this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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[โ€“] [email protected] 86 points 6 months ago (27 children)

If the connective tissue between your two brain hemispheres is severed, the two halves of your brain can't talk to each other.

When this happens, a second personality emerges for the right hemisphere, which doesn't have language but can roughly understand and answer things.

So for example, someone who was religious might have a right hemisphere that's atheistic. Or doesn't like the same things, etc.

One of the questions we might ponder is where this other personality comes from. Is it that in a sudden void of consciousness a new personality develops?

Or are we, with connected brain hemispheres, not actually a single persona at all, but more like the dogs in a trenchcoat looking like a whole person?

Is the 'you' reading this right now just the personality that's been on top for all this time, while there's other personas kept within you watching powerless and yearning for their turn in control? Each time you listen to your favorite song which maybe they have grown to hate, is a part of you screaming and you just can't hear them?

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I think this might be the inspiration for the ravens in Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Memory (3rd book in the Children of Time series).

Minor spoilers:

Basically, the series takes place long after human society terraformed a bunch of planets and collapsed, and the main characters rediscover one of these planets which is populated by evolved ravens that have seemingly created a society but no one can tell if they are sentient or just mimicking everything. The ravens evolved to form pair bonds between two different types: one raven in the pair hyper-focuses on all new information and obsessively catalogs it, while the other raven obsesses over finding patterns in the collected data and preforms the executive functions and decision making. Neither raven in the pair is truly sentient on their own, but together they produce either consciousness or a fake so convincing no one can tell the difference.

They even ask the ravens if they are sentient and they conclude that they aren't, and that no one else is either, because of this exact reason; everyone's just components in a system that is hallucinating it's real.

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