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vilhelm_syesterday at 8:58 PM1 replyview on HN

Yeah, that sounds very unlikely. The full paper dismisses the possibility:

> Another possible explanation to consider is that the current indings were caused by cross-cueing (one hemisphere informing the other hemisphere with behavioural tricks, such as touching the left hand with the right hand). We deem this explanation implausible for four reasons. First, cross-cueing is thought to only allow the transfer of one bit of information (Baynes et al., 1995). Yet, both patients could localize stimuli throughout the entire visual field irrespective of response mode (Experiments 1 and 5), and localizing a stimulus requires more than one bit of information. Second, [...]

I get the impression that the authors of the paper have some kind of woo (nonmaterialist) view of consciousness. But they also mention this possiblity, which seems more plausible to me:

> Finally, a possibility is that we observed the current results because we tested these patients well after their surgical removal of the corpus callosum (Patient DDC and Patient DDV were operated on at ages 19 and 22 years, and were tested 10–16 and 17–23 years after the operation, respectively). This would raise the interesting possibility that the original split brain phenomenon is transient, and that patients somehow develop mechanisms or even structural connections to re-integrate information across the hemispheres, particularly when operated at early adulthood.


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throw310822today at 12:11 AM

> I get the impression that the authors of the paper have some kind of woo (nonmaterialist) view of consciousness.

Indeed:

"Our findings, however, reveal that although the two hemispheres are completely insulated from each other, the brain as a whole is still able to produce only one conscious agent."

Which is materially impossible, given the premise.