superimposed minds?

[yaaarrrgg]

There's an old riddle that asks "how many grooves are on a record?"

With the answer being "two" ... one on the front, and one on the back.

However, that's not entirely true. There was a band years ago that came out with a record that had two intertwined grooves on each side. Meaning you could put the needle down in two places (randomly) and half the time you'd hear a different record (half the length of a standard lp of course). The record itself was not monumental, and the band I think lost money due to the higher cost of this unusual production.

Although applied to the philsophy of mind, it made me wonder if the same thing is not possible with a brain.

The level of redundancy is probably greater than two fold, since people have lost half their brain at birth and still adapted to function normally.

This means there could be (in theory) two complete, fully functioning brains superimposed in the same head. That never interacted with each other. The brain that was hooked up the the sensory equipment and muscles would never even know the other person existed.

Just an odd thought

:driving:

[spot]

Only if you regard neurons as carrying signals without interacting with each other by (say) EMF, or that no memory is involved in any chemical constituent of the brain.

I have it in mind that recollection of a learned maze has been transferred between rats as a fluid injection between brains. That has always rather unsettled me.

There's an elegant experiment to show bilateral independence of thinking - two people inside your head. One side only is involved in writing and the other side only in speaking. You can ask a question related to pain, for example, to be answered orally and in writing, having suppressed pain perception on one side of the brain only. The oral response is "that feels fine" while the simultaneous written answer is "that hurts, please stop it". I think you have to prevent the person from seeing what he's writing for it to work. What's fascinating is that neither "mind" knows what the other's thought, felt or done.

[Bryn Mawr]

yaaarrrgg;792811 wrote: There's an old riddle that asks "how many grooves are on a record?"

With the answer being "two" ... one on the front, and one on the back.

However, that's not entirely true. There was a band years ago that came out with a record that had two intertwined grooves on each side. Meaning you could put the needle down in two places (randomly) and half the time you'd hear a different record (half the length of a standard lp of course). The record itself was not monumental, and the band I think lost money due to the higher cost of this unusual production.

Although applied to the philsophy of mind, it made me wonder if the same thing is not possible with a brain.

The level of redundancy is probably greater than two fold, since people have lost half their brain at birth and still adapted to function normally.

This means there could be (in theory) two complete, fully functioning brains superimposed in the same head. That never interacted with each other. The brain that was hooked up the the sensory equipment and muscles would never even know the other person existed.

Just an odd thought

:driving:


I think that you're assuming that those areas of the brain for which we know no function are unused. That people with brain damage can re-learn using other areas of the brain does not mean that the have not lost other functions.