gave reasons to think it wasn't the same that there were multiple streams of consciousness, but further into my reading from Richard Swinburne, he presents this thought experiment which I thought was interesting, but he gets it from someone else. Suppose prior to your splitting of the brain, a mad scientist tells you that after your operation, in which he will put one half of our brain into one body and the other half into another body, he will torture one and set the other free with a million dollars. He then gives you the option of who to torture and who to let go. So the question here is, does it matter who you chose? If bundle theory is correct, then it wouldn't matter, because neither would be true. But that doesn't seem to be true. It does seem that it would matter who is tortured and who isn't, because you have a sense that you would be one of them, and you don't want to be...

In my Metaphysics textbook, there is an article by David Parfit describing split brain experiments and its implications for the philosophy of mind. So, the experiments go something like this. You take a brain and you split it into the two hemispheres. Each part of the brain controls a different part of the body. Next, the patient is shown a card that is half blue and half red. Now, say the right eye is focused on the red, and the left eye is focused on the blue. Then ask the patient which color he sees, and his right arm will write red, and his left arm will write blue, but the patient cannot comprehend both at the same time. He thinks he only sees blue and he also thinks he only sees red. He cannot conjoin the two beliefs.  What Parfit says this proves is that our conscious is not a unified thing. Consciousness is supposed to  unify all beliefs, and this unified consciousness is what we call the self. But since we know that a single patient can have two streams of consci...