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February 2001

How Many Persons Are You?!? Part One

It has been observed that people can live with only one hemisphere of the brain. For example, people may lose half their brains in a terrible accident but still recover, or people may have brain tumours and survive the removal of a hemisphere by their surgeons. This has led one famous philosopher, David Wiggins(1967), to propose the following theory; a person's brain could be removed, and the two hemispheres be placed into two different bodies, both of which could survive, and share the memories and character of the original person. Now, of course, Wiggins is not suggesting that this is scientifically possible - indeed it could be argued to be deeply unethical (though that is a different topic altogether!) Rather, Wiggins' is intuitively guessing what might happen, conjecturing from cases of people surviving with one hemisphere. This seems to lead us to conclude that where previously we had one person, we now have two. If this is so, it could suggest that the two hemispheres in each person's brain have always been two different persons.
We would like to argue there is one person only, but difficulties arise in trying to explain how one person could span across the two bodies. We could conclude, like Derek Parfit (1971), that the persons are different selves, sharing psychological continuity with the original self. The two new persons could talk about their past self, persons about to have the 'brain-split' operation could talk about their future selves. It is not that persons split and rejoin, they simply share psychological continuity, e.g. quasi-memories (the new self did not actually have these past experiences). This also appears to be a possible solution to Wiggins' experiment - except for one main problem, in my opinion. Quasi memories? What are they? I only know about real memories.
But what if we are two persons in every body? We may have to rethink all of our notions of responsibility, punishment and so forth. Why? Well, which hemisphere was responsible for that burglary? Maybe one hemisphere did not approve, but was dragged along in it's shared body by the other evil hemisphere!

Wait a minute, wait a minute! These are all just ideas! They have no basis in reality!

That is a very good point. No such operation has ever taken place. Is there any evidence we have which should make us even consider the possibility? Why, yes, actually!

The case of split-brain patients. No, these people have not undergone Wiggins' operation - read on to find out more!

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