Recommended reading:

"The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind" by Julian Jaynes

"Left in the dark" by Graham Gynn and Tony Wright (and apparently, 2nd hand recommendation - "Return of the brain to eden" from the same authors)

Consider both science fiction rather than science; Jaynes is much more scientific and grounded, though it is still incomplete. Wright is much looser with facts and interpretations,

Still, both are thought provoking and worth reading in my opinion.

Are you familiar with Dennett's take on it?

His paper, The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity - http://cogprints.org/266/1/selfctr.htm

Was not familiar with it. Thanks, an excellent read.

Former consciousness neuroscientist here.

Julian Jaynes is really only of historical interest. For starters, he's more about meta-consciousness than raw awareness per se. Most of his ideas are intriguing, but has the feeling of a Just-So Story.

To quote Dawkins: "It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets."

I read "Left in the Dark" and second the recommendation. It's quite an elegant hypothesis even if it doesn't seem to cover all of its bases, but it's a good jumping-off point for those interested in rationalizing phenomena related to consciousness.

For example, the book's theory that the dormant (but incredibly powerful) right brain (or subconscious or what have you) is responsible for our immune systems neatly explains things like the placebo effect, faith healing, miraculous lucid dream healing, etc.

If we assume that the Buddha's enlightenment was a total coming together of his mind, then all the seemingly supernatural abilities attributed to him, such as immunity to disease, start to make sense.

Also:

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist

If you want to read a book that has the potential of radically changing your perspective of things, give this a shot.

Also relevant: "Neurons gone wild" by Kevin Simler. https://www.meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/

Split brain used to play a large role in how I understood personhood, until I read that researchers could not later replicate the original results.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2017/01/31/sp...

Former neuroscientist here. Umm, your link actually criticizes the study that didn't replicate the original findings in its final paragraph.

I'm inclined to believe their results were due to:

1) The corpus callosum is the dominant interhemispheric tract, but not the only one. Secondary tracts may have been recruited/enhanced to share info, especially given that they've had decades since their surgery.

2) This fits with the progression of callosotomies, (and brain injuries in general), where deficits are most acute right after surgery, and tend to diminish over time. In fact the Nature article's example addresses this; the patient only experienced split-brain behavior for about a year.

Thanks for the clarification. I did not read the link I posted carefully, I was searching from memory for the article that I'd thought I'd read. Obviously I got the wrong one and there have been further developments.

The aspect of personhood that I'm referring to is the idea that we have two people inside of us, that develop independently. That's a really weird one to wrap my "brains" around. That the body works to recreate one personhood after the callosum is split is pretty clear indication that there's one only 'self' at play here. Both hemispheres cooperate to create it.

While I'm sure you can create some weird Frankenstein by cutting off all the ways for the hemispheres to communicate, this is just doing damage to the self, might as well just put a bullet in there and be done with it. A collosotomy by itself doesn't destroy the self, the cohesive identity of the body as having one mind.

> The aspect of personhood that I'm referring to is the idea that we have two people inside of us, that develop independently.

The same experiment informed my understanding of consciousness in a different way. It's not that there are two people inside you. Rather, your mind is composed of many pieces that each individually only understand one apect of the world. The corpus callosum is just an easy place to make a split. You could subdivide further and see a similar effect on each subdivided part.

That's a thought experiment that could never be done for many reasons, but I hold out some hope we might some day be able to verify it non-destructively.