Topics Mind

Question Is there a logical contradiction with the notion of having two or more minds? What if it is intelligible that there are two or more minds and that you're the only "self" that is existing but you got so lonely that you created an elaborate delusion (that other minds exist) so that you can escape your loneliness? (Solipsism.) Is the plurality of minds/selves a coherent concept?

Accepted:
February 17, 2008

Comments

I wasn't entirely sure how many issues were on the table here. Your first question seemed to be whether it's contradictory to say that one person has two minds. But as your question continued, the issue seemed to be whether it's possible in general for there to be more than one mind.

There's no obvious reason to think there couldn't be many separate minds, and of course what we usually assume is that there are. Whether solipsism is coherent is something that some people have doubted, but I've never found the doubts very convincing. So the question we'll tackle is whether you or I might have more than one mind or self.

Interestingly enough, there are serious reasons for saying that the answer is yes. There are two bits here. One has to do with the brain. It has two hemispheres, and in patients with severe epilepsy, sometimes the only way to relieve the symtoms is to sever the corpus callosum -- the bundle of nerves that connects the two sides. Although there is room to argue about the details, there is reason to think that in cases like this, there really are two separate centers of consciousness. The philosopher Derek Parit, among others, has considered this kind of case in some detail. And if Parfit's interpretation is correct, the most plausible thing to say is that one person can have two minds or two centers of consciousness. Here are a couple of youtube videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZnyQewsB_Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMLzP1VCANo

As you'll see, the researcher in these videos doesn't agree that both hemispheres are conscious, but other researchers think otherwise.

The second bit in Parfit's view is that the very notion of a person is actually a shallow one. If we describe the split brain case in detail, making clear how it works and what the phenomena are, then the question of whether this is "really" one person with two minds or two persons is more or less a matter of what sort of description we prefer. But what seems clear is that one brain/body might well contain two more or less independent centers of consciousness that typically manage to co-operate but that are importantly distinct from one another.