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I would be very grateful if someone could direct me towards any literature on the following thoughts:

I have always wondered if my brain were split into 2 and separated while being kept alive and then rebuilt into 2 fully functioning brains, which one would I (my current self/consciousness) occupy.

Of course this is all debatable but I came to a fairly satisfactory answer (for myself) that there exists some sort of module within the brain that emulates my conscious self and whichever half of the brain got that module would be the one my current consciousness would inhabit.

But it then seems that consciousness is simply an illusion from the brain. That the question if (in the Ship of Theseus type of thinking) your whole body where to be decomposed and rebuilt would the new consciousness still be the same as the old is simply answered by the fact there was no real consciousness in the first place.

I however find this very hard to wrap my head around as it seems like a logical answer, yet every waking moment I feel as if I have a very real consciousness.

Could anyone direct me to a book that discusses this in more detail?

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    $\begingroup$ Not really a philosophy question. This is more neuro-science. There are people whose 2 hemispheres do not talk to each other. The part of the brain that connects the two halfs together and co-ordinates everything is the corpus callosum. Wikipedia here - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_callosum $\endgroup$
    – Swami Vishwananda
    Commented Dec 22, 2014 at 15:39
  • $\begingroup$ I don't think the two are mutually exclusive especially when discussing consciousness. Thanks for the link. $\endgroup$
    – rwolst
    Commented Dec 22, 2014 at 15:44
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    $\begingroup$ People that have damaged their callosum can have two different consciousnesses as they cannot talk to each other and arrive at a single awareness. It has been seen in these instances that sometimes the left side will want to do one thing and the right another. But then, each cell in your body as a separate existence, life, from your total body also. There was a yogi some years ago that had learned how to control his mind to such an extent that he could right two different letters on different subjects, one with each hand, at the same time. $\endgroup$
    – Swami Vishwananda
    Commented Dec 22, 2014 at 15:46
  • $\begingroup$ Right, what I essentially want to find out about is, if your consciousness gets split in 2 which one would you then occupy. $\endgroup$
    – rwolst
    Commented Dec 22, 2014 at 15:54
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    $\begingroup$ Uhhh this isn't really cogsci/neuroscience. Hell, it's not even an empirical question. Why on earth was this migrated here? $\endgroup$
    – Louis Thibault
    Commented Dec 22, 2014 at 22:11

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