What if conscious experience is managed by each module? Lose a module to injury or stroke, and the consciousness that accompanies that module is gone… - Michael S. Gazzaniga

After my talk, he went into some kind of rant about how the “odd human case” didn’t mean much of anything and that it was sort of a bizarre consequence of prior epilepsy, etcetera.

Robert Sapolsky, professor of neurology at Stanford, makes the extremely strong statement: “It’s boggling that the legal system’s gold standard for an insanity defense — M’Naghten — is based on 166-year-old science. Our growing knowledge about the brain makes notions of volition, culpability, and, ultimately, the very premise of a criminal justice system, deeply suspect.

While there are more neural connections within a half brain than between the two halves, there are still massive connections across the hemispheres. Even so, cutting those connections does little to one’s sense of conscious experience. That is to say, the left hemisphere keeps on talking and thinking as if nothing had happened even though it no longer has access to half of the human cortex. More important, disconnecting the two half brains instantly creates a second, also independent conscious system. The right brain now purrs along carefree from the left, with its own capacities, desires, goals, insights, and feelings. One network, split into two, becomes two conscious systems. How could one possibly think that consciousness arises from a particular specific network? We need a new idea to cope with this fact.