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 think that’s the human condition. Don’t studies show that most decisions are made on emotion and rationalized afterwards?
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.
I heard about this as well. I think maybe this is what is mistaken as subconscious. I think it’s the “dogs in a trench” coat situation. But there is actually some amount of deep communication. Maybe even just hormonal/ emotional.
Sometimes in life I’ll get a feeling that’s origin is not immediately apparent to me. After some focus I can trace its origins to the intersection of two competing desires or something. That I understand. But other times… Even with long sessions of meditation, it feels like the explanation for some feelings do not reside within my own consciousness.
I’ve begun to try and listen for other consciousness and understand them. I’ve gotten a sort of impression of a personality and when we’re both happy, I feel a sort of harmony. When they’re upset I feel a pull towards chaos. Doing something can be as simple as getting a drink they like or as complex as avoiding a certain social situation.
Or it’s all in my imagination, lol. If so I’ll enjoy the placebo.
theres a video somewhere of a dude like that where his halves would make shit up independently of eachother on the fly and he was unaware of it. really interesting stuff
Yeah, this is a phenomenon called ‘confabulation.’ You see it with stroke patients too. There’s some who feel like it’s a more accurate term than ‘hallucinations’ for when LLMs make shit up these days too.
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.
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.
I can’t find the specific article, but it was basically arguing that prions are an unavoidable existential crisis that will eventually kill everything on the planet. The basis was the fact that they are virtually indestructible, can lie latent in our environment indefinitely and basically just always make more of themselves.
Mind you, the time frame for this particular apocalypse would be pretty big. It was still an eerie thought though, just like this inexorable accumulation of alien/bizarro world proteins that would eventually kill/convert everything. I guess it’s kinda like the grey goo planet theory.
Anyway, we’ll almost certainly kill ourselves via climate change or massive war first, so no need to worry too much about prions.
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.
I mean we’re slowly replacing every cell in our body like the ship of Theseus
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.
So what makes me… me?
Your memories?
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
Only in a single version of how teleportation could work.
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
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…
Doors not opening in a fire should end the company that made them. Not sure how this company still exists.
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.
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 :-(
deleted by creator
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. 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.
You have to believe that a malevolent AI will give enough of a damn about you to bother simulating anything at all, let alone infinite torture, which is useless for it to do once it already exists. Everyone on LessWrong has a well-fed ego so I get why they were in a tizzy for a while.
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
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
roko’s basilisk
discussion board LessWrong, a technical forum focused on analytical rational enquiry
🙄
Praised be the basilisk!
You have doomed us all!
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!
Quantum immortality
Having survived a few suicide attempts I’ve been convinced this is how it actually is. I have no interest in any further attempts because I know I’ll just end up waking up full of regret and possibly maimed.
Pretty compelling case against suicide tbh, unusual as it may be.
I read a short story about this, and can’t remember the name but I remember how hollow it made me feel.
Damn now I wanna read it, any more ideas on finding the story?
https://reactormag.com/divided-by-infinity/
I don’t feel like this is exactly right but it’s hitting some of the same notes. Divided by Infinity by Robert Charles Wilson
!The one I remember ends with the main character essentially becoming the singularity, but this ends a little differently. Equally as sad as I recall though.!<
We’re all gonna die!
Edit: not a theory, I guess. My bad!
he’s a witch! he knows the future!
If I don’t die, at least I’ll be pleasantly surprised
This can only be proved by killing everyone.
Someone figured it out how to make, farm and mass produce the Higgs boson, creating microscopic particles that can generate infinite electricity with simple mechanical systems thanks to their high gravity and then humanity starts develop insane tech powered by gravity waves, traveling faster than speed of light becomes possible by switching gravity on and off. Then obviously some company or government make too much of it and collapses into a microscopic blackhole that instantly falls into the center of the earth quickly eating the planet inside out.
That’s how the Earth got destroyed in “The Forge of God.” :)
Plot (spoils about 50% of the book)
A hostile alien probe discovers Earth, builds/grows three wildly different alien races, has them crash one each in the world’s three largest superpowers (one claiming to bring knowledge, one warning of an impending attack, one claiming to seek conquest), while robot ships plant explosives along the Mariana trench, but the primary attack is two singularities, circling earth in a decaying orbit, by the time anyone even begins to theorize about the cause of the anomalous gravity measurements across the world, both are already circling deep under Earth’s crust.
“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
