Those in the medical field might be familiar with the terms Hemispherectomy, which literally implies a surgical procedure in which half of the human brain is being isolated and this is mostly done on very young patient because their brains are able to adapt to vary condition and the remaining half of the brain will take up the function of the other half that was removed and this is usually done because a young child or a baby is having seizure and removing the part where the seizure occur seems the only solution but you might want to ask these questions "if you can live with half a brain, what if each half of this brain is placed on two empty skulls of different bodies, which person will be you?"
You are you, you are conscious and you are aware of what is happening to you from the perspective of yourself, it feels little bit like you are a thing inside a body looking out from a eyeballs and nobody on earth will ever see things the way you view it from that position and this awareness of your own experience, the awareness that you are having your own thought makes up what is called consciousness but if your brain is being isolated and placed into two different people, which of them will be you? Take a moment and think about it.
Well, one of the best place to start when defining consciousness and understanding them is to begin with things that we agree not to be conscious, for instance "clever bot" this is a website where a computer robot will response to any form of questions you ask, this is possible because it was program but you can't consider it as being conscious because it does not have any sense of itself, it doesn't feel anything or having it's own inner life and it's just a program that response to questions based on programme. Humans are not like cleaver bot because humans feel things and have intention but how do I know that the person reading this article is not a bot, how do I know if everyone I meet here on steemit are like me, how do I know if these people are not just a smart version of clever bot. What I'm asking is incredibly philosophical but it's a very famous and important question and I'm basically asking if it's possible for something to exist as a philosophical zombie, a thing that act, react and response like normal human does but at same time doesn't feel anything, it's doesn't know that it's having his own thoughts and automatically response like a robot in the appropriate way.
What's amazing and heavy about all these questions is that science doesn't have an answer to it, although who knows maybe some day and this is just my believe but for the now what we have is just is the psychologic of disorder of consciousness and let's begin with "Anosognosia". A common example of anosognosia in psychology classes is a patient who has lost the ability to raise the left hand but when you ask them to raise their left hand, they say no problem but funny enough they won't move a thing and if you ask them why didn't they,instead of them to say "I couldn't" they be like; "I didn't feel like" .
Anton-Babinski syndromes is another way dramatic, patient with this syndrome are kind of blind and can't see anything and if you also ask them let's say " How many fingers I'm raising up" they will make guess but if they are wrong, they will explain their inaccuracy with an excuse "like I wasn't with my glasses", people who exhibit Anton-babinski syndrome tend to be a victim of stroke and there are some disconnection between what they are really experiencing and their conscious awareness , they don't know that they can't see because their part of their brain that monitor virtual input isn't telling the brain anything or even telling that there is no virtual input which means that the part of the brain that is responsible for answering questions and creating speech has to completely create a comfortable response despite the fact that science has be able to study the patient of the syndromes, we still haven't gotten the idea on how to solve our original problem and all we manage to come up with is impossible questions about identity, questions that you can answer yourself base on what you believe.
Here is another one and its called the Swamp meon which was introduced by Donald Davidson, imaging you are walking and all of a sudden you are struck with a bolt of lightning and your body is burnt but at same moment a second bolt of lightning strike near by and cause atom and molecules to arrange themselves into exact configuration that your body use to have but does that mean that's you! or imagine a surgical operation is being done and my cell is being removed from my body and replace them with identical once into yours but at that point, will I officially become you?.
All these questions that we might ask based on this article are some sort of questions that science has be burning midnight candles just to answer and until we meet again :).
Reference
⊙ Understanding Hemispherectomy | Cleveland Clinic
⊙ What Is Consciousness? | Big Think
⊙ Anton-Babinski syndrome - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics
⊙ Anosognosia - Treatment Advocacy Center
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