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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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    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 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_callosum –  Dec 22 '14 at 15:39
  • I don't think the two are mutually exclusive especially when discussing consciousness. Thanks for the link. –  Dec 22 '14 at 15:44
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    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. –  Dec 22 '14 at 15:46
  • Right, what I essentially want to find out about is, if your consciousness gets split in 2 which one would you then occupy. –  Dec 22 '14 at 15:54
  • Do you have to occupy either? One valid viewpoint in that extreme surgical situation is that "you" cease to exist, and two new "entities" begin existence when the surgeon wield its knife. The actual answer to your question is dependent on the definition of the Self, which is not 100% agreed upon between schools of philosophy. I believe you could pick the answer you want, and then go find a school of philosophy that agrees with you; there is simply that many differing opinions. –  Dec 22 '14 at 16:10
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    Uhhh this isn't really cogsci/neuroscience. Hell, it's not even an empirical question. Why on earth was this migrated here? – Louis Thibault Dec 22 '14 at 22:11
  • Anything capable of awareness has a point of view. If the awareness is great enough, we call it 'consciousness'. With enough capacity to be aware, it is inevitable that there will be multiple centers of awareness. If two or more of those are "big enough", there will be two or more consciousnesses. It does not matter if those happen in the same or different bodies. We have multiple awarenesses all the time, that is why we can do two or more things at once, also be alerted to rapidly changing conditions (danger or surprise) and have unconscious conclusions arise, all at once. This is normal. –  Mar 03 '16 at 13:35

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