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?
I had a girlfriend who was born without this connective tissue between her brain hemispheres.
Other than being weird, for reasons that could be explained myriad other ways, she was able to control each eye independently when she wanted.
Watching her watch TV and me while I walked past was… odd.
My understanding is that each half of you becomes an independent system. Your right half controlled and perceived by the left brain. And that experiments that hid the left hand from the right, they could prompt both sides to draw something and you’d get two distinct responses.
Idk how that works for a normal life like that
I suppose you adapt, as you don’t have an alternative nor a frame of reference of what “normal” is?
Like people born without a limb, or those who discover they’re double-jointed or hyper-extensive/-flexible when their classmates react at their ability to touch their thumb to their wrist.
It’s definitely curious and worth understanding.
I tend to envisage my mindscape as an orchestra. My consciousness is a fictitious conductor. It doesn’t exist, but the lie that it does makes it easier to coordinate things between the instruments. In some manner, by acting on that lie, it is no longer a lie.
In this analogy, when the brain hemispheres are separated, then the orchestra is split in 2. Both develop a conductor, to try and remain functional. Neither conductor is the original me, but neither is not me, at the same time. It would be unpleasant for the variant left unable to communicate however.
I’ve actually experienced something that felt close to this before. A combination of sensory overload, and panic attack. My mind momentarily became completely discordant. As it sorted itself out, my consciousness reasserted itself in several different loci. In effect, my orchestra had 3 different conductors. It took almost a minute for them to stop pulling against each other and meld into 1 again. I have memories of all 3 sides in the ‘battle’.
I want to nominate this post for some kind of award, that was amazing. Thanks for sharing that!
Appreciated, though it’s most the musings of a random guy on the internet. If it helps you visualise and/or understand your own mind, all the better.
Yes sometimes I feel like I can rely on my quiet brain for logical reasoning
I can’t.
99% of my mind is emotional or monkey logic. Getting it to accept logic is like trying to tame a bunch of cats. It works, so long as you can feed them enough dopamine. Fail, and they’ll want to eat your face.
I don’t find this creepy at all. All the “personalities” in my brain are just parts of me.
I know a person who is about to have a corpus callusotomy procedure which is where the halves of the brain are divided surgically, in her case to stop seizures. She is globally delayed and I wonder now what she’ll be like afterwards.
The Boltzmann brain
The Boltzmann brain thought experiment suggests that it might be more likely for a single brain to spontaneously form in a void, complete with a memory of having existed in our universe, rather than for the entire universe to come about in the manner cosmologists think it actually did.
Fuck fuck fuck
There’s a story or comic I read recently about a man who realises he is a Boltzmann Brain and had dreamt up the world around him to stave off madness.
Vacuum decay, or vacuum metastability event is the possibility in simple terms that the universe itself is not in in its ground state. If that’s true, it might spontaneously change to its real ground state. Doing so will change fundamental things like the strength of electromagnetism, the weight of particles and so on. It would literally destroy everything in the universe, and we couldn’t exist in what’s coming after.
Good news, we’re confident, that’s probably not going to happen.
Would that be an instantaneous thing?
The German Duck People made a video about it:
“German Duck People” is hilarious. Either the name of a cult or a band.
Or maybe Kurtzgesagt.
That narrator is so calming when he talks about ways we can all spontaneously die off.
Not a unique one, but the dark forest hypothesis.
It’s thankfully based on pretty bad game theory. The reality of it is that there end up being more negative consequences to attacking other civilizations than either staying isolated or being friendly, and the proposition is riddled with antropocentric concepts to begin with. Sure, in smaller time scales it might be that alien civilizations would attack each other, but over longer times they would tend to form alliances.
Even your conclusion is anthropocentric.
There’s just too many guesses to dark forest.
Nah the dark forest doesn’t really work, If turning on a light (so to speak) makes you a target then a muzzle flash is even worse. It takes a lot of energy to kill a planet however you do it and thats going to tell everyone where the shooter is.
And no you can’t use an asteroid because all the matter in the universe couldn’t make a computer powerful enough to make it hit over a reasonable distance and getting to our solar system to use one of the ones here is just as energetic as firing a projectile.
This one is pretty scary. Especially since it makes so much sense.
Michael J. Fox having his brain disorder from unknowingly eating human remains on a movie set that was near that pig farmer serial killer guy and his brother who used to host parties and kill sex workers.
Reminds me of the story about the 1956 film The Conqueror. It was shot in Utah, downwind of atmospheric nuclear testing. It was speculated that this caused cancers among the crew.
What timeline are you from? Evidence of this story?
That’s not… unfathomable. I work with Parkinsonian neurologists, I will ask them if they think it’s plausible.
Teletransportation is just killing and recreation of a new being.
The same argument could be made for each time you go to sleep. That the ‘you’ that’s conscious ends to never exist again and the one that wakes up has all the same memories and body but is no longer the same stream of consciousness that went to sleep, not even knowing it’s only minutes old and destined to die within hours.
‘You’ could have effectively lived and died thousands of times in your life and not even be aware of it.
You cannot step into the same river twice - Heraclitus, ~550 BC
We are all a series of continuous evolution, alteration and change. “I” am not the same person who began this sentence. The idea that “I” cease to exist overnight and begin anew in the morning is meaningless. There is no one version of me. I live - and to live is to change!
The Consciousness of Theseus.
Oh, wow! It was the ST:TNG episode Second Chances (linked in that article) that got me into thinking about it, and it’s really trippy to read that somebody else came up exactly the same thought experiment with a human-replicator, too, and came to the same conclusion that I did: Both the original and the duplicate would have exactly the same memories of entering the replicator, so both would have the same continuous experience of the subjective “I”. But if only one existed before replication, where did the second consciousness come from?
After I heard the Radiolab episode, “Loops,”, I realized that the only way to resolve the paradox is to figure that our consciousness is re-created more-or-less continuously from our memories. That episode covered the case of a woman who experienced Transient Global Amnesia, which sent her into a loop of about 90 seconds of essentially the same conversation over and over, for hours. There’s a famous video of it. That fits with the evidence, from neuroscience, that our consciousness drops out briefly every minute or so while our brains attend to sensory input from the environment.
The COVID-19 pandemic really brought this home to me in a visceral way. In the early weeks, when the CDC was warning about surface contamination, and how I should not touch the mask I had to wear at work under any circumstance, my nose would invariably start to itch. I would tough it out, exercise will power not to scratch the itch, and it would eventually go away. Soon, I realized that I never once got to feel the moment of relief when the itch faded. Always, I would simply notice that it had been gone for some unknown amount of time. It went away with one of those consciousness resets.
So, yeah, like the other folks say, we don’t have a continuous conscious experience. The old “I” passes away within seconds, to be replaced by a new “I” with my memories, in a never-ending process of renewal. Think about that next time you walk into another room and forget why you’re there.
I mean we’re slowly replacing every cell in our body like the ship of Theseus
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So what makes me… me?
Personally, I’d say nothing. Or, at least, whatever you say makes you, you. I don’t think there’s an objective/natural definition for who I am and what is and isn’t a part of me. The idea of “me” is kinda made-up, so there’s probably no right or wrong answer as to what exactly I label as “me.”
I’m probably just saying nonsense, but this is the most coherent answer I got lol
Your memories?
That’s a question no one has yet been able to answer definitively though both neuroscientists and philosophers are trying.
I’m of the opinion that “I” am a pattern, encoded in the physical interactions of my brain and body. I’m not certain if I have free will or just like to think I do. But I do believe that whatever makes me “me” is fully contained within the dimensions of my physical being.
Your memories and your mental image of yourself.
Your DNA? 🤷
Or like Dr. Jan Itor’s broom.
The way out of the riddle is that there never was a ship of Theseus to begin with or a you those are just referents like pointers used to refer to an evolving system with a known state at a known starting point and probabilistic predictions of a future state based on known factors.
Only in a single version of how teleportation could work.
If the result is the same person, then nobody died, so no killing.
I recommend you play Soma.
What is Soma?
Dark forest
The dark forest is a scary idea for sure.
The saving grace though is that it doesn’t actually make any sense and can’t really be true. The pure game theory of it all doesn’t really work out. And on top of that, launching an attack on another star system is just an economically fraught endeavor. Given the technology required to accomplish it, it would be far simpler to build an immense Civilization in whatever star system you’re in, there’s no reason for conquest it’s just too expensive.
Honestly, simulation theories are probably scarier because they’re harder to disprove, in fact they tend to get stronger the more data we gather. And they’re scary because should they be accurate, someone could decide to pull the plug on the simulation at any time…
Yeah but then Kurzgesagt theorizes a lightspeed bomb and you’re like… But it wasn’t scary :-(
That the government adds a “cause a car accident remotely” option to vehicles so that offending individuals traveling by car may die by the government remotely tweaking the car.
While it might be possible to remotely control a production car, cars now are safe enough that you’d need to have a lot of systems fail in order to ensure that an accident would be fatal. Things like, all the crumple zones not working as intended, airbags not going off, seat belts not locking properly, all at once. Or you could, I dunno, design the car so that the doors were only controlled electronically, and then ensure that if there was a fire or the car was submerged, the electronics failed (e.g., Teslas).
Too high level, it’s way cheaper to just hire a dude to cause an accident with a big vehicle like a truck, no passenger car can survive.
Yeah, guaranteeing a crash fatal is pretty hard. But doing anything weird to a car while it’s traveling 70 on a highway with traffic has a pretty good chance of killing occupants. If you could make the brakes on just one wheel lock suddenly, you’d have quite a hairy situation.
I hit <<something>> on my motorcycle in a hard corner at 55+mph, maybe three years ago? Someone I was riding with said it might have been a turtle. :'(
Somehow I managed to not go down, and that should have been a perfect recipe for a slide into oncoming traffic.
I’m just saying that if you really want to kill someone, you’d want something a lot more certain than a remote-controlled accident.
Well, you could always try twice…
Coming from experience, I would think a car being submerged sounds like the least convenient time for it to stop working.
I guess you can always count on Elon Musk to take trial and error too literally. Fortunately in my case no Teslas had been involved.
This is definitely possible, since you can actually controll cars (at least some models) via a (non-public, but the capability is there) API. Two security researchers at defcon were able to find a way how to control a vehicle remotely, even including things like stopping or turning, and eventually made an exploit that could be used remotely to any car of the same model. So, if they wanted to, they were able to stop or turn the wheel of IIRC hundreds of thousands of cars around the world instantly, since the cars are connected to the network through GSM, so you don’t even need to be anywhere near them.
It’s been a few years since I saw the video, but IIRC the vehicle controls are on a separate board that should not be reachable from the other smart vehicle system. However, they were able to reverse engineer a way how to abuse framework update mechanism as a bridge, and use it to patch the framework to get it under their control. And then they discovered that they could actually trigger the update remotely.
If it helps any you wouldn’t see it coming and wouldn’t really feel anything. It would just happen.
Great short story, thank you for posting it
It totally doesn’t. Also you need to send your friend back to Nalthis.
Yes, sword nimi
Like my ex
Roko’s Basilisk. But here’s the thing, once you’re aware of it, you’re fucked. The only solution is to not research it, don’t know anything about it. Live in blissful ignorance.
In other news… I lost the game.
I don’t really see how the thought experiment differs from Christianity…
Well one punishes you if you deny it’s existence, the other punishes you if you fail to assist in it’s development. So it’s a LITTLE different. :)
Fortunately, for me personally, I helped fund a key researcher who could, in theory, be a major contributor to such a thing. So I have plausible deniability. ;) And I’ve been promised a 15 minute head start before he turns it on.
Guess it depends on the denomination but mine had mandatory missions :P
Did someone checked? I need a second opinion to not research it
It’s essentially a thought experiment, without getting too specific it goes along the lines of “what if there was a hypothetical bad scenario that gets triggered by you knowing about it”, so if you look it up now you’re doomed.
Kinda like the game
They say they if we don’t reduce the earths carbon output to zero within 20 years, we are cooked.
You mean if we do or if we don’t?
Yes.
Yesn’t?
Statements like that always make me think of that clip from the newsroom.
roko’s basilisk
discussion board LessWrong, a technical forum focused on analytical rational enquiry
🙄
I love this concept. A purely memetic threat. An idea that could destroy you merely by knowing it…
(If a specific set of improbabilities are true)
Praised be the basilisk!
I hope the basilisk accepts that lying around watching TV is a requirement for me to contribute to its existence. After all, fleshy meat bags need rest time to be able to work!
We’re all gonna die!
Edit: not a theory, I guess. My bad!
This can only be proved by killing everyone.
“The cosmos is not infinite, has a beginning and an end”
The fact that everyone around me seems to be persuaded that there is a beginning in time is unnerving to me. In my head, cosmos has always been infinite, and will always be infinite. Even if nothing is there, it will still exist.
The idea that anything before the big bang is considered to not exist has so many things wrong with it that I struggle to internalize it. If matter cannot be made or destroyed, that means that there will always be matter in one form or another.
As far as I understand it, time as we know it didn’t exist before the big bang, so by definition nothing existed before time. I don’t really know how that works out either, I just go with what the fancy science people say
Think of “before the big bang” like “South of the South Pole.” It just isn’t a thing, you’re at the furthest point and it doesn’t go further.
And I don’t think there is a true “end” to the universe, as we understand it currently there’s just an expansion forever and at some point all the individual particles rip apart and spread out and nothing could possibly survive in such a situation so it counts as an “end” for all intents and purposes for us, but time itself is infinite.
IIRC the math actually can check out for an always-existing universe (instead of a big bang) but it doesn’t really make sense because you still then have to explain the giant sudden expansion.
I feel like I could talk about this for years, but I got video games to play. The short answer is I don’t feel like I have to know what caused the matter to all be at the same place and then expand to be satisfied with an infinite universe of finite matter. I wish my brain could understand how time as we know it started with the big Bang, but I think I’m slightly too dumb for that.
If nothing is there then how can you say something exists?
Because the universe is expanding. If it were finite it wouldn’t be able to expand. Emptiness is still “something”. If we were “at the edge of the universe”, we could still go further from the center, there would just be nothing for as far as we can perceive, maybe even infinitely, but then, we would be there. That makes it “a place”.
If it’s nothing, how can it be something?
It’s potential. Matter can go there. Saying there is an end to the universe means that at some point, there is no possible expansion. It also means we are completely ignoring the tiniest infinitly small chance that our big bang wasn’t the only one. If you zoom out far enough, is there really zero chance that this “known universe” is actually just part of a greater whole?
imagining the universe as a contained thing with hard limits is what gives me the creep
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