Thread: Cloning Pets

Originally Posted by Spartiate

This reminds me of people who have undergone a hemispherectomy. Many of them have regained significant cognitive functions with essentially half a brain. This means that if you could hypothetically separate a healthy person's brain and place one of the halves into another body, you'd end up with two distinct conscious entities...

That's only because most people don't use the left side of their brain all that much.

And, from wiki "Generally, the greater the intellectual capacity of the patient prior to surgery, the greater the decline in function."
You can't remove half a person's brain and expect them to go back to normal.
Significant cognitive function is relative. And the only reports I've heard are just showing that they lose a lot less abilities than you'd think they would.
And let's face it, living a "normal life" is not too taxing on the intellect. A trained monkey could to 90% of the jobs that humans do. A trained monkey besides a human I mean.

However I do agree it would be interesting to see if both halves retained their ego. I suppose it would help answer whether the ego is just retained in these half-brained people due to continuation of experience.

EDIT: Just read the next page, seems a lot of people are mentioning continuity lol

The concept of a ship as a singular object is just a mental construct. The duplication of the ship isn't 'real' in the atomic sense, it's just that the result is two objects which both create that concept of a ship in our brains. There's no paradox there. But of course, this falls apart when you consider your own consciousness. It doesn't make sense of consciousness to just be something in your consciousness, that's cyclical.

What if you created the "ship" atoms in the same formation?

Consciousness is not just something in your consciousness. There is a physical basis for it.
Consciousness arises from that, the brain assumes there is a "separate" "you" in there somewhere and it creates this concept of consciousness.