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Self-Consciousness and “Split” Brains
Self-Consciousness
and “Split” Brains
The Minds’ I
Elizabeth Schechter
1
3
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Dedicated to L.B.
Acknowledgments
It is humbling to contemplate the number of people who have contributed in some

way or other to the creation of this book.
First and foremost, I owe a debt of gratitude to the Department of Philosophy at
Washington University in St. Louis for hosting a workshop on a draft of the manu-
script, at the generous suggestion of Kit Wellman, in the spring of 2016. I was fortunate
to have as guest participants Tim Bayne, John Campbell, Georges Rey, and Walter
Sinnott-Armstrong, who I trust will see their influence on the completed work, and to
have been joined by so many of my colleagues: Eric Brown, Carl Craver, Julia Driver,
John Heil, Charlie Kurth, Ron Mallon, Casey O’Callaghan, Roy Sorensen, Julia Staffel,
and Brian Talbot.
I owe another debt of gratitude to Michael Gazzaniga and Michael Miller and to the
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, for hosting a workshop on the empirical portions of a draft of the manuscript,
a workshop whose participants included John Caravello, Matt Gobel, Nikki Marinsek,
Alex Schlegel, Dillon Schulz, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Jesse S. Summers, Lukas Volz,
Locke Wellborn, and Aaron Zimmerman. It was both a necessity and a pleasure to hear
directly from Mike Gazzaniga and Mike Miller, both then and in later correspondence.
Naturally, I am grateful to Walter Sinnott-Armstrong for proposing the workshop in
the first place and for setting its gears in motion. I remain grateful as well to Carl Craver
for first introducing me to Michael Gazzaniga and Mike Miller in the winter of 2013.
A number of philosophers heard or invited me to present portions of the work in
progress or the paper that originally inspired it and provided helpful criticisms and
suggestions at those presentations: Tim Bayne, José Bermúdez, Berit Brogaard, Tony
Chemero, Simon Cushing, Guy Dove, Gary Gala, Peter Langland-Hassan, Joseph Levine,
Bill Lycan, Tom McClelland, Dan Moseley, Jesse Prinz, Robert Van Gulick, Neil van
Leeuwen, and Daniel Weiskopf. I am also grateful for my time with Yoshiyuki Hayashi,
Yukihiro Nobuhara, and other philosophers at the University of Tokyo Center for
Philosophy. After presenting at the 2015 SPAWN Conference on Consciousness,
organized by Bob van Gulick, I was fortunate to receive discerning commentary from
José Bermúdez. I cannot count the number of enlightening exchanges I have had with
Tim Bayne, from whom I have also received much sage advice.
I am thankful to those who read one or another draft of the entire manuscript
and provided such generous feedback, including again Tim Bayne, John Campbell,
Georges Rey, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, as well as my colleague John Heil, and
also graduate students Rick Chang, Dylan Dougherty, Maria Doulatova, James Gulledge,
Caroline Stone, and Tom Wysocki. I am fortunate to have had my editor at Oxford
University Press, Peter Momtchiloff, solicit incisive reader reports from Rocco Gennaro,
viii Acknowledgments
Tom McClelland, and Alain Morin. Quite possibly I owe extra thanks to Peter Carruthers
for wading through the manuscript in its earliest incarnation.
This project was supported in part by the Philip L. Quinn Fellowship at the National
Humanities Center (2014–15), at which I had the pleasure of doing a large part of the
research for the book as well as the pleasure of conversing especially with Corinne
Gardner and Shannon Gayk, and Gordon Love and Christopher Whitmore. I am
especially grateful to have been at the Center at the same time as Corinne Gardner,
and of course I am grateful for the existence of the Center itself.
Brooke Andrade and Sarah Harris provided invaluable research assistance during
my time at the National Humanities Center, as did Mari Brubaker. I have also received
more forms of assistance than I can count from current and former administrative staff
in my home department, including Mindy Danner, Rachel Dunaway, Sue McKinney,
Kimberly Mount, and Dolores Stewart, as well as work-study student Courtney Yoo.
I have also received editorial, copyright, and design assistance not only from Peter
Momtchiloff, and from other editorial staff at Oxford University Press, including April
Peake, Karen Raith, Kavya Ramu, and of course Dawn Preston (whom I thank for their
patience), but also from Barbara Egbert, Nathan Fisher, Sabrina Leroe, Robert
Margolis, and mon amie artiste Pippin Schupbach.
Many friends suffered to hear me talk through portions of the argument, including
Charlie Kurth, Eric Mandelbaum, Anna Soy Ribeiro, Shannon Spaulding, and Bénédicte
Veillet. Thanks especially to Julia Haas, Louise Richardson, Julia Staffel, and Kathryn
Lindeman for careful readings and generous comments on portions of the manuscript
and to Julia Staffel for some last-minute quality checks as well. Thanks also to Fay
Edwards, Louise Richardson, and Bénédicte Veillet for emotional support from afar.
I also warmly recall early and persistent encouragement from John Doris, Bill Hodos,
and Georges Rey.
It was through Louise Antony and Peter Carruthers that I initially met my editor,
Peter Momtchiloff. Thank you Louise and Peter C. for the introduction, and thank you
Peter M. for your patience.
Finally, I am thankful for supportive family and friends who happen not to be
associated with the disciplines of philosophy or neuropsychology. I give thanks to
my sister, Laura Schechter Parker, for her forces at my back; to my mother, Jonna
Semeiks, for never worrying about me; to my father, Harold Schechter, for his
inventive ideas; to my stepmother, Kimiko Hahn, and my late de facto stepfather,
John Browne, for their persistent support; to keLi Weed, who was there with me in
the trenches until the end; and of course to my co-pilot, Carl Sanders, who helps me
find the keys.
Contents
List of Figures xiii
1. The Unity Puzzle 1

1. The Dual Brain 1
2. The Split-Brain Surgeries 4
2.1. The first split-brain surgeries 5
2.2. The discovery of the split-brain phenomenon 5
2.3. The first split-brain experiments 8
2.4. Working with split-brain human beings 11
3. The Unity Debates 15
4. Outline of Book 18
5. On Paths Not Taken 19
2. Subjects of Experience and Subjective Perspectives 23
1. The Question of Split-Brain Consciousness 23
2. Conscious Unity and Disunity 25
2.1. Access unity and awareness unity 26
2.2. Delineating perspectives 27
3. The Positive Case for the 2-Perspectives Claim 28
3.1. The empirical basis of the 2-perspectives claim 29
3.2. The bihemispheric consciousness claim 31
3.3. Conscious unity as causal integration 32
3.4. Two qualitatively distinct perspectives 34
4. One Perspective Nonetheless? 35
4.1. The 1-interhemispherically-switching-stream account 35
4.2. The conscious-unity-through-unified-agency account 39
4.3. The persisting-phenomenal-unity account 44
5. Subjects and Subjective Perspectives 46
3. Dual Intentional Agency 50
1. The Question of Split-Brain Agency 50
2. Intentional Agency 51
3. The Positive Case for the 2-Agents Claim 53
3.1. True agents versus zombie systems 53
3.2. Individual intentional agency 57
3.3. The autonomy condition on agency 59
3.4. Intentional autonomy 63
4. Dual Agency and Disunified Behavior 65
4.1. The objection from normal behavior 66
4.2. The objection from unified behavior 67
4.3. The objection from ordinary behavior 71
4.4. Dual agency in daily life 74
5. Agents and Anthropomorphism 78
x Contents
4. How Many Minds? 80

1. Identities of Split-Brain Psychological Beings 80
2. Distinct Candidate Thinkers in the Split-Brain Case 81
3. The Case for the 2-Thinkers Claim 83
3.1. Interhemispheric independence 84
3.2. Thinkers as thinking systems 88
3.3. Misconceptions about the 2-thinkers claim 90
4. Indirect Interaction and Psychic Independence 95
4.1. Direct versus indirect interaction 95
4.2. The architecture of (a) mind 99
4.3. Mental duality versus the disunity of mind 102
5. Mental Duality versus the Partial Unity of Mind 105
5. Objection from Sub-Cortical Structures 107
1. Objection from Sub-Cortical Structures 107
2. Direct Interhemispheric Interaction in the Split-Brain Case 109
2.1. Unity of the ambient visual field 111
2.2. Transfer of semantic associations 112
2.3. Unified emotion and affect 113
2.4. Attention and other resources 115
2.5. Motor and motoric forms of integration 116
3. Non-Discrete Minds 118
4. The “Split” Brain and the Duality of Mind 120
4.1. The dual brain 121
4.2. Cross-cueing in split-brain subjects 128
4.3. Psychic autonomy 132
4.4. The agent of interaction 134
5. But Is It True? 136
6. Bodies and Being One 139
1. Unity and Necessity 139
2. Universal Plural Personhood 139
3. The Objection from Us 142
4. The Objection from I 146
5. S as the Object of Embodied Self-Awareness 147
5.1. Bodily self-awareness 148
5.2. Explicit self-consciousness versus implicit self-awareness 149
5.3. The implicit object of bodily self-awareness 152
6. The Self-Consciousness Objection to Any Reconciliation Account
of the Split-Brain 153
7. Self and Other in the Split-Brain Subject 156
1. Self-Consciousness and Strict Self-Reference 156
2. I-Thoughts and I-Thinkers 157
2.1. RH Language and the 1-I-thinker claim 157
2.2. The 2-I-thinkers claim 159
2.3. R as I-thinker 159
Contents xi
3. Three Striking Features of Self-Consciousness in Split-Brain Subjects 162

3.1. Lack of mutual recognition 163
3.2. Common subjective identification 165
3.3. Lack of capacity for self-distinction 168
4. Capacity for Self-Distinction 170
4.1. Recognition and perception 171
4.2. Self-distinction 173
4.3. Distinguishing R from L 174
5. Subjective versus Objective Self-Reference 175
8. The Self-Consciousness Condition of Personhood 181
1. The Question of Split-Brain Personhood 181
2. Persons and the Interpersonal 183
2.1. Persons and personal capacities 184
2.2. The self-consciousness condition of personhood 185
2.3. Self-governance and social governance 188
2.4. Two distinctively interpersonal practices 189
2.5. Why social self-consciousness matters for personhood 192
3. R and L as One Interpersonal Agent 194
4. Objections to the Failure Argument 201
4.1. The relational fact objection 201
4.2. The overly strict objection 203
5. Objections to the Success Argument 204
5.1. Is S a thinker? 204
5.2. Self-knowledge and self-reference 208
5.3. Self-governance and psychic unity 208
9. Duality Myths 211
1. The Standard Explanation of the Split-Brain Sociological Phenomenon 211
2. Unity in Commonsense Psychology 212
3. Divided Minds and Duality Myths 213
4. Living Myths 215
5. R and L as They Are 218
Appendix 221
1. Visual Unity 221
2. Can Semantic Associations Transfer? 224
3. Unified Emotion and Affect 231
4. Unitary and Dual Attentional Systems 237
5. An at Some Level Unitary System for Motor Control 242
5.1. Competition for response control 243
5.2. Gating of bihemispheric motor information 244
5.3. Response coordination 251
Bibliography 259
Author Index 285
Subject Index 290
List of Figures
1.1 The corpus callosum 3

1.2 Primary visual pathways to the hemispheres 10
1.3 A split-brain experiment 13
2.1 An instance of interhemispheric interaction 30
2.2 An instance of intrahemispheric interaction 31
3.1 Bimanual activities 56
4.1 Brain sections 83
4.2 Indirect interhemispheric interaction, visual 94
4.3 Bimanual coordination 97
4.4 Indirect interhemispheric interaction, proprioceptive/kinesthetic 99
4.5 The cross-comparison task 104
5.1 Crossing tracts of the cerebellum 125
5.2 The anterior commissure 125
5.3 The corpus callosum 126
5.4 A monkey’s “deep split” brain 127
7.1 A split-brain non-human animal experiment 176
8.1 A conversation 200
9.1 The split-brain phenomenon in the popular imagination 216
A.1 The “secret word” paradigm 226
A.2 Interpreting the results of the “secret word” experiment 227
A.3 Testing cross-field spatial attentional awareness 237
A.4 Testing intra-field and cross-field attentional costs 238
A.5 Visual attentional space in split-brain versus in non-split subjects 240
A.6 A first model of interhemispheric motoric interaction 246
A.7 A second model of interhemispheric motoric interaction 247
A.8 Response coordination 252
The prudent carries a revolver,
He bolts the door,
O’erlooking a superior spectre
More near.
Emily Dickinson, 1862
1
The Unity Puzzle
It is worth remembering that the main reason everybody—really, just about

everybody—is fascinated with, and troubled by, work in cognitive science is that
it so manifestly promises or threatens to introduce alien substitutes for the everyday
terms in which we conduct our moral lives.
(Dennett, 2009, p. 235; original emphasis)
1. The Dual Brain

At least twice so far—first in the nineteenth century and then again in the twentieth—
debates about our nature and identities as embodied psychological beings have taken
as a primary source of puzzlement and inspiration what may be the most readily visible
fact about the human brain: its dual structure.
Like our limbs and faces, but unlike many of our internal organs, our central nervous
systems are bilaterally symmetric: they look the same on the right as on the left, at least
with respect to their gross morphology, that is, their large-scale shapes and structures,
visible without magnification. Most of the structures that make up the brain are paired,
again just like our eyes and ears and arms: there is a caudate nucleus on the left and a
caudate nucleus on the right, a left cerebellar peduncle and a right cerebellar peduncle,
and so on. As one would expect, these paired structures are in general roughly symmetric
in function: there is a left cortical visual system and a right cortical visual system, a left
thalamic relay system and a right thalamic relay system, and so on.
The duality of the brain is nowhere more evident than at the cortical level, since the
cortex is both the most outward-lying and the largest portion of the cerebrum, itself
the most outward-lying and largest portion of the brain. Its size is one reason that for
so long “higher” cognitive functions (self-awareness, reason, language, moral sensitivity)
were believed to be basically cortical phenomena. These were the capacities that
supposedly made human beings unique among animals, and the cortex was known to
be unusually large in us, relative both to the size of our bodies and to the rest of the
human brain. (Its relative size has since come to be seen as less psychologically and
evolutionarily significant; see Herculano-Houzel, 2009.) And the unusually large cortex
of the human brain is visibly doubled—that, or divided—into two half-globes of gray
convolutions: the right cerebral hemisphere and the left cerebral hemisphere—the
“great” cerebral hemispheres, as they were sometimes called.
2 SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND “SPLIT” BRAINS
The duality of the brain was what led the seventeenth-century mathematician,
philosopher, and natural scientist René Descartes to propose that the point of inter-
change between the mind and its material organ might be the pineal gland, one of
the few unpaired structures in the brain and thus one of the few that seemed a viable
candidate for interacting with the essentially unified mind (see Shapiro, 2011, for
discussion). In a fascinating scientific and intellectual history, Harrington (1987)
notes that a number of nineteenth-century thinkers argued that the duality of the brain
undermined the materialist view of the mind (for a neuropsychologist’s perspective
on the same history, see Bogen, 1969, 1979). Their reasoning was simple: the brain is
dual, so if the mind were the brain, the mind would be dual too, but in fact the mind
is unitary, so the mind is not the brain.
Materialists did not respond to this argument in one voice. One option was to accept
the first two premises of the anti-materialist’s argument: the brain is dual, so if the
mind is the brain, then the mind is dual, too. Wedded with materialism, the conclusion
is that each brain is the seat of two minds, a right hemisphere mind and a left. Wigan
(1844) defended just this position in his provocatively titled tome, The Duality of Mind:
Proved by the Structure, Function, and Diseases of the Brain and by the Phenomena of
Mental Derangement and Shown to Be Essential to Moral Responsibility.
Wigan’s was an argument for universal mental duality: each of us has two minds
apiece. As his title makes clear, Wigan did not appeal solely to neuroanatomical
considerations. Among other things, he was much impressed by case reports of persons
who had lost almost an entire cerebral hemisphere and still carried on reasonably well.
No one could carry on reasonably well after losing half a mind—whatever that would
even mean. What, then, are we to conclude, but that a brain is ordinarily the site of two
minds? Once proposed, the dual mind hypothesis seemed poised to explain so much:
there was evidence almost everywhere, in robust mental faculties and psychic instability
alike. Over the course of the next century, the notion that we all have two minds or,
better, two selves, would be used, in some hands, to explain everything from hypnosis
to homosexuality.
Most of Wigan’s materialist contemporaries did not accept his conclusion, however,
but instead rejected one of the anti-materialist’s premises. The mind is unified, they
said, because the brain itself is unified, via the great white band of fibers that visibly
connect the two cerebral hemispheres (see Figure 1.1).
Different structures and areas of the brain are connected by white matter tracts.
Some of these pathways are physically direct, running from one structure to another
without passing through and synapsing at an intermediate third. Others are quite
indirect. Structures on opposite sides of the brain are connected via white matter
pathways that themselves cross the midline of the brain. Some of these crossings occur
via decussations, crossing the midline while ascending or descending to another level.
Others are commissures, crossing the midline without ascent or descent, and generally
connecting homologous (equivalent) structures. The corpus callosum is the largest of
these commissures. It is in fact the largest fiber tract in the human brain.
the unity puzzle 3
Figure 1.1 The corpus callosum. The arrow indicates the corpus callosum in a coronal section
of the brain.
The corpus callosum connects mostly homologous areas of the cerebral hemispheres.
It is readily visible to the naked eye and made some impression upon nineteenth-
century materialists and anti-materialists alike (see e.g. Holland, 1852, p. 175). The
great nineteenth-century psychologist Gustav Fechner was led to predict that if this
commissure were cut, then the human soul or self would itself become two, in the same
way that a worm, cut in half, simply becomes two living organisms (1860, p. 537). As
Corballis notes, this hypothesis “is essentially a mechanistic one: dividing the brain
should also divide the mind” (Corballis, 1998, p. 1084).
That one worm becomes two living beings when cut had struck Augustine as well:
could souls be so divisible? (Augustine, 1947, pp. 128–9.) But worms are a special case;
you can’t double a herd by vivisection. Who is to say that you could divide the brain
without destroying thought and consciousness altogether?
There were reported instances in which the corpus callosum had been partially
destroyed by organic causes, that is, by illness or injury, and while in some cases this
damage was accompanied by “psychic dysfunction,” there were also a “disturbing
number” of cases that seemed to show the opposite (Harrington, 1985, p. 627). Organic
brain injury makes for messy evidence, though—especially at the time, since neither
the location nor the extent of the damage could be confidently determined until
postmortem autopsy, however many years later. It was also possible to section the
corpus callosum in non-human animals for purely experimental purposes, but they
couldn’t speak, making their mental lives relatively opaque to the theorist, and anyway,
their minds might simply be different, more material than ours, somehow.
What was really needed to settle the matter was a controlled surgery on a sane and
intelligent person.
At least one man offered to make the ultimate sacrifice for human understanding
(and for his own long-standing scholarly defense of anti-materialism): the British
psychologist William McDougall, author of the expansive and impassioned tract Body
and Mind (1911), who
tried to bargain with Sherrington . . . that if he should ever be smitten with an incurable disease,
Sherrington should cut through his corpus callosum . . . “If I am right,” he said, “my consciousness
will remain a unitary consciousness.” And he seemed to regard that as the most convincing
[possible] proof of the existence of something like a soul. (quoted in Zangwill, 1974, p. 265)
No one took McDougall up on his offer, however; then as now, there was a great
reluctance to cut open a living person just to settle a metaphysical bet. The great
commissure connecting the great cerebral hemispheres would not be deliberately
destroyed by a surgeon’s knife short of medical necessity.
2. The Split-Brain Surgeries

Epilepsy is a chronic condition characterized by recurring seizures that have no
other known cause. A seizure is a sudden excess of electrical activity, like a short circuit
in the brain. When the disruption is confined to a localized area, it is called a focal
seizure. In a generalized seizure, the activity spreads.
A tonic-clonic seizure is a generalized seizure. In the first phase the body clenches,
becomes rigid. In the second phase it begins to jerk violently. Epilepsy characterized
by this type of seizure was classically called grand mal—French for “great illness.”
A person experiencing a grand mal seizure may lose consciousness. She may be
halfway across a busy intersection when it happens. She may only have a few seconds
of warning, one that comes in the form of an aura: a visual disturbance, an auditory or
olfactory hallucination, a feeling of numbness or tingling on one side of her face, or a
wave of nausea, anxiety, or fear.
Seizures most often originate within a single hemisphere, but in a grand mal seizure
this electrical wildfire quickly spreads to the other side, too. The corpus callosum
physically bridges the two hemispheres. What if this was how the seizures crossed?
And then what if you destroyed the bridge? Sparing even a single hemisphere from
seizures might at least allow patients to retain consciousness during the episode, to
avoid collapsing where they were.
the unity puzzle 5
2.1. The first split-brain surgeries

The first human beings to receive “split-brain” surgeries will not receive much atten-
tion in this book. They didn’t receive much attention at the time, either.
I call them “pre-modern” split-brain subjects because we don’t have their complete
history. According to some reports, we don’t even know how many of them there were:
one epilepsy researcher first capped the number of such surgeries at twenty-seven and
later clarified (or revised) this to mean that there had been twenty-seven done at least
in one particular year (Williamson, 1985, 1995). Akelaitis (1945), writing at the time
they were performed, reported thirty such surgeries while citing a paper (van Wagenen
and Herren, 1940) that mentions only ten. Careful analysis of all the papers concerning
this first set of split-brain surgeries led Bogen (1995) to believe that there were thirty-
four callosal surgeries but on only twenty-eight patients.
The surgeon was Dr. van Wagenen. Years later, the sitting Chief of Neurosurgery at the
University of Rochester would mention in a letter to another neuropsychologist, Joseph
Bogen, that “Dr. Van Wagenen always was sorry about what he did to those patients”
(cited in Bogen, 2000, p. 93). Certainly, the surgery didn’t catch on, though the results van
Wagenen himself reported appear to have been fairly positive: the patients suffered some
irritating new symptoms, but also enjoyed some relief from their far-beyond-irritating
seizures. They were extensively examined post-operatively by Akelaitis and colleagues,
who published a short series of papers presenting the findings of their investigations into
the psychobehavioral consequences of callosal section.
They found very little (Akelaitis, 1941). Putting a positive spin on his anti-climactic
conclusions, Akelaitis wrote only that “evidence has been presented showing that
interhemispheric neuronal pathways exist other than those found in the corpus callosum
and anterior commissure” (1944, p. 101). No candidate pathways were proposed.
And that, presumably, was that: as van Wagenen himself said (van Wagenen and
Herren, 1940, p. 741), so much for the “hallowed ground” of the corpus callosum as the
“seat of the soul”! In fact, by the mid twentieth century the functional insignificance
of the corpus callosum was arguably “common knowledge” (see e.g. Fessard, 1954).
As one neurophysiologist joked, “I have laughingly said that, so far as I can see . . . the
only demonstrable function of the corpus callosum, [is] to spread seizures from one
side to the other” (McCulloch, 1949, p. 21).
2.2. The discovery of the split-brain phenomenon

In retrospect, it seems likely that van Wagenen’s surgeries did not fully section the
corpus callosum, which would partially explain Akelaitis’s negative results. On the other
hand, Akelaitis’s findings were not entirely negative; he did, for instance, mention
one “remarkable type of behavior which has not [yet] been described in patients with
callosal lesions as far as I can discover. It consists of an apparent conflict between
the desired act and the actually performed act” (1945, p. 594). For that matter, van
Wagenen himself commented upon a patient who, after surgery, briefly began referring
to herself in the third person (van Wagenen and Herren, 1940).
No systematic behavioral consequences of callosal section were revealed by clinical

testing, however (van Wagenen and Herren, 1940; Akelaitis, 1944), and this was partly
due to the testing methods themselves.
Akelaitis was a neurologist, trained to discern behavioral signs of mental disorder or
impairment following brain injury. He looked for the signs that neuropsychologists
still consider hallmarks of the callosal disconnection syndrome: impaired stereognosis
(impaired capacity to recognize objects by touch), apraxia (difficulty with motor
planning), and anomic aphasia (impaired ability to retrieve the words for things). The
right way of looking for these signs in this particular patient population, however,
had not yet been developed. In fact, you would never think to look in what turned
out to be the right way unless you came armed with a specific hypothesis about
what you might find:
Experienced split-brain experimenters are often surprised when noted and unquestionably
competent neuropsychologists . . . show themselves initially unequal to the task of testing the
commissurotomy patient. The chronic disconnection syndrome is dramatic, widely known,
and readily explicable. However, the arsenal developed to assess it is complex, sometimes
subtle, and often based on implicit assumptions. (Zaidel et al., 1990, p. 147)
Developing and employing this “arsenal” requires an unusual conceptual shift, one
that is illustrated by the first “proto” split-brain experiment ever performed on a
human being. The man was Bill Jenkins, the first of the “modern” split-brain subjects,
who underwent commissurotomy at the hands of Dr. Vogel in 1962. Not least because
Jenkins was the first person to undergo split-brain surgery in about twenty years,
Vogel’s colleague Joseph Bogen was eager to run formal tests of the patient’s cogni-
tive abilities following the operation, and Jenkins was apparently “eager” to oblige
(Bogen, 2006, p. 93).
Bogen writes, “Vogel shrugged off the idea. I supposed it was a result of his having
learned surgery at a time when, if a brain-operated patient left the hospital speaking
sensibly and walking without assistance, the operation was a success” (2006, p. 93).
Even Roger W. Sperry, who had already been investigating the psychobehavioral con-
sequences of split-brain surgeries in non-human animals, “shrugged: what theoretical
preconception would be falsified?” (Bogen, 2006, p. 93). But a graduate student of
Sperry’s named Michael Gazzaniga was also interested, and he and Bogen eventually
found a psychologist to help them administer to Bill a variety of tests measuring differ-
ent aspects of intelligence.
Dr. Edwards had experience testing clinical patients, but unlike Bogen and Gazzaniga,
he did not know of the split-brain animal experiments (see Section 2.4) and did not
enter the room armed with a hypothesis about the psychological significance of the
corpus callosum. Careful clinical testing of a split-brain subject thus once again threat-
ened to turn up nothing of interest, until Dr. Edwards began to administer the Block
Design Subtest.
the unity puzzle 7
The Block Design Subtest is first and foremost a test of visuospatial reasoning. The
subject is given a collection of colored blocks and asked to arrange them to match a
sample geometrical pattern. At first:
Bill [Jenkins] pushed the blocks around somewhat ineffectually. Meanwhile Edwards was
timing in his usual fashion and ended up [giving Bill] a zero score. I suggested that he [Bill] use
one hand at a time. Dr. Edwards objected because it was customary for subjects to use both
hands. However, he was persuaded to try this momentarily, so we asked Bill to use only his
right hand while sitting on his left hand. Then we asked him to do it with [only] his left hand. He
had considerable success. Mike [Gazzaniga] and I looked at each other as if we had caught a
glimpse of the Holy Grail. “Now try it with just your left hand,” I asked. He was quite successful!
“Now try the next pattern.” With his left hand he did the next one quite quickly.
“No!” Edwards said, “He is supposed to use both hands.” It was getting a little tense, because
he insisted on doing it the standard way and we were anxious to further pursue our Grail.
Dr. Edwards quietly prevailed and he finished the tests. We thanked him, and he replied, “Yes,
it was interesting. We should test 20 or 30 more of these patients with various lesions.” . . . We
realized Edwards was in the dark as to what had happened and what sort of patient Bill was, or
why we were so wreathed in smiles. (Bogen, 2006, p. 93; emphasis added)
Dr. Edwards saw no rationale for instructing the patient to use only one hand. He was
trying to test the visuospatial abilities of Bill Jenkins, and Bill Jenkins had two hands.
Joseph Bogen and Michael Gazzaniga were trying to test the visuospatial abilities of
Bill Jenkins’s right hemisphere. And the right hemisphere enjoys greater control of the
left hand, specifically.
With Bill Jenkins, split-brain surgery was revived as a treatment for severe cases of
epilepsy in the second half of the twentieth century. The split-brain subjects I will focus
on in this book belong to three different patient groups. The first group (including Bill
Jenkins) was operated upon by Dr. Vogel in the 1960s (the “West Coast series”); the
second group was operated upon by Dr. Rayport (the “Midwest series”); the third and
largest group was operated upon by Dr. Wilson in the 1970s (the “East Coast series”).
There were substantial differences between the surgeries both within and across
groups. Patients in the West Coast series underwent cerebral commissurotomy. This
surgery sections the cortical or cerebral commissures: the corpus callosum, the anter-
ior commissure, the posterior commissure, the hippocampal commissure. Patients
from the Midwest series underwent full callosotomy, which sections the entirety of
the corpus callosum (and also the hippocampal commissure; see Gazzaniga, 2000,
p. 1311) but leaves intact the anterior and posterior commissures. Patients from the later
East Coast series underwent either full callosotomy or only partial callosotomy, since it
was discovered that in many patients, significant seizure reduction with fewer side
effects could be achieved by a surgery that left intact not only the anterior commissure
but also the posterior portion of the corpus callosum (the splenium). Adults in the
United States now undergo at most partial callosotomy, although full callosotomy is
sometimes still performed on children in the United States and on adults elsewhere in
the world. I will refer to human beings who underwent either commissurotomy or full
callosotomy as split-brain subjects.
The term “subject” is meant to be as neutral as possible on all philosophical questions
of personal identity. I’m using it, as Rupert says, with a nod to “the dry language of
methodology sections . . . [in which] ‘subject’ means little more than ‘warm body that
can be reidentified over time’ ” (Rupert, 2009, p. 51). The term “split-brain patient” is
more often used, but split-brain experiments are not medical treatment; the split-brain
men and women we know much about are those who generously agreed to act as
participants in ongoing scientific research into the psychological consequences of
“splitting” the brain. I’ll generally use the present tense to refer to them, though by
now, many of them are deceased.
In light of the sheer size of the corpus callosum, it isn’t surprising that its removal
should produce the acute callosal disconnection syndrome, lasting days or weeks or
months. Immediately after surgery, a split-brain subject may be entirely mute, then
incapable of spontaneous speech, and lastly incapable of obeying verbal commands
using her left hand. Or she may have trouble using her two hands cooperatively. Or she
may say that she cannot control her left hand, that it won’t do what she wants or that
it does what she doesn’t want. Still, she knows that the hand is hers (that is, she isn’t
delusional) and she is fully aware of her impairments (that is, she isn’t anosognosic).
Once the acute phase of the syndrome has passed, the subjects generally report that
they are doing well, and their friends and family agree. Improvements in their medical
condition usually outweigh the seriousness of any new, post-surgical difficulties.
Most of these difficulties are not immediately striking: a diminishment of emotional
expressivity in speech, some memory loss around the edges. The only striking sign that
subjects often complain of is some ongoing “trouble with the left hand”: the left hand
begins unbuttoning the shirt the subject is attempting to button, or the left hand pushes
away the paper the subject is trying to read or grabs items from the supermarket shelf
that the subject has no intention of purchasing.
On the face of it, these signs constitute a motley crew. The systematic psychic conse-
quences of split-brain surgery emerge clearly only under experimental conditions.
2.3. The first split-brain experiments

Split-brain experiments have two paradigmatic features. Their basic rationale is to
allow experimenters to interact with each hemisphere independently.
The first feature of the split-brain experimental paradigm is stimulus lateralization:
sensory-perceptual information is carefully directed to only a single hemisphere at a
time, to the extent possible. This feature exploits the fact that the two hemispheres are
not totally symmetric with respect to their access to incoming sensory-perceptual
information. In the realm of tactile perception (fine-grained touch, as could be used to
identify an object by feeling it), each hemisphere receives information from only the
the unity puzzle 9
contralateral, that is, opposite-side hand: left hemisphere (LH) from right hand, right
hemisphere (RH) from left hand. In the realm of olfaction, each hemisphere receives
olfactory information from mainly the ipsilateral, that is, same-side, nostril: if you
hold a rose before a split-brain subject’s nose after sealing her right nostril, leaving
only her left nostril open, olfactory information about the rose will be sent to only her
LH. Each hemisphere receives auditory information from both ears, but more strongly
from the contralateral ear (that is, RH from the left ear, LH from the right ear); if you
simultaneously present to the two ears different complex auditory stimuli—such as a
different stream of speech to each ear—each stream will be suppressed in the ipsilateral
(same-side) hemisphere, which will consciously process only the speech from the
contralateral ear. And there are similar stories to tell for perceptual information
from other modalities, which can be lateralized differently and to different degrees
in each case.
The second feature of the split-brain experimental paradigm is response lateraliza-
tion: split-brain subjects are directed to respond to stimuli or requests either vocally or
using a specific hand. This feature exploits the fact that the two hemispheres are not
totally symmetric with respect to the control of movement. Each hemisphere exerts
dominant motor control over the contralateral hand, so that the left hand is especially
controlled by the RH and the right hand is especially controlled by the LH. In subjects
in whom the left hemisphere is the so-called dominant hemisphere—which is most
subjects—the left hemisphere is dominant for spoken language and for many (though
not all) linguistic functions; indeed, split-brain subjects often cannot generate speech
out of their right hemispheres at all.
The first successful split-brain experiments were performed on cats and monkeys
(see e.g. Myers, 1956; Myers and Sperry, 1953; Sperry et al., 1956; Sperry, 1958). This
was only after a considerable period of unsuccessful attempts. For more than a decade
prior, callosotomy had been performed on non-human animals for experimental pur-
poses and yet those animals hadn’t seemed much changed after recovering from the
trauma of the surgery itself: they could still see, walk, eat, learn from experience.
These first experimental callosotomies had left intact the optic chiasm: a midline
crossing (a decussation) at which some axons from the right optic nerve pass over to
the left to join the left optic tract while some axons from the left optic nerve pass over
to the right to join the right optic tract (see Figure 1.2). The optic chiasm had also
been experimentally sectioned in non-human animals, but in those animals the corpus
callosum had been left intact. Following either kind of surgery, animals trained to
make a perceptual discrimination using only one eye (the second eye forcibly closed)
could nonetheless, as soon as given the opportunity, perform it perfectly using only the
other eye (the first eye now forcibly closed). In other words, there was no evidence that
such surgery disrupted or divided the unity of perceptual experience, learning, or action.
However, as Morgan and Stellar noted (1943, pp. 449–50), no one had yet sectioned
both the corpus callosum and the optic chiasm in one animal.
left visual
hemifield
right visual
hemifield
optic
right
chiasm
optic nerve
corpus right
callosum optic tract
left right
hemisphere hemisphere visual
cortex
Figure 1.2 Primary visual pathways to the hemispheres. A subject’s visual field is the entire
region of space that they can perceive, holding constant their direction of gaze. The point at
which the subject’s gaze is focused, at a given moment, defines the visual midline. A subject
gets the richest and most detailed visual information from the very small region of space
located around the midline. Everything to the right of the midline falls within the subject’s
right visual hemifield; everything to the left of the midline falls within the left visual hemifield.
In this figure, information from the right visual hemifield is represented by shaded symbols
(squares and circles), and information from the left visual hemifield is represented by unshaded
symbols (squares and circles). Information from both visual hemifields enters each eye, and
information from both eyes enters each hemisphere, but information from only a single visual
hemifield enters each hemisphere (right visual hemifield to the left hemisphere, left visual
hemifield to the right hemisphere). Normally, the hemispheres share this information via the
corpus callosum, shown sectioned here. Were the optic chiasm to be sectioned as well, each
hemisphere would still receive visual information from only a single visual hemifield but would
also receive visual information from only a single eye.
the unity puzzle 11
Sperry suggested to Myers that he do just this: perform a double surgery, a callosotomy-
chiasmotomy (Evarts, 1990, p. xxi). Myers went to some trouble perfecting the technique
of sectioning the (very small) optic chiasm (see Gazzaniga, 2015, pp. 42–3). It was this
double surgery that finally allowed experimenters to present different visual informa-
tion to the two hemispheres.
After the optic chiasm is sectioned, each hemisphere receives visual information
directly from only the ipsilateral (same-side) eye. After the corpus callosum is sectioned,
neither hemisphere receives visual information indirectly from the other hemisphere.
With both the optic chiasm and the corpus callosum sectioned, visual information from
the left eye is received by only the LH, and visual information from the right eye by
only the RH. So, in an animal who has undergone sectioning of both the optic chiasm
and the corpus callosum, a single hemisphere can be rendered effectively blind just by
placing an eye patch over the ipsilateral eye.
Now the observed “disconnection effects” were striking. Among other things, an
animal could be trained to make competing visual discriminations with each eye
(e.g. selecting Os rather than Xs with the left eye open, and Xs rather than Os with the
right eye open), with no interference effects, as if each eye had its own memory and
volitional system. But of course no one thought that a mere eye had its own memories,
much less an independent will. It was rather as if each hemisphere of these split-brain
animals had its own eye.
Sperry would later be awarded the Nobel Prize for several aspects of his research,
including his research with split-brain animals and then with human split-brain
subjects. The latter research he initially collaborated on, at California Institute of
Technology, with his then PhD student Michael Gazzaniga and with former Caltech
postdoc and local neurosurgery resident Joseph Bogen. Relatively early on, Sperry—
already eminent as an experimentalist—seems to have begun focusing on the more
philosophical issues raised by the split-brain phenomenon (Bogen once called him
“among the deepest, the most profound, neurothinkers” (2006, p. 87)). By comparison,
the younger Gazzaniga published a mass of experimental works on various aspects of
split-brain psychology, with Bogen perhaps intermediate between the two in his mix
of energies and attentions.
2.4. Working with split-brain human beings

The experimental paradigm developed by Myers and Sperry to test split-brain non-
human animals needed to be modified to test human split-brain subjects. (Much of the
credit for these modifications seems to belong to Gazzaniga, though this is made clear
not by Gazzaniga himself, in his own recent autobiography (see e.g. Gazzaniga, 2015,
pp. 42–4), but rather by others, including Bogen, 2006, and Corballis, 2015.)
Epilepsy presents no medical need to section the optic chiasm, and thus a mere eye
patch will not suffice to lateralize visual input, since each hemisphere receives visual
information from both eyes. Instead, the various methods that were developed to
lateralize visual information for human subjects exploit the fact that each hemisphere
directly receives visual information from only one side of the visual field (see Figure 1.2).
The RH receives visual information from only the left visual hemifield, and the LH
receives it from only the right visual hemifield (I am simplifying; see Chapter 5).
One interesting requirement of working with human split-brain subjects is the extra
attention needed to prevent them from engaging in cross-cueing. Cross-cueing is the
interhemispheric communication of information subserved by the subjects’ own
movements. Many cross-cueing behaviors are automatically deployed by both human
split-brain subjects and non-human split-brain animals: for instance, moving one’s
eyes to fixate on something glanced suddenly to one’s left, thus bringing a portion of it
into the right visual field also. On the other hand, some cross-cueing behaviors look
like strategic attempts to circumvent the lateralization of stimuli. Suppose for instance
that an experimenter wants to learn whether semantic meaning can still transfer
between the two hemispheres, via some kind of intact non-cortical route. So she
presents a word, say, “CAT,” in a split-brain subject’s left hemifield, so that it is sent to
only his RH, and then asks him to indicate what he saw by naming it, thus using his LH.
If the experimenter is not careful, the subject might try to use the finger of his left hand,
controlled by his right hemisphere, to trace the letters “C-A-T” on the back of his right
hand—which the left hemisphere can feel (Sperry et al., 1979).
The special features of human split-brain experiments are intended to permit
or preserve stimulus lateralization and response lateralization. Such lateralization
allows neuropsychologists to ask questions of and receive answers from each hemi-
sphere individually.
Imagine a split-brain subject, S, visually focusing on some point on a screen marked
by a dot or a cross. Anything visually presented to the left of this central fixation point
will be sent directly to his right hemisphere (RH), and anything visually presented to
the right of this point will be sent directly to his left hemisphere (LH). Now, this is
also true of subjects who have two cerebral hemispheres and a corpus callosum, such
as me and (I assume) you—but the corpus callosum of a “non-split” subject allows
either hemisphere to gain indirect access to the information that only a single hemi-
sphere initially received. In a split-brain subject, however, the information remains
largely confined to the hemisphere that initially received it.
Suppose for instance that (as described in Sperry, 1968a) two symbols are presented
onscreen simultaneously: a dollar sign in S’s left visual hemifield and a question mark
in his right visual hemifield (see Figure 1.3). Once the screen goes blank, you ask S
what he saw, and he says he saw a question mark on the right. You ask S what was on the
left and he says he didn’t see anything or that he doesn’t know. But now suppose you
ask him to close his eyes and you give him a sheet of paper and a pencil to hold in his
left hand and ask him to draw what he saw on the screen using that hand. S now draws
the dollar sign, that is, the left-sided stimulus that he said he didn’t see. If his eyes are
still closed and you ask him what he drew, he says “without hesitation that the figure
he drew was the question mark, or whatever appeared in the right half of the field”
(Sperry, 1968a, p. 726). S is not crazy or blind, and once you allow him to open his eyes
the unity puzzle 13
In a moment, a ‘+’ sign will come up on a screen in front of

you. Once you look at the ‘+’, an image or images will What did you see?
come up, to the left, to the right, or on both sides of the
‘+’. Please keep your eyes on the ‘+’ until the screen goes
blank. Then I will ask you what you saw. Okay?
$ + ? I saw a question
mark on the right.
+ ?
Okay....
? $
1 2 3
Okay. How about you close your eyes,

Anything on the left? and keep them closed until I say to
open them. I’m putting a pencil in
+? your left hand. Please use your left
No, I didn’t see hand to draw what you saw. $+
anything on the left.
Okay...
4 5 6
So what do you think

Please keep your eyes
was on the left side
closed for a little
Okay now open your eyes... of the screen?
longer. What did you
+? draw?
Okay.... $+? A dollar sign,
A question mark. I guess.
....What did you draw?
$ $ $$
A dollar sign! $
7 8 9
Figure 1.3 A split-brain experiment. Figure depicting a common split-brain experiment design
type, with prototypical results (illustrating an experiment described in Sperry, 1968a). The sec-
ond panel shows the subject seated in front of a screen. The “+” sign represents the central
fixation point on which the subject’s gaze is focused, defining the midline of the subject’s visual
field. In this experiment a “$” is presented in the left visual hemifield and a “?” in the right
visual hemifield. When the subject is asked to indicate verbally what he saw, he names the “?”
that was presented in the visual hemifield of the LH, which in this subject also controls speech.
When the subject is asked to draw what he saw using the left hand, the subject draws the “$,”
which was presented in the visual hemifield of the RH, whose dominant hand is the left hand.
Source: illustration by Pippin Schupbach, with permission.
he quickly corrects himself: it’s a dollar sign on the sheet of paper, not a question mark.
But he may say that he doesn’t know why he drew it, or that he drew it by mistake—
though if you ask him whether it might thus have been a dollar sign on the left side
of the screen, he admits that it might.
Here is as uncontroversial an explanation of the subject’s behavior as I can give. The
dollar sign presented on the left was received by S’s RH exclusively, while the question
mark presented on the right was received by S’s LH exclusively. Very often in split-brain
subjects—and let’s assume so in S—spoken language cannot be generated out of the
RH. So when S stated what he’d seen, production of the statement originated in the
LH, which had received no visual information about the dollar sign, so S mentioned
only the question mark. But the RH receives visual information from the left side of
visual space and (typically) exerts dominant motor control over the left hand. So when
S used his left hand to draw what he’d seen, production of the drawing behavior ori-
ginated in his RH, which had received visual information about the dollar sign. But the
LH apparently lacks access to the RH intentions causally responsible for the drawing,
so, prior to being allowed to look at the drawing, S’s statement about what he drew
originated in a hemisphere that still hadn’t received any information about a dollar
sign: S’s left hemisphere. Once S was allowed to look at the drawing, however, his LH
finally received visual information about the dollar sign on the sheet of paper, and so S
could now provide a correct verbal identification of the symbol originally presented on
the left side of the screen.
This explanation traces the causal flow of information into and through and back
out of the brain more than once: from onscreen stimulus into the RH and from the RH
to an action that produces a new stimulus in the form of the dollar sign on the sheet of
paper, and then back into the brain, this time the LH. This kind of information flow
story crucially relies upon hypotheses about the architecture of perception and the
control of action in the brain, hypotheses supported by a range of evidence, including,
at this point, the split-brain literature itself.
Here is a second explanation of the same behavior. S’s right hemisphere saw the
dollar sign, but the RH can’t speak, and the left hemisphere, which can speak, saw only
the question mark, and so that is all the LH at first mentioned. The RH can use the left
hand, however, and so drew the dollar sign that it saw. But the LH didn’t at first know
what the RH had drawn and therefore understandably assumed that the drawing was
of the question mark the LH had seen. When finally allowed to see the sheet of paper,
however, the subject was startled. Or at least, his left hemisphere was startled; his right
hemisphere presumably knew what it had drawn.
The first story sounds unobjectionable from a philosophical standpoint. The second
is highly controversial. What I will call the unity debates about the split-brain cases
center on the question of whether the second explanation offers an accurate way of
conceptualizing the activities of the two hemisphere systems after split-brain surgery,
or whether it is just a shamelessly anthropomorphic shorthand for a much subtler
psychological reality.
the unity puzzle 15
In other words: can a mere hemisphere really see? Speak? Feel startled? Know what
it has done?
3. The Unity Debates

No other neurological condition has attracted the same multidisciplinary attention.
By the mid 1990s (at which time Ornstein, 1997, estimated that there had already
been about 45,000 psychological and biomedical papers published on the split-brain
phenomenon), “split-brain ideas [had] spilled over into academic fields in both the
sciences and the humanities, from cognitive and developmental psychology, clinical
psychology, anthropology, archeology, and even paleontology, to education, philosophy,
religious studies, and theology” (Wald, 2008, p. 36).
Why? Well, for one thing, the plain isomorphism between putative mental and neural
structure in the split-brain case offered a particularly vivid symbol of materialism: it’s
one thing to know that taking a hammer to a man’s head damages him psychologically
and another to believe that dividing his brain at the cortical level somehow divides
him into two psychological beings. By this point, the secular academy had achieved
confident consensus on materialism anyway, but anti-materialist theologians and
Christian philosophers still took on the split-brain phenomenon as a “hard case.”
Michael Gazzaniga once relayed this anecdote: Sperry went to the Vatican to give an
impassioned speech on the necessity of integrating science and the study of values for
the survival and flourishing of humankind—and yet it seemed (to Sperry’s slight frus-
tration) that all the questions from the holy audience concerned his relatively brief
mention of the split-brain cases.1
Within philosophy, the so-called “split-brain phenomenon” would ultimately be
invoked to argue for everything from the virtues of a Kantian moral framework
(Korsgaard, 1989) to the coherence of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity (Merricks,
2006). But a main reason for the philosophical interest of split-brain cases is that they
appeared to raise the old specter of self-blindness in a contemporary context: that of
the growing predominance of scientific perspectives on human beings. In the first
philosophical article devoted to the split-brain cases (though they figure also in
Parfit, 1971), Nagel used them to highlight what he saw as a growing tension between
our ordinary ways of understanding people and the understanding of human beings
“as physical systems” emerging from the developing sciences of the mind/brain
(Nagel, 1971, p. 396).
This was in part a tension between disciplines. Despite the diversity within each
group, philosophers and neuropsychologists generally tended toward different inter-
pretations of the split-brain phenomenon. Many neuropsychologists seemed to accept,
implicitly or explicitly, what I will call the 2-thinkers claim. Philosophers, as always,
showed little convergence, but perhaps most expressed skepticism. Some more or less
1
M. Gazzaniga, personal communication, January 10, 2013.
explicitly accused neuropsychologists of running away with the data (Rigterink, 1980,
pp. 449–50). To this, some neuropsychologists retorted that they, at least, had had “direct
contact with the data” (Bogen, 1977, p. 282)—that is, presumably, with the split-brain
subjects themselves.
At a deeper level, however, the tension the split-brain cases evoked was intrapsychic:
they served as a focal point for a felt tension between two divergent and potentially
incompatible perspectives on human life and human nature (Erdmann and Stover, 1991).
They evoked this tension first and foremost because the subjects themselves did not
feel psychically split; neuropsychologists, with their ingenious experiments, seemed
to adopt or assume a perspective on the subjects that the subjects themselves lacked.
Worse yet, it was said that outside the lab, split-brain people were indistinguishable
from anyone else. If scientific work could nonetheless reveal that each of them is merely
a composite of multiple psychological beings, whose identity might the lab coats come
for next?
Philosophical discussion of the split-brain cases has overwhelmingly concerned the
topic of psychological identity, that is, of personal identity broadly construed, since
philosophers have debated not just how many persons there are within or associated
with a split-brain subject, but also how many minds and subjects of experience.
Presumably, split-brain subjects are unitary qua animals (even if animals’ psycho-
logical capacities are essential to their identities as animals; Maiese, 2016). But human
beings are not unitary qua animals only; we are also, we suppose, unitary qua persons,
qua responsible agents, minds or thinkers, self-knowers, subjects of experience, and
so on. What I will call the “how many?” questions are questions such as: How many
subjects of experience is a split-brain subject? How many intentional agents? How
many persons?
As a group, philosophers and neuropsychologists would come to defend every one of
the possible answers that Nagel (1971) laid out: that a split-brain subject has one mind
vulnerable to conscious dissociations, or two conscious minds, or two minds at some
times and one mind at others, and so on. Nagel himself ultimately concluded only that
all such conclusions were “unacceptable for one reason or another” (1971, p. 403).
In other words, the split-brain phenomenon presents a puzzle: a question to which
“every imaginable answer seems wrong” (Pietroski, 2000, p. 13). The question is some-
thing like this: how many of us is a split-brain subject? If the question seems vague or
indeterminate—who and what are we, anyway?—then that is just a part of the problem.
I will call this the unity puzzle. It arises from two intuitions about the split-brain
cases in particular plus a background assumption about persons generally. The first
intuition is that a split-brain subject has two minds, or rather that each hemisphere has
its own mind. The second intuition is that a split-brain subject is nonetheless a unitary
(single) person.
These intuitions are in tension only against the background of some idea or
assumption linking the unity of the person to the unity of mind. I will call this the
“one mind per person” (1-mind/person) rule. It’s in the background insofar as it is not
the unity puzzle 17
explicit in ordinary understanding or social interaction but nonetheless presup-

posed by much or all of it. When someone voices their decision, you don’t typically
expect or ask to hear a second, different decision voiced from the same mouth, and
if you do hear one, you assume that the first decision has been reversed, that one
thinker changed his mind or her mind, singular. Or if, at time t1, you attribute an
intention to someone and then at t2 see them act inconsistently with that intention,
you assume either that you were wrong at t1 about what they even then intended to
do or that although you were right at t1, something changed by t2. You do not
assume—as another possibility, on equal footing with either of these—that one
thinker or agent within the human being did indeed intend at t1 what you believed
them to intend and that the t2 action was the action of a second thinker or agent who
had different intentions even at t1. Or if a friend promises something, you make a
global judgment about how likely she is to honor that promise, and you don’t need to
make separate judgments about two beings somehow within or associated with your
friend, one of whom always keeps her word and the other of whom never does. Or
you delight that your friend is deservedly proud of his recent accomplishment, with-
out worrying that—as he has some deep-seated insecurities—he may now become
jealous and resentful of himself.
The unity puzzle thus consists of this inconsistent triad:
The duality intuition: A split-brain subject has two minds.
The unity intuition: A split-brain subject is one person.
The one mind per person (1-mind/person) rule: Each person has exactly one mind.
On the one hand, each member of the triad is independently appealing. On the other
hand, they can’t all be true.
Philosophers have usually responded by offering illusion accounts of the split-brain
phenomenon, which preserve the 1-mind/person rule by rejecting either the unity
intuition or the duality intuition as illusory. Relatively few philosophers have offered a
reconciliation account, according to which both the duality intuition (two minds) and
the unity intuition (one person) are true. It is this latter sort of account that is offered in
this book.
Reconciliation accounts are prima facie less appealing. Although reconciling
apparently conflicting intuitions is nice when you can get it, it often comes at too high
a price, since it requires making changes to the larger background against which
such intuitions are in conflict. Why not think that the 1-mind/person rule is the worst
possible place to make changes? At least the unity and duality intuitions only explicitly
concern split-brain subjects—a special and a small population—while the 1-mind/
person rule governs our understanding of persons generally. As Pietroski points out,
“I want not just any coherent set of beliefs, but a coherent set of beliefs that is recogniz-
ably mine” (Pietroski, 2000, p. 17; original emphasis). There is no point in resolving the
split-brain unity puzzle only by offering an account of personhood that is so radically
unfamiliar that I myself cannot accept it.
My approach therefore won’t be to develop a new way for us to think about persons
but to try to bring to light certain things that we already on some level accept. I will in
part appeal to certain empirical facts about split-brain psychology that have gone under-
examined in the philosophical literature on the phenomenon and that I hope will explain
how the 1-mind/person rule admits of at least this one exception. While potentially
unique, the exception is nonetheless made possible by more general features of persons
and of our psychologies: by complex social practices designed to meet needs under
perpetual threat, by the resources that enable these practices, and by the assump-
tions that undergird them. The strategy, then, isn’t simply to reject the 1-mind/person
rule but to contextualize it, thereby showing that its violation in the case of some rare
individuals does not threaten the substance of our basic ways of thinking about human
beings as psychological beings.
4. Outline of Book
Here is how the rest of the book will go.
Chapter 2 presents the case for thinking that a split-brain subject has two subjective
perspectives. This 2-perspectives claim is entailed by three others: that there are elements
of experience associated with both the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere, that
these elements are unified intrahemispherically, and that they are disunified interhemi-
spherically. Chapter 2 also rejects challenges to the interhemispheric disunity claim,
and explains why the truth of the 2-perspectives claim suggests that the two hemispheres
are associated with distinct subjects of experience, whom I call R and L.
Because of the close connections between consciousness and agency, the truth of
this latter 2-subjects claim ultimately depends upon it being the case that R and L are
distinct intentional agents. Chapter 3 defends this 2-agents claim, and explains why it is
consistent with what we know about split-brain subjects’ behavior even outside of
experimental conditions, in their daily lives.
Chapter 4 generalizes the defense of the 2-subjects and 2-agents claims, explaining
who R and L are, and how there could be two distinct psychological beings, two
thinkers, co-embodied as one human being. What is puzzling about the 2-thinkers claim
is that R’s mental states interact with L’s richly and perpetually. The argument for the
2-thinkers claim therefore appeals to different kinds of psychic interaction and inde-
pendence and especially to what I call the distinction between direct versus indirect
mental state interaction. What evokes the various duality intuitions are cases in which
R’s mental states seem able to interact with L’s only indirectly. Chapter 4 explains why
this distinction matters to the individuation of thinkers.
Chapter 5 concerns the major objection to the 2-thinkers claim, the objection from
sub-cortical structures, according to which split-brain psychology is ultimately not
substantially divided by split-brain surgery. Chapter 5 argues that remaining direct
interhemispheric interaction is neither substantial nor the primary source of what
the unity puzzle 19
unity and normalcy we see in split-brain subjects’ behavior. The best account of
split-brain psychology is thus still one according to which a split-brain subject is
two distinct psychological beings, albeit beings that are neither physically nor
psychologically discrete.
Several philosophers have presented arguments to the effect that if the duality claims
are true of split-brain subjects, then they must be true of non-split subjects also, since
we are all unitary human beings with two cerebral hemispheres. Chapter 6 responds to
and rejects these arguments, and then presents the kind of psychological commonality
between non-split and split-brain subjects that is secured by the unity of the body.
Chapter 7 turns to self-consciousness in split-brain subjects, arguing that R and L
are not just distinct thinkers but distinct thinkers of I-thoughts in particular. In this
sense, self-consciousness is dual in split-brain subjects. On the other hand, split-brain
self-consciousness operates in such a way as to make R and L very different from other
pairs of self-conscious thinkers. This will become the basis of Chapter 8’s argument
that R and L are not distinct persons but are instead mere parts of one person. Chapter 9
turns again to the relationship between the split-brain and the non-split case, and in
particular to the question of why the split-brain cases garnered so much interest and
attention even from non-academic quarters. There I offer a different explanation from
the one standardly offered—including in Section 3 of this chapter.
5. On Paths Not Taken

Before continuing on to defend the duality intuition in the next chapters, I want to say
something about the book’s central framing device: as concerning psychological
identity, the individuation of psychological beings. This approach is traditional, but
some might view it as outdated, or naïve—perhaps willfully so, since I myself will
acknowledge in Chapter 5 that RH and LH mental states interact in some ways that make
it prima facie problematic to think of them as belonging to distinct conscious minds.
So why bother?
After all, we have other options. We could pursue a 1-thinker account, and see what
sense we can make of a split-brain subject, S, having one mind that incorporates both
RH and LH activities, even though they don’t seem to operate, interhemispherically, in
the ways that the activities of a single mind ordinarily do. Or we could seek the nearest
exit, as it were, and take a deflationary attitude towards the “how many?” questions, one
that assumes that the psychological identities of split-brain subjects are metaphysically
indeterminate.
Maintaining that a split-brain subject has one mind has the advantage of conserv-
ativism—a virtue in a philosophical account of psychological identity, as I have said.
It could be viewed as a curious and open-minded conservatism at that, one ready to be
enlightened about the potentially sui generis form that the unity of mind takes in this
particular instance.
It would be worthwhile to try to develop a 1-thinker account that was fully consistent
with the empirical extent of mental division in split-brain subjects. Perhaps such an
account would appeal to some kind of unified meta-cognitive access that wasn’t access
to specific or detailed contents, an account according to which S remains a single
thinker in respect of having a preserved sense of how to orient herself and respond to
goings-on in the world despite limited information, or in respect of being able to
continually mine the contents of her own mind for increasingly elaborated information,
slowly exposing both RH and LH contents to the air of full-blown, cognitively accessible
conscious experience.
The ultimate possibilities for such an account are not clear in advance. The basic risk
is that no matter how intellectually honest its development, it will inevitably mislead
on the feature of split-brain psychology that makes it uniquely puzzling: that it involves
not disunity or even simply partial unity but two unities. Granted, these two unities are
themselves partially unified with each other. But this is a slim pass between two moun-
tains. The picture of S as mining the contents of her own mind for increasingly elabor-
ated information is always only one half of the picture, for the elaborated information
is in fact already present to another consciousness. A 2-thinkers account is in this way
more faithful to the large-scale structure of split-brain psychology.
The deflationary account meanwhile gets one big thing right: no split-brain subject
offers a perfectly clear-cut instance of “two minds in one body.” The subjects rather
occupy points intermediate between the ideal case of two thinkers in one body and the
ordinary case of one thinking animal.
I say that they occupy points, plural, because in fact split-brain subjects differ from
each other with respect to their degrees of interhemispheric dissociation and integra-
tion.2 The duality claims defended in the first half of the book may thus not be true of
N.G., for instance, in whom hemispheric independence has always been less striking,
though she is still far from a non-split subject in this respect, insofar as she does show
certain systematic dissociations characteristic of the callosal disconnection syndrome.
And there are a number of split-brain subjects about whom we simply know very little.
I therefore make no claims about how representative different split-brain subjects are
of either the non-split population or of the split-brain population (Myers, 1984). I’m
interested in the possibility of one person with multiple minds. Even a single actual case
would suffice. As it happens, however, I believe that the 2-thinkers claim is true of
at least P.S., V.P. (also known as P.O.V. or C.Z.), J.W., L.B., and most likely C.K. Of
course, even they differ from each other; for instance, L.B. is probably not as “dual” qua
2
Many of these differences are believed to be the consequence of brain injuries suffered prior to surgery;
some may be the consequence of unintentional but inevitable differences between the surgeries themselves;
for the most part, they are unexplained. Interestingly, the differences extend to the bilateral coherence of
resting state activity; compare Johnston et al. (2008) and Brázdil et al. (1997) to Uddin et al. (2008). Note
that Uddin et al. used the split-brain subject N.G., of whom the 2-thinkers claim does not seem to be true.
(See also Paul and Tyszka, 2012, and O’Reilly et al., 2012.)
the unity puzzle 21
thinker as were P.S. and J.W. (as noted by Seymour et al., 1994). Like them, however, he
is closer to the “two minds” end of the spectrum.
Still, if there is any sort of a spectrum whatsoever, doesn’t this show that the “how
many minds?” question requires a false presupposition? A deflationary attitude toward
the unity debates may seem particularly appealing. It seems to be the most intellec-
tually brave, forsaking the childish comfort of whole-number-countable minds. It
also seems to be the least dogmatic, most willing to accept (surgically modified) nature
as it comes (Lockwood, 1989). There is plenty to debate even in a purely empirical
study of split-brain psychology; however those debates turn out, why not simply leave
it at “one human being that is in some ways psychologically unified and in other ways
psychologically divided or dual”?
One reason is that I’m not sure that we can leave it there. We can of course refrain
from saying anything further, but that does not mean we could maintain this neutrality
in our own minds. It may be that we cannot help but assign psychological phenomena
to psychological beings, conceived robustly enough to make a difference to our down-
stream understanding. If this suspicion is right, then even if we ceased to speak of how
many minds a split-brain subject has— preferring vaguer formulations of the sort that
I myself will employ in Chapters 2 and 3, like that of experiences “associated with” or
actions “originating in” one hemisphere or the other—we would nonetheless inevit-
ably think either of S or of the two hemisphere systems as minds, and which way we
thought of them would color how we understood split-brain psychology. In other
words, an ostensibly deflationary answer to the “how many minds?” question risks
implicitly collapsing into either a 1-thinker or a 2-thinkers account after all. If this is
right, then it may be better to be explicit and self-conscious about how we are concep-
tualizing the domain, while acknowledging that we do so provisionally and fallibly.
A more basic concern about the deflationary position is that it may discourage us
from taking a hard and detailed look at the empirical literature. This may seem
implausible, and it would certainly be ironic: the possibility of metaphysically inde-
terminate cases is entailed by reductionism about psychological beings, and reduc-
tionism ought to encourage focus on particular forms and mechanisms and degrees
of unity and disunity, since at the end of the day that is all there is, if reductionism is
true. And maybe at the end of looking closely we will decide that the “how many?”
questions have no answers. It is not a very inspiring place to start, however. There
may be lumpers and splitters, but even splitters need a unifying picture, if only to
have something to pick apart.
This is a concern about pursuing a deflationary account, not a criticism of the
position itself. A deflationary attitude toward the “how many minds?” question is
not equivalent to an “it’s all just a giant mess” dismissiveness. My own sense, however,
has been that too often the latter is what the former seems to inspire. And there is so
much not to dismiss here that it is worth trying to forge an order from it, whether or
not the attempt succeeds.
After all, imagination outstrips reality in some ways—but sometimes it’s the
other way around. Even if my account of split-brain psychological identity should
turn out to be a castle in the air, it will have been built from real and important
materials, ones that could be made to serve other philosophical purposes. The
materials are different kinds of psychic unity and disunity, and, as the reductionist
says, they are what we are.
2
Subjects of Experience and
Subjective Perspectives
1. The Question of Split-Brain Consciousness

Human beings are animals. In this respect, I will assume, split-brain human beings are
like anyone else. The duality intuition is that a split-brain human animal is nonetheless
somehow two psychological beings (using the “is” of constitution or composition,
rather than that of identity). The book defends this version of the intuition: that there
are at least some split-brain subjects of whom it is true that each is two conscious
thinkers and intentional agents. On the other hand, I will also argue that a split-brain
subject is a unitary person. This is the defining thesis of any reconciliation account:
two minds, yet one person.
There are of course differences between the conditions of personhood and the
conditions of “mindedness,” and those of agency and of subjectivity, and so on. What
looms against any reconciliation account are the powerful connections between the
individuation or unity conditions of various kinds of psychological beings: between
the criteria for being unitary qua person and those for being unitary qua thinker,
between the conditions of being a single agent and those of being a single subject of
experience, and so on.
The organization of the book presupposes that we can pursue an answer to any one
of the “how many?” questions—how many minds, how many subjects of experience,
and so on—in partial independence of the others. The needed independence is
methodological and only preliminary, since an answer to any one of the “how many?”
questions is ultimately constrained by answers to all the others. But we have to break
into this circle somewhere, and so we will break in with the concept of the experiencing
subject, because the unity debates take root in the impression that there is something
strange about consciousness, in particular, in split-brain subjects.
That the problem starts here is made evident by the disparity between the attention
received by split-brain subjects—those in whom the corpus callosum has been surgically
sectioned—versus by subjects in whom the corpus callosum congenitally failed to
develop. Subjects with this latter condition—called agenesis of the corpus callosum—
have sometimes figured as participants in split-brain experiments. The two populations
exhibit different psychobehavioral profiles, presumably partly because neuroplasticity
is greater in youth (because of which people who undergo split-brain surgery in
childhood don’t later exhibit the same dissociations as do people who undergo the
procedure in adulthood). Human beings with agenesis of the corpus callosum
nonetheless do exhibit “deficits of hemispheric interaction . . . for which there appears
to be no compensation . . . They affect such diverse abilities as, among others, simple
visuomotor integrations, binocular fusion and stereopsis, bimanual coordination in
skilled actions, auditory memory, and certain aspects of language and spatial cognition”
(Berlucchi et al., 1995, p. 933).
That much could be said of both “acallosal” populations. The reason the split-brain
population has received incomparably more attention is that the deficits of congeni-
tally acallosal subjects are most evident only in tasks that are
based on procedural or implicit knowledge, i.e. operational knowledge which need not be
represented in consciousness; on the contrary these subjects often perform normally on tests of
hemispheric interactions which are failed by callosotomy patients and are based on declarative
or explicit knowledge, i.e. factual knowledge which can be described as consciously possessed.
(Berlucchi et al., 1995, p. 933; emphasis added)
In other words, while congenitally acallosal people are also subject to atypical failures
of psychic integration, these failures occur primarily within the realm of non-conscious
psychology. As a result, no one has ever wondered how many minds they have, much
less how many persons they are.
If split-brain surgery diminishes interhemispheric psychic integration but leaves
consciousness untouched, such that a split-brain human being remains subject to a
single conscious, first-person perspective, then the other “how many?” questions don’t
get off the ground. Where there is one conscious vantage point, we are not moved to
posit more than one experiencing subject or mind, one agent or one person—even if
the surround of non-conscious activity is disunified or divided. Apparently, we identify
most strongly with the conscious portions of our mental lives. Or maybe it’s better to
say that there is a kind of identification-with that is an essentially conscious activity,
and which a subject with a unified consciousness can thus engage in only with respect
to other subjects of unified conscious experience (see Section 5).
This chapter presents the case for thinking that the two “disconnected” hemisphere
systems are associated with distinct subjects of experience, each with its own subjective
perspective—one center or stream of conscious experience. The basic shape of the argu-
ment is this: that each hemisphere is associated with multiple elements of experience,
both at and across time; that RH-associated elements of experience are systematically
unified with RH elements but systematically disunified with LH-associated elements,
and mutatis mutandis for LH-associated elements of experience; that the two hemi-
spheres are thus associated with distinct subjective perspectives; and finally, that the
two hemispheres are thus associated with distinct subjects of experience.
More formally:
P1. In a split-brain subject, S, there are RH-associated elements of experience and
LH-associated elements of experience.
SUBJECTS OF EXPERIENCE AND SUBJECTIVE PERSPECTIVES 25
P2. If RH elements are unified with RH elements, and LH elements are unified
with LH elements, but RH elements are not unified with LH elements, then
the RH elements belong to experiential perspective E1 and the LH elements
to perspective E2, and E1 ≠ E2.
P3. RH elements are unified with RH elements, and LH elements are unified
with LH elements, but RH elements are not unified with LH elements.
SC1. E1 ≠ E2.
P4. Each perspective is the perspective of some subject of experience, and each
subject of experience has exactly one perspective.
C. The subject of E1 ≠ the subject of E2.

The vague language of “association” used in P1 of the 2-subjects argument is not
ultimately satisfying. What we want to know is whether the split-brain subject, S, is one
of us qua conscious being or whether after split-brain surgery a human being is some-
how two subjects of experience. (Again, using the “is” of constitution or composition.)
Although the conclusion of the argument presented in this chapter is the 2-subjects
claim, the identities of these subjects will not be explicitly addressed until Chapter 4. In
the meantime, I will simply argue that each hemisphere system is associated with a
perspective in whatever way that my whole brain is (I assume) associated with one.
This does not entail that my brain is the subject of my perspective.
Section 2 explains the notions of unity and disunity employed in P2 and P3. Section 3
presents the positive case for P1 and P3. The argument’s most controversial empirical
claim is the interhemispheric disunity claim made by P3. Section 4 responds to a number
of specific objections to that claim, including the objection that the notion of disunity
needed to justify P2 is distinct from that employed in defending P3. Section 5 turns to
the grounds for P4.
2. Conscious Unity and Disunity

Something about a split-brain subject’s behavior gives rise to what I will call the dual
consciousness intuition: the sense or impression that a split-brain subject’s behavior
is the product of two distinct centers or streams of consciousness. Sperry expresses this
intuition when he says, “Instead of the normally unified single stream of consciousness,
these patients behave in many ways as if they have two independent streams of conscious
awareness, one in each hemisphere, each of which is cut off from and out of contact
with the mental experiences of the other” (Sperry 1968a, p. 724; emphasis added).
What’s puzzling about this is that a split-brain human being is one animal,
and we don’t ordinarily individuate streams or centers of consciousness except
by individuating animals, identifying them as subjects of experience, and thereby
attributing to each of them a single conscious vantage point. The fact that so many
people have had the dual consciousness intuition nonetheless shows that it must
be possible to move in the other direction: from apparent facts about conscious
experience to the eventual judgment, or hypothesis, or even the mere suspicion, that
a human being is two experiencing beings.
This is possible because in spite of the diversity both between perspectives and
encompassed by a single perspective, there are nonetheless certain abstract relations
that the elements of any subject’s perspective seem to stand in to each other. I will
call these conscious unity relations. These relations allow some determination of which
elements a perspective encompasses in abstraction from identifying its proper subject.
In other words, I will argue that if subject S1 is subject to element of experience e1,
and subject S2 is subject to a different element of experience e2, we may yet determine
whether e1 and e2 are elements of a single perspective without first knowing whether
S1 = S2.
2.1. Access unity and awareness unity

At any instant in time, our perspectives encompass a multitude of elements: we see and
hear things out in the world, often while also “hearing” our own voices in inner speech,
or envisioning scenarios in our minds’ eyes; we feel not just moods and emotions
and diffuse senses of contentment or of discontent but also twinges of pain, pangs of
hunger, the weight of one limb against another, the growing discomfort of having sat
too long in a hard-backed chair.
There are many relations between experiential elements that could sensibly be called
the unity of consciousness. For most such relations, it seems clear that they are not
essential to your having your one perspective in the way that I have mine. It does,
however, seem essential that the elements of a perspective be related to each other in
two ways.
Nagel alluded to the first when he wrote that “for elements of experience . . . occurring
simultaneously or in close temporal proximity, the mind which is their subject can also
experience the simpler relations between them if it attends to the matter” (Nagel, 1971,
p. 407; emphasis omitted). Call this relation between experiential elements access unity.
Two elements are access unified when they (or their contents) are jointly available for
use in reasoning, reporting, or rationally guiding action.
The second relation between experiential elements we could call awareness unity.
Two elements are awareness unified when they (or their contents) can be jointly intro-
spected (given a capacity for introspection, of course), or can be made the common
object of a single state or act of awareness. Marks seems to have had this relation in mind
when he noted that we assume that two experiences “belong to the same unified con-
sciousness only if they are [or could be] known, by introspection, to be simultaneous”
(1980, p. 13). Two experiences are awareness unified, then, when they can be jointly
made the object of a single higher-order thought or state of awareness.
The concept of access unity is a natural extension of the concept of access consciousness:
consciousness in the sense of availability for use “in reasoning, reporting, and rationally
SUBJECTS OF EXPERIENCE AND SUBJECTIVE PERSPECTIVES 27
guiding action” (Block, 1995, p. 228). Access conscious states are to be contrasted with
the multitude of mental states whose contents aren’t made available for use in reasoning
or the rational selection of actions as a whole, but whose existence is revealed by
experimental work showing that such contents do nonetheless figure in guiding
animals’ behavior and automatic responses to things.
The concept of awareness unity is a natural extension of the concept of higher-order
consciousness or awareness (Rosenthal, 1986, 2005), whether of the higher-order sense
variety (Armstrong, 1968; Lycan, 1996) or of the higher-order thought variety
(Carruthers, 2000; Gennaro, 1996). An awareness conscious state is one of which
its subject either is or could be aware or one about which its subject thinks or could
think a higher-order thought (these may be distinct proposals).
For simplicity’s sake, I will speak of access unity alone in what follows. This should
not be read as a rejection of higher-order theories of consciousness or of the notion of
awareness unity, however, but rather as assuming that some kind of access—say, by the
mindreading system that can conceptualize mental states as such (Carruthers, 2000), or
by the mechanisms of attention (Lycan, 1996)—is essential for higher-order thought or
awareness, too. Note that this does not mean that access consciousness is a precondition
for awareness consciousness (see Lau and Rosenthal, 2011). It means at most that
one portion of the machinery needed for access consciousness is also required for
awareness consciousness.
It is possible to sidestep the disagreement between these two theories of conscious
experience because what split-brain surgery puts a stop to is the interhemispheric
accessibility of elements of experience—accessibility to reasoning and the rational
control of action and to higher-order thought or awareness. Or so I will argue (see
Section 4.3 on the possibility of inaccessible conscious unity).
2.2. Delineating perspectives

There are a few different ways to use the access unity relation to determine how many
perspectives a split-brain subject has. The least controversial of these is via a kind of
exclusion principle, according to which two elements of experience that are not access
unified are not elements of a common perspective.
The relevant notion of access unity must be properly understood in order to make
it possible that even a non-split subject, N, should have only a single perspective.
A non-split human being’s perspective encompasses a multitude of elements at any
moment in time, yet it may be the case that N can in some sense only access some
subset of them at any one time (Block, 2007), since some of the systems employed in
cognitive access—such as, or especially, working memory—have stark capacity limits.
If this is right, then our exclusion principle must take it into account. What we can do is
use generalizations about working memory capacity to individuate the elements of
experience, which would then ensure (since the capacity of working memory is greater
than one) that for any two elements of at least a neurotypical subject’s experience, these
two (or their contents) can be jointly accessed. And we can understand the exclusion
principle in such terms: according to it, if some pair of experiential elements are not
access unified, then they do not belong to one perspective.
Note that even this principle is plausible only for simultaneous or temporally near
elements of a perspective. Our perspectives are always changing, and most of what we
experience is simply forgotten. It is unlikely that there is any relation whatsoever—
other than mere succession—that all pairs of temporally distant experiential elements
stand in to each other. Only the synchronic (that is, at-a-time) disunity of a pair of
elements signifies that they are not elements of one perspective, then.
On the other hand, many pairs of temporally separated experiential elements do
seem to be unified diachronically (that is, across time) in an interesting and important
sense. Consider when I recollect some earlier event on the basis of the experience I had
of it at the time. In this case, there is a relation other than mere succession that
my earlier and my later experience stand in to each other. And that a pair of temporally
separated experiential elements are related to each other in some such way presumably
demonstrates that they are elements of one perspective. This is a kind of diachronic
inclusion principle. A synchronic inclusion principle is equally plausible.
Formulating these principles raises difficult questions about how to understand what
I’ve called the elements of experience: as tokens or types, as experiences themselves or
as contents of experience. Such questions are not irrelevant to the issues at hand. It is
nonetheless possible to address unity and disunity relations between the elements of a
split-brain subject’s experience without facing such questions head on, for two reasons.
The first is that where there are qualitative differences (different types), there must
be different individuals (different tokens), and meanwhile the two hemispheres are
not associated with qualitatively identical perspectives. The second is that we are con-
cerned with systematic patterns of unity and disunity relations, rather than with every
individual pair of experiences. If it looks as though RH elements of experience are
systematically unified with each other but not with those of the LH and as though
LH elements of experience are systematically unified with each other but not with
those of the RH, then this alone warrants the conclusion that the two hemispheres are
associated with distinct perspectives. If, for instance, bihemispheric pairs of elements
systematically fail to be diachronically unified, in a way that unihemispheric pairs do
not, then this warrants an interhemispheric diachronic disunity claim even if no single
bihemispheric pair of diachronically disunified experiential elements would have
much empirical significance.
This is just what we see: RH elements of experience and LH experiences are system-
atically unified intrahemispherically and disunified interhemispherically, both at a
time and across time.
3. The Positive Case for the 2-Perspectives Claim

Making the case for the 2-perspectives claim requires showing three things. First, we
need to establish that both hemispheres are the source or site of elements of experience.
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tapaa hänet ja kohtelee häntä kuin varmaa omaisuuttaan, heittää
hän heti maahan Väinämöisen ihailemat korunsa, pitäen niitä siten
juurikuin saastutettuina, ja rientää itkien kotiin. Muille hän ei tahdo
ilmaista korujensa katoamisen todellista syytä; vasta äidille, ainoalle
uskotulle näin arassa asiassa, hän kertoo Wäinämöisen rohkeat
kosiskelut. Hyvää tarkoittava, mutta lyhytnäköinen äiti lohduttelee
Ainoa parhaansa mukaan ja käskee hänen kadotettujen sijaan
pukemaan ylleen äidin säästämät kalliit korut, luullen Ainon niistä
lohtua saavan. Mutta turhaan! Ainon neitseellisen sydämen
sopusointu on särkynyt; itku ja valitus vain on hänen lohduttajansa.
»Mieli ei tervoa parempi, syän ei syttä valkeampi», hän sanoo
itsestään. Kun äiti vihdoin tarkemmin tiedustelee tuon jatkuvan itkun
syytä, silloin Aino vasta suoraan sanoo katkeran surunsa johtuvan
siitä, että äiti oli luvannut ja käskenyt hänet, hänen mieltään
kuulematta, »vanhalle varaksi, ikäpuolelle iloksi». Parempi muka olisi
ollut käskeä hänet suorastaan »alle aaltojen syvien sisareksi
Siikasille». Näin Ainon mieli aivankuin vaistomaisesti vetää häntä
veteen — rauhaan ja vapauteen.
Tuska ja suru vie häneltä mielen tasapainon ja itsensä

määräämisvallan. Hän toimii nyt aivan koneellisesti, vaistomaisesti.
Hän menee aittaan, pukee yllensä äidin tarjoamat korut ja lähtee
sitten, juurikuin kuololle vihittynä ja koristettuna, harhailemaan
tarkoituksettomasti pitkin saloja. Kuoleman vapauttava ajatus täyttää
hänen sumenneen mielensä; veden väljät ja vapaat tilat
houkuttelevat Ainoa sinne suruansa unhottamaan. Ja niin
vastustamattomaksi käy tämä houkutus, että Aino, nähdessään
vedenneitojen vapaina ja iloisina kisailevan läikkyvillä laineilla,
rientää suoraan heidän huolettomaan joukkoonsa veden viileään
syliin mieltään viihdyttämään ja sinne hukkuu. Se ei ollut pelkkä
tapaturma; se oli johdonmukainen tulos Aino raukan hennon ja
tunteellisen sydämen ristiriidoista. Rauhaton, maailman kanssa
epäsointuun joutunut sydän löytää levon kuolon viileässä sylissä,
joka hänelle aivankuin itsestään suurena ja sovittavana avautuu.
Näin olemmekin tarkastelleet Kalevalan kaikki huomattavammat

naiskuvat. Näihin voitaisiin lisätä vielä esim. rehevä Osmotar, »oluen
seppä», tuo taitava ja toimekas emännöitsijä ja oivallisen oluen
valmistaja, joka myöskin Pohjan neitiä perinpohjin neuvoo ja
opastaa, kuinka hänen tulee miehelässä käyttäytyä; »ruma
Ruotuksen emäntä», joka ylpeänä kädet puuskassa »liehoi sillan
liitoksella, laahoi keskilattialla» ja ynseästi tiuskuu avunanojalle;
lopuksi onneton Kullervon sisar, joka sukunsa surkean kohtalon
vainoamana ensin eksyy metsään, kotiin osaamatta, sitten Kullervon
korujen ja kultien sokaisemana tietämättään yhtyy veljeensä ja
vihdoin, saatuaan tietää asian oikean laidan, sovittaa kauhean
rikoksensa hyppäämällä kuohuvaan koskeen, jossa »löyti turvan
Tuonelassa, armon aaltojen seassa».
Mutta näiden ihmisellisten naiskuvien lisäksi tuo Kalevala vielä

eteemme lukemattoman joukon yliluonnollisia naisolentoja, jotka
monella eri tavalla joutuvat kosketuksiin ihmisten kanssa. Meillä on
Kalevalassa määrättömästi luonnottaria, ilmattaria, sotkottaria,
vedenneitoja, tuulettaria, puuttaria, metsänneitoja ja sinipiikoja,
manattaria j.n.e. On siellä Vellamo, »veden emäntä», on Mielikki,
»Tapiolan tarkka vaimo», on Tellervo, Tuulikki ja muut »utupaidat,
hienohelmat» metsänjumalan Tapion kepeät tyttäret — niin, koko
luonto on täynnä kaikenlaisia hengettäriä ja haltiattaria sitä
elävöittämässä ja somistamassa.
Lopuksi emme saa unhottaa Kalevalan ihania häärunoja, joissa

naisilla on niin tärkeä sija. Ne tosin eivät vie Kalevalan varsinaista
toimintaa eteenpäin, mutta niiden puhtaasti lyyrillinen, idyllinen
kauneus on verraton. Kaikki perhe- ja avioelämän suhteet tuodaan
niissä havainnollisesti esiin. Aluksi Pohjolan emäntä itse kuvailee
tyttärelleen, kuinka tällä oli ollut huolettomat päivät kotona kuin
perhosella ja kedon kukkasella, mutta kuinka miehelässä kaikki on
toisin; »toisin siellä torvet soivat, toisin ukset ulvaisevat, et osaa
ovissa käy'ä», hän sanoo morsiamelle, joka siitä tulee ensin kovin
alakuloiseksi ja valittaa mielensä olevan »kuin syksyinen yö pimeä».
Toiset vaimot vielä lisäävät morsiamen huolta ja pelkoa, kuvailemalla
appelan oloja vieläkin mustemmin värein, kun näet miniän niskoille
siellä muka talon kaikki työt lykätään ja vain moitteita ja toria
kiitokseksi annetaan. Miniä saa alkaa seuraavan päivän toimet jo
edellisenä iltana pitämällä huolta siitä, ettei hiilos liedessä yöllä
pääse sammumaan, jotta siitä aamulla helposti saa tulen. Kukon
ensi kerran laulaessa hänen tulee nousta ja alkaa päivän työt, joita
sitten jatkuu yhtä mittaa hetkisenkään levotta myöhään iltaan. Ensin
on tehtävä tuli, sitten hoidettava karja, sitten siivottava tupa j.n.e.
loppumattomiin. Miniän huolena on käsikivellä jauhaminen, veden
kanto, puiden tuonti tupaan, taikinan teko, astiain peso, uunin
lämmitys, leipominen, saunan lämmitys ja saunoittaminen, kehruu,
kudonta, oluen pano j.n.e. Hän raataa kuin orja ja saa sittenkin
palkakseen »apen luista leukaluuta, anopin kivistä kieltä, ky'yn
kylmiä sanoja, na'on niskan nakkeloita». — Näin kuvataan miniän
asema vaikeaksi, ja todellakin monissa tapauksissa se sellaista
lienee ollutkin. Mutta toiselta puolelta morsianta myös lohdutellaan ja
kehutaan, kuinka hän oivallisen sulhon hoivissa vasta tuntee itsensä
täysarvoiseksi ja onnelliseksi ja kuinka hän itse on tämän onnen
ansainnut kauneudellaan, hyvillä tavoillaan, ahkeruudellaan ja
taloustaidoillaan, joista maine on kauas kuulunut. — Erittäin kauniit
ovat myös ne jäähyväiset, jotka morsian lähtiessään lausuu
vanhemmilleen, kiittäen heitä kaikesta hyvästä, sisaruksilleen ja
koko kodilleen elukoineen, puineen, tanhuoineen. Niissä ilmenee
hienosti rakkaus vanhempia ja lapsuudenkotaa kohtaan.
Paljon voisi häärunoista samoinkuin muualtakin Kalevalasta

poimia hienoja, sattuvia piirteitä, jotka elävästi kuvailevat naista
neitona, sisarena, morsiamena, vaimona ja äitinä, mutta tila ei salli
meidän laveammalta niihin syventyä. Ja vaillinaiseksi tällainen
poiminta aina jäisi; vasta Kalevalasta itsestään niiden kauneuden ja
runsauden oppii täysin tajuamaan.
SUOMEN LUONTO KALEVALASSA
Esittänyt V. Tarkiainen
Todellisuus ja satu kilpailevat keskenään Kalevalassa. Väliin on

todellisuus voitolla, mutta useammin satu. Tuskin lienee toista
eeposta, ainakaan ei länsimaissa syntynyttä, jossa mielikuvitus löisi
leikkiään niin esteettömän vapaasti runouden pitkillä pihoilla kuin
Kalevalan lauluissa ja loitsuissa. Tämä seikka antaa koko
»kansalliseepoksellemme» omituisen lapsellisen viehätyksen, mutta
samalla riistää siltä sen mielenkiinnon, minkä todellisempien olojen
ja todellisempien tekojen kuvaukset voivat synnyttää lukijassa. Ettei
Kalevala kuitenkaan ole aivan vailla miehekästä ryhtiä ja elävästi
havaittuja luonteita, sen todistavat esim. Kullervo-runot.
Todellisuuspiirteet ovat ainakin kuteena, ellei loimena, tässä sadun
monikirjavassa kankaassa. — Siitä saamme käsityksen
katsellessamme esim. Kalevalan luonnonkuvausta.
Vaikka suomalainen runotar antaa Kalevalan suurten sankarien

usein matkustella ilmojen teitä »tuulen purressa, ahavan venosessa»
semmoisella helppoudella ja nopeudella, että se saattaa herättää
kateutta yksinpä meidän aikamme ilmapurjehtijoissa, ja vaikka sadun
kultakuut ja valheauringot kumottavat välistä sen kuusten latvoissa
niin lumoavalla loisteella, että suurkaupunkiemme sähkövalot niiden
rinnalla himmenevät säteettömiksi tuohuksiksi, tuntuu todellisuuden
maaperä sentään useimmissa paikoissa jalkain alla ja todelliset
taivaankappaleet valaisevat tavallisesti henkilöiden liikkeitä. Eikä
lukijan tarvitse kovinkaan pinnistää tarkkaavaisuuttaan, jotta hänen
silmäänsä piirtyisi Kalevalan runoista Suomenmaan kuva
suhteellisesti oikeassa muodossaan.
Johtaahan heti ensimäinen runo mielemme luontevasti »näille

raukoille rajoille, poloisille pohjanmaille», missä naapurit harvoin
tapaavat toinen toisensa ja missä ilmanalan ankaruus on värittänyt
soiton sekä laulun surunsoivaksi. Tämän harvaan asutun, kylmän ja
köyhän maan rannoilla loiskii meri aukeine ulapoineen ja korkeine
kuohuineen, joiden harjalla aikojen alussa keinui tarumainen Ilman
impi ja myöhemmin moni retkeilevä laiva tai vene. Meri ei ole
kuitenkaan antanut runoudellemme aiheita ja kuvia niin paljon kuin
esim. kreikkalaisten Odysseialle. Siitä on huomattu vain
pääominaisuudet: rannaton avaruus, sininen väri ja lakkapäiset
laineet, keskellä joku luoto ja saari. Kalevalan runous on etupäässä
sisämaan runoutta. Se heijastaa sisämaisia piirteitä, etenkin Suomen
tuhatjärvisyyttä. Kaikkialla soudetaan järvien soiluvia selkiä,
kaikkialla nähdään taloja lahdenpoukamissa, kaikkialla
pyykinpesijöitä »nenässä utuisen niemen, päässä saaren
terhenisen», kaikkialla kalastajoita nuotalla, verkolla tai ongella.
Järvestä järveen virtailee jokia, jotka kelpaavat liikeväyliksi, vaikka
niitä usein haittaavat »tuliset kosket» salakareineen ja muine
vaaroineen. Runo tietää mainita nimeltäkin eräitä kuuluisimpia
koskia:
»Kolme on koskea kovoa: Hämehess' on Hälläpyörä,
Kaatrakoski Karjalassa, ei ole Vuoksen voittanutta, ylikäynyttä
Imatran.»
Mutta kaikista julmin on kuitenkin ankara Rutjan koski, jonka

nieluun
»puut päin putoovat, perin vierivät petäjät, tyvin syösten

suuret hongat, latvoin lakkapäät petäjät.»
Pohjolan kuuluisan talon luona näyttää myös olevan virta tai laaja
salmi. Ja Tuonelan synkkää saarta ympäröi mustavetinen
kammottava joki, jossa pitkäkaulaiset joutsenet joluvat ja suuret
suomuhauit uiskentelevat, ja jonka yli ei ole hyvä inehmon elävänä
kulkea. Näiden jokien lisäksi tekaisee runo jonkun vielä
ihmeellisemmän satuvirran esim. Vipusen vatsaan tai — äidin
kyyneleistä. Ainon äiti se 4:essä runossa itkee niin suunnattomasti,
että hänen kyyneleistään kasvaa kolme virtaa saarineen ja
suvantoineen, ja niiden vieremiltä kaikuu käen kukunta, näin luoden
oikean suomalaisen kevättunnelman.
Sisämaiset näköalat kuvastuvat läpi runoelman sangen

vaihtelevina »kuusikkokumpuineen», »kanervikkokankaineen»,
»auhtoine ahoineen», »marjaisine mäkineen»,
»vesakkonotkoineen», »synkkine saloineen», ja suunnattomine
soineen, joiden keskellä kohoaa siellä täällä vain »märkä mätäs»,
karpaloiden koto. Kevätaurinko saa näillä Pohjan pimeillä perillä
aikaan suuremmat ihmeet kuin konsanaan etelän ikuisen kesän
mailla.
Sen säteiden hellittäessä nousee

»lehti puuhun, ruoho maahan, linnut puuhun laulamahan,
rastahat iloitsemahan, käki päälle kukkumahan.»
Paimen ajaa silloin karjansa laitumelle, ilon raikuessa:
»Lampahat meni mäkeä, vuonat vuoren kukkujata, paimen

asteli ahoa, lepikköä leyhytteli, käen kullan kukkuessa,
hopeaisen hoilatessa.»
Ja keskikesän aikana seisoo koko metsä jonkun hetken

ihanimmassa kullassaan, säteilevänä ja tuoksua täynnä:
»Kuuna paistoi kuusen oksat, päivänä petäjän latvat, metsä

haiskahti me'elle, simalle salo sininen, ahovieret viertehelle,
suovieret sulalle voille.»
Kesäisenä näkynä kangastaa Kalevalassa monet

lapsuudenaikaiset »marjamäet» ja paimenkukkulat sekä esim. se
laaja, nurmikenttäinen Saari, johon Lemminkäinen nuoruutensa
päivinä purjehtii kuuluisaa Kyllikkiä, »saaren kukkaa», kosimaan.
Sen salot kaikuvat kesäisin — niin melkein näyttää — aamusta iltaan
nuorten karkeloista; työnteosta ei ole puhettakaan. Siellä vain
leikitään ja karkeloidaan erityisellä kisakedolla:
»Neitoset kisaelevi, kaunokaiset karkelevi mannerpuolella

saloa, kaunihilla kankahalla.»
Kaukana pohjoisessa häämöttävät tämän kesäisen maiseman

vastakohtana Pohjan pitkät pimeät perukat, »kylmät kylät»
kivimäkineen, »vaskisine vaaroineen», »kuumottavine portteineen»,
aittoineen ja pihalla haukkuvina koirineen. Siellä
hyyss' on virrat, jäässä järvet, ilmat kaikki iljenessä, hyiset
hyppivät jänikset, jäiset karhut karkelevat keskellä lumimäkeä,
lumivaaran liepehellä, hyiset joutsenet joluvat, jäiset sorsat
soutelevat keskellä lumijokea, jäisen kosken korvaksella.»
Näille maille pakenee Lemminkäisen edellä Hiiden hirvi. Näitä

lumitunturien rinteitä, »kuss'ei kuuta, aurinkoa, eikä päiveä iässä»,
matkailee Lemminkäinen kerran ruskealla Hiiden ruunalla:
»Veti virkkua vitsalla, paiskasi pajun vesalla, ajoi matkoa

vähäisen, tuuritteli tunturia, pohjoispuolella mäkeä,
lumivaaran kukkuloa.»
Kuinka säät vaihtelevat Kalevalan kankahilla, siitä antavat runot

usein eläviä kuvauksia. Talvella ovat järvet ja merenlahdet jäässä, ja
on niin kova pakkanen, että Lemminkäinen uhkaa jäätyä
matkatoverinsa Tieran kanssa (runossa 30 säkeet 143—180) ihan
kuoliaaksi. Välistä sataa lunta leppeästi:
»Laskip' Ukko uutta lunta, viskoi hienoista vitiä, se katti

kanervan varret, peitti maalta marjan varret.»
Välistä taas kauheita rakeita:
»Satoi hyytä, satoi jäätä, satoi rauaista raetta, pienemmät

hevosen päätä, päätä ihmisen isommat.»
Välistä sakeaa sumua:
»Ututyttö, neiti terhen, u'un huokuvi merelle, sumun

ilmahan sukesi» j.n.e.
Välistä raivoaa kauhea myrsky:

»Kovin läikkyi länsituuli, luoetuuli tuikutteli, enemmän
etelätuuli, itä inkui ilkeästi, kauheasti kaakko karjui, pohjonen
kovin porasi. Tuuli puut lehettömäksi, havupuut havuttomaksi,
kanervat kukattomaksi heinät helpehettömäksi; nosti mustia
muria päälle selvien vesien.»
Toisin ajoin taas on ilma tyyni ja selkeä, etenkin auringonnousun

tai -laskun tienoissa:
»Päivänäpä kolmantena aletessa aurinkoisen jo sepon koti

näkyvi, luvat ilman tuulottavi, noki nousi nuoraisena, savu
paksuna pakeni, tuprusi savu tuvasta, ylös pilvihin kohosi.»
Jos semmoisena päivänä nousee korkealle mäelle, aukenevat

pitkät näköalat selvinä kulkijan eteen. Esim. kun Lemminkäinen on
Hiiden hirven hiihdännässä, niin hän
»hiihti päivän, hiihti toisen, jo päivänä kolmantena meni

suurelle mäelle, nousi suurelle kivelle, loi silmänsä
luotehesen, poikki soien pohjoisehen; Tapion talot näkyivät,
ukset kulta kuumottivat poikki suosta, pohjoisesta, alta
vaaran, varvikosta.»
Tai kun rannalla pyykinpesussa, oleva Annikki silmäilee ulapalle:
»Katselevi, kääntelevi ympäri ihalat ilmat, päänsä päälle

taivahalle, rannatse meriä myöten; ylähällä päivä paistoi,
alahalla aallot välkkyi.»
Tämän tapaiset laajat maisemakuvat, jotka taiderunouteemme

koteutti Aleksis Kivi »Seitsemässä veljeksessään», eivät ole
harvinaisia Kalevalassa. Ihanimpana esiintyy kuitenkin suomalainen
maisemasävy semmoisissa kohdissa, joissa luonto on vain sisäisten
mielialojen kuvastimena. Esim. seuraavissa lyyrillisissä säkeissä,
jotka ovat Kalevalan kauneimpia:
»Niin on mieli miekkoisien, autuaallisten ajatus, kuin

keväinen päivännousu, kevät-aamun aurinkoinen; mitenkä
minunki mieli, minun synkeä sisuni? On kuin laaka lammin
ranta, kuin pimeä pilven ranta, kuin syksyinen yö pimeä,
talvinen on päivä musta, viel' on mustempi sitäki, synkeämpi
syksy-yötä.»
*****
Millainen on sitten eläinkunta, joka kansoittaa näitä Kalevalaisia

maisemia? Millainen kasvisto, joka antaa niille värin ja sävyn? Tuiki
tuttua ja kotoista, jommoisena se on piirtynyt luonnonlapsen
tarkkaan silmään.
Jalan neljän liikkuvista metsien asukkaista on Kalevalassa

etumaisimpana karhu. Salojen kansa seurustelee sen kanssa
samalla tuttavallisesti sekä arvonantavasti, sillä se tietää otsolla
olevan »yhdeksän miehen voiman ja yhden miehen mielen». Se
tuntee sen ulkomuodon ja merkitsee sen tärkeimmät piirteet
täsmällisesti:
»lyhyt jalka, lysmä polvi, tasakärsä talleroinen, pää levyt,

nenä nykerä, karva kaunis röyhetyinen.»
Se nimittää sitä »koverakouraksi», »karvalallukseksi»,

»karvaturvaksi» ja kuvailee sen elämäntapoja todenmukaisesti:
kuinka se makailee talvet havumajassaan
»kengällä korean kuusen, katajikon kainalossa»,
kuinka se kesillä liikkuu ylt'ympäri metsiä »villakuontalona» taikka

»pellavaskupona», syöpi sieniä, murtaa muurahaiskekoja, etsii
»juuria punaisen putken, Metsolan mesipaloja» — ellei ole tottunut
liharuokaan ja ruvennut rumille töille, jolloin se välistä ärsytettynä ja
ähmissään kaatelee koivunpökkelöitä, vääntelee vesihakoja, määhkii
marjamättähiä. Kansa on tuhlannut tälle jalolle otukselle, jonka vihaa
se on aina peljännyt, mitä kauneimpia hyväilynimiä ja mainesanoja:
»mesikämmen», »mesikki», »metsän omena», »metsän kaunis»,
»salon kulta», »salon armas», »aika poika», »pyylypoika» (=
pesässä asuva poika), »vanha mies», »verkanuttu», »verkahousu»,
»mustasukka», »käpeä-kenkä», »rahakarva», »rahasaari» j.n.e. Sitä
lepytellään erityisillä luvuilla keväällä karjaa laitumelle laskettaessa
ja varoitellaan elämään sovinnossa. Ja jos se on taistelussa
talvisaikaan saatu kaadetuksi, kohdellaan sitä yhä kunnioittaen ja
hellävaroen. Metsästä tuotaessa se otetaan vastaan juhlallisilla
menoilla, valituin lauluin ja lauseparsin, kannetaan juhlasaatossa
pirttiin, jossa sitten komeat peijaiset sen kunniaksi pidetään ja
vainajan korkeita sukujuuria muistellaan, ennenkuin ryhdytään
karkeampiin toimiin: nylkemiseen ja lihan paloittelemiseen. Näissä
peijaismenoissa, jotka häidenvieton ohella ovat Kalevalan suurin
juhlatilaisuus, ilmenee karjalaisen heimon keskuudessa vallinnut,
miltei uskonnollinen karhunpalvelus, samalla kuin niiden sekä
häärunojen perinnäisissä vuorolauluissa ja toiminnoissa piilee
suomalaisen draaman ensi itu. Tämmöiseen maineeseen on karhu
voinut kohota vain semmoisilla seuduilla, missä ihmisen on ollut
vaikea huonoilla aseillaan puolustaa asemaansa tätä pelättyä
vihollista vastaan.
Muut metsänpedot, kuten susi, ilves ja kettu, ovat Kalevalassa
karhuun verraton aivan syrjäasemassa. Sutta (eli hukkaa) pelkäävät
vain naiset talviöinä pihamailla liikkuessaan. Repo on huomattu
vaaralliseksi vain hanhilaumalle. Nämä eläimet ovat kaikki haluttua
riistaa kalliin nahkansa vuoksi, niinkuin myös »näätä kultarinta»,
»talvinen jänis» sekä oksilla hyppelevä orava. Näädästä ja oravasta
on sitäpaitsi pantu merkille liikkeiden sukkeluus, jäniksestä juoksun
nopeus, jonka vuoksi tämä »ristisuu», »pitkäkorva», »kehräsilmä»,
»vääräsääri» kelpaa m.m. sanansaattajaksi Ainon kuoltua. Vikkelin
eläimistä on kuitenkin kärppä (l. portimo), jonka liikkeisiin usein
verrataan sukkulan sujahtelemista taitavan kutojan käsissä:
»niin sen suihki sukkulainen kuin on portimo pinossa (kuin

kärppä kiven kolossa)».
Vesissä asustava saukko ja hylje, joka »luotansa lohia syöpi,

sivultansa Siikasia», Kalevalan laulajille kuten pienimmät maan
matoset, tai myyrät, hiiret, kusiaiset (mauriaiset). Onpa joukkoon
sentään päässyt joku eläin, joka osoittaa laajempaa
luonnontuntemusta kuin Suomenmaan rajojen sisällä välittömästi on
mahdollista. Semmoisia on eteläisempiin seutuihin viittava
»kamelivarsa» ja siili sekä Jäämeren läheisyyttä todistavat mursut ja
valaat, joista viimemainittu on Suomen kansan kuvituksessa (kuten
niin monen muunkin) kasvanut miehiä nieleväksi hirviöksi. —
Lapinmaan peura sekä usein sen toisintona esiintyvä hirvi ei ole
Kalevalassa saanut kovin suurta huomiota osakseen. Tosin
kerrotaan (13—14 runoissa) laajasti, kuinka Lemminkäinen
ansiotöikseen hiihtää Hiiden hirven »silosorkan» »Hiien peltojen
periltä, Lapin lasten tanterilta», mutta tästä eläimestä ei saa muuta
todellista kuvaa kuin sen, että se juoksee nopeasti ja on kovin äksy
potkimaan. Tämä onkin luonnollista, sillä se ei ole tavallinen
metsänotus, vaan mielikuvituksen luoma outo kuvatus, kyhätty
kokoon mitä erilaisimmista aineksista:
»Hiiet hirveä rakenti, juuttahat poroa laati, pään panevi

pökkelöstä, sarvet raian haarukasta, jalat rannan raippasista,
sääret suolta seipähistä, selän aian aiaksesta, suonet kuivista
kuloista. silmät lammin pulpukoista, korvat lammin
lumpehista, ketun kuusen koskuesta, muun lihan lahosta
puusta.»
Samanlaisen mahdottoman kummitusmuodon on saanut myöskin

se kokko, joksi Pohjan akka muuttaiksen Sammon ryöstäjiä takaa
ajaessaan:
»Jopa muuksi muutaltihe, tohti toisiksi ruveta: otti viisi

viikatetta, kuusi kuokan kuolioa, nepä kynsiksi kyhäsi,
kohenteli kouriksensa; puolen purtta särkynyttä, senpä
allensa asetti, laiat siiviksi sivalti, peräpuikon purstuksensa,
sata miestä siiven alle, tuhat, purston tutkamehen.»
Ja tästä kuten muista Kalevalan kokoista, vaakalinnuista ja

lokeista käytetään runoissa niin suunnattomia mittasuhteita, että
ajatus aivan tyrmistyy:
»Ei ole kokko suuren suuri, eikä kokko pienen pieni: yksi
siipi vettä viisti, toinen taivasta lakasi, pursto merta pyyhätteli,
nokka luotoja lotasi.»
tai:
»Suu sen on satoa syltä, kita kuusi koskellista, kieli kuutta

keihäsvartta, kynnet viittä viikatetta.»
Muut linnut sensijaan ovat pysyneet luonnollisuuden rajoissa: pyyt,
teeret, korpit, kuret, kajavat, tikat, kiurut, pääskyt, pulmuset, sotkat,
joutsenet, allit, kyntörastaat, käet j.n.e. Ovatpa niistä monet kuvatut
erinomaisen tarkasti ja havainnollisesti. Joutsenesta, »pyhästä
linnusta», esim. mainitaan, että se uiskentelee joluen jokivesissä ja
pesii ylhäällä pohjoisessa »suurimmalla suon selällä, tuiman tunturin
laella». Hanhi on merkitty »kirjasiiveksi» ja »punasuuksi», sotka
»siniseksi» linnuksi, tikka puussa kapuavaksi, kiuru pilviin
katoavaksi, korppi keikkuvaksi ja varis vaakkuvaksi. Eloisin on kuva
lokista, joksi Ilmarinen loihtii ryöstämänsä morsiamen, nuoremman
Pohjan neitosista:
»Lauloi naisensa lokiksi luo'olle lokottamahan, veen karille

kaikkumahan, nenät nienten niukumahan, vastatuulet
vaapumahan. Nyt se lokkina lojuvi, kajavana kaakahtavi,
kiljuvi vesikivillä, kartioilla kaljahuvi.»
Kauneimman sijan lintujen joukossa on kuitenkin saanut käki. Se

on Suomen kansan varsinainen lempilintu, kevään lintu ja nuoruuden
lintu: »kultarinta», »hopearinta», »tinarinta», »hietarinta». Sen
yksitoikkoinen sointuva kukunta herättää vastakaikua kaikkien
sydämissä. Sille uskovat nuoret toiveensa ja vanhat huolensa. Siltä
odottavat neitoset tietoa sulhon saapumisesta ja muutkin onnea ja
rikkautta. Senvuoksi sitä suojellaan ja suositaan. Sille jätetään
kaskesmailla erityisiä kukuntapuita, joissa sen toivotaan kukkuvan
illoin, aamuin sekä keskipäivälläkin. Sen kukunnan kullasta taotaan
naulat kanteleeseen ja sen säveltahtiin sykähtelee sekä onnellisen
että onnettoman sydän. Käen kukunnan vaikutus on kuvattu 4:en
runon lopussa, jossa Ainon äiti tulkitsee kovaa kokeneen sydämensä
tunteet kauniilla sanoilla:
»Elköhön emo poloinen kauan kuunnelko käkeä; kun käki
kukahtelevi, niin syän sykähtelevi, itku silmähän tulevi, ve'et
poskelle valuvi, kyynärän ikä kuluvi, vaaksan varsi vanhenevi,
koko ruumis runnahtavi kuultua kevätkäkösen.»
Selvää on, että suomalaiset, joille lukemattomat järvet ja joet

tarjosivat mainion tilaisuuden kalastukseen, myös tunsivat hyvästi eri
kalalajit: »haleat» hauit, »sinervät» siiat, »kuleat» kuujat (järvilohet),
»kyrmyniskat» ahvenet, »kinaiset» kiiskit, »nuljaskaiset» mateet
sekä säret, säynäät, kuoreet, mujeet ja lohet. Tunsivatpa he niiden
elintavat ja kutuajatkin: »hauki hallalla kutevi, ahven arka,
kyrmyniska, sykysyt syvillä uipi, kesät kuivilla kutevi, rantasilla
rapsehtivi». Mutta taaskin on runossa tapahtunut, että yksi kala,
Tuonelan joen »suomuhauki», on kasvanut niin suureksi, ettei se
mahdu mihinkään todellisuuden kaavoihin:
»Ei ole hauki pienen pieni, eikä hauki suuren suuri: kieli
kahta kirvesvartta, hampahat haravan varren, kita kolmen
kosken verta, selkä seitsemän venehen.»
Eikä paljon pienempi liene ollut sekään jättiläishauki, jonka

selkään juuttuu koskessa samporetkeläisten vene ja jonka
leukaluusta Väinämöinen laittaa itselleen maankuulun kanteleen.
Vielä suurempi hirmu kuin Tuonelan suomuhauki on Pohjolan

porttia vartioiva käärme, arvatenkin samaa yhteistä alkujuurta kuin
ne jättiliskot ja käärmeet, joiden kanssa kaikkien maiden tarulliset
sankarit saavat voimiansa koetella. Se on kuvattu seuraavin sanoin:
»Käärme tiellä käänteleikse eessä portin poikkipuolin,

pitelämpi pirtin hirttä, paksumpi patsasta portin, sata silmeä
maolla, tuhat kieltä käärmehellä, silmät seulan suuruhiset,
kielet pitkät keihovartta, hampahat haravan varren, selkä
seitsemän venettä.»
Tarvitaan tietää synnyt syvät, ennenkuin tämmöinen hirviö

saadaan siirtymään tieltä syrjään. Niissä sanoissa, joilla
Lemminkäinen manaa sen matkoihinsa, kuvastuu kansan kauhu ja
inho käärmettä kohtaan. Helposti ymmärrettävä on myös, että
Tuonela, kaiken inhuuden ja onnettomuuden tyyssija, on täynnä
kyitä, käärmeinä; niin hyvin makuusijoilla kuin oluttuopeissa niitä
siellä matelee. Kansan usko on tehnyt kyykäärmeestä yksinpä
myrkyllisen nuolenkin, jolla sokea paimen ampuu Tuonelan joella
Lemminkäisen läpi maksan, kautta kainalon vasemman. Käärmeiden
paljoutta vähän viljellyillä seuduilla muuten todistaa »kyisen pellon»
kyntäminen, joka esiintyy Kalevalassa pari kertaa.
Niinkin pieniin eläimiin kuin ampiaisiin (»herhiläisiin»), mehiläisiin

ja »mustiin» muurahaisiin ulottuu kansanrunoilijain huomio
Kalevalassa. Varsinkin mehiläinen on tarkkaan kuvattu ja esiintyy
usein. Se näyttää olleen oikea lempilintu sekin, koska sille annetaan
semmoisia hyväilynimiä kuin »mehiläinen, meiän lintu,
metsänkukkien kuningas», »simasiipi», »sinisiipi». Ja se tekee
useampaan kertaan kauniita palveluksia ihmiselle: hakee
Lemminkäisen äidille voiteita taivaasta, mettä Osmottaren oluviin ja
Ilmarisen raudankarkaisu veteen.
Kotieläimistä on koira, hevonen ja lehmä tavallisimpia

Kalevalassa. Koira esiintyy niin hyvin talonvartijana (esim.
Pohjolassa) kuin metsänkävijän (Väinämöisen) ja matkamiehen
(Kullervon) toverina. Sen tuntomerkit »villahäntä», »rauankarva» ja
»pikkusilmäinen» viittaavat luultavasti sen lappalaisrotuisuuteen.
Samaan päätelmään johtaa myös humoristinen kuvaus haukkuvasta
Pohjolan koirasta:
»Aina haukkui linnan rakki, saaren vartio valitti, linnan lukki

luksutteli, perän peltohon sysäten, peni julma juhmutteli,
hännän kääten käppyrähän.»
Koira näyttää hyödyllisyydestään huolimatta olleen pikemmin

halveksittu kuin arvossa pidetty eläin (»lihan syöjä, luunpurija, veren
unelta vetäjä»), niinkuin osoittaa »koira» ja »rakki» nimien
käyttäminen haukkumasanoina. Hevonen (hepo, uve, ori) sensijaan
oli suuressa arvossa, varsinkin jos sattui olemaan »tulinen» juoksija.
Väriltään se oli »ruskea» tai »tulipunainen», kuten suomalaisrotuinen
tavallisesti on, toisinaan »liinaharja», »sukkajalka», »kuloharja» tai
»laukki». Sen raisua juoksua kuvataan usein eloisasti:
»Senpä tukka tulta tuiski,

harja suihkivi savua.»
Senvuoksi kelpasivat sen liikkeet vertauskohdaksi muullekin

nopealle vauhdille, esim. Vipusen laululle:
»Suu se syyteli sanoja, kieli laski lausehia, kuin on sälkö

sääriänsä, ratsu jalkoja jaloja.»
Joskus on hevonenkin saanut tarumaisen muodon, esim. se

ruskea Hiiden ori, jonka Lemminkäinen ottaa kiinni (14 runossa),
hevonen, jonka hengityksen lämpimässä Marjatta synnyttää
poikansa Tapiomäellä (50 runossa), sekä se kultavarsa, joka
tungeiksen Ilmarisen ahjosta (37 runossa). Kaikista merkillisin on
kuitenkin se »musta ruuna», jonka Lemminkäinen kerran
murheistaan laatii ja jonka selässä hän ratsastaa kotiin
onnistumattomalta sotaretkeltä. Lehmistä, joita lihan, voin ja maidon
antinsa vuoksi pidettiin paljon kalevalaisissa kodeissa, mainitaan
monet nimeltä (»Muurikki», »Mansikki», Puolukka», »Omena» j.n.e.)
sekä kuvaillaan niiden laitumelle laskemismenot, maidonsaaliin
rukoileminen, paimentaminen, lypsäminen sekä navetassa talvella
ruokkiminen. Ilmarisen ahjossa syntyvä »kultalehmä» on ainoa
epätodellinen ilmestys lehmien joukossa. Härkä sensijaan on
kasvanut joskus aivan mitattomaksi, mahdottomaksi. Sillä härällä,
jolla Sammon juuret maasta irti kynnetään, oli »syltä sarvet pitkät,
puolentoista turpa paksu». Ja vielä suurempi on se sonni, joka
teurastetaan Pohjolan hääruuiksi, sen kun
»Hämehessä häntä häilyi, pää keikkui Kemijoella, sata syltä

sarvet pitkät, puolta toista turpa paksu» j.n.e.
Muut kotieläimet: kissa, sika, lammas, vuohi, uuhi, kana ja kukko,

ovat säilyttäneet Kalevalan lauluissa luonnollisen kokonsa ja
muotonsa.
*****
Jos sitten siirrymme tarkastamaan Kalevalan kasvikuntaa, niin

huomaamme samanlaisen, miltei luonnontieteellisesti tarkan
käsityksen siinä ilmenevän. Ja tässäkin kohden pyrkii suomalaisten
runollinen mietiskely tunkeutumaan olioiden syntyyn ja historialliseen
alkuperään. Toisessa runossa esitetään Sampsa Pellervoinen
»maita kylvämässä, toukoja tikittämässä» ja annetaan yleiskuva
Suomen tavallisimmista puulajeista ja niiden kasvupaikoista.
»Mäet kylvi männiköiksi, kummut kylvi kuusikoiksi,

Noromaille koivut kylvi, lepät maille leyhkeille, tuomet kylvi
tuorehille, raiat maille raikkahille, kankahat kanervikoiksi

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Self-Consciousness and ’split’ Brains:

The Mind’s I Elizabeth Schechter

It is humbling to contemplate the number of people who have contributed in some

List of Figures xiii

1. The Unity Puzzle 1

4. How Many Minds? 80

3. Three Striking Features of Self-Consciousness in Split-Brain Subjects 162

1.1 The corpus callosum 3

It is worth remembering that the main reason everybody—really, just about

1. The Dual Brain

2. The Split-Brain Surgeries

2.1. The first split-brain surgeries

2.2. The discovery of the split-brain phenomenon

No systematic behavioral consequences of callosal section were revealed by clinical

2.3. The first split-brain experiments

2.4. Working with split-brain human beings

In a moment, a ‘+’ sign will come up on a screen in front of

Okay. How about you close your eyes,

So what do you think

3. The Unity Debates

explicit in ordinary understanding or social interaction but nonetheless presup-

5. On Paths Not Taken

1. The Question of Split-Brain Consciousness

C. The subject of E1 ≠ the subject of E2.

2. Conscious Unity and Disunity

2.1. Access unity and awareness unity

2.2. Delineating perspectives

3. The Positive Case for the 2-Perspectives Claim

Annikin virkkua sukua on »Pohjan piika pikkarainen, joka jo aikoja

Kalevalan hienoin ja naisellisin naiskuva on epäilemättä

Kun Aino saa tietää että veli on luvannut hänet »Väinämöiselle

Tuska ja suru vie häneltä mielen tasapainon ja itsensä

Näin olemmekin tarkastelleet Kalevalan kaikki huomattavammat

Mutta näiden ihmisellisten naiskuvien lisäksi tuo Kalevala vielä

Lopuksi emme saa unhottaa Kalevalan ihania häärunoja, joissa

Paljon voisi häärunoista samoinkuin muualtakin Kalevalasta

Todellisuus ja satu kilpailevat keskenään Kalevalassa. Väliin on

Vaikka suomalainen runotar antaa Kalevalan suurten sankarien

Johtaahan heti ensimäinen runo mielemme luontevasti »näille

Mutta kaikista julmin on kuitenkin ankara Rutjan koski, jonka

»puut päin putoovat, perin vierivät petäjät, tyvin syösten

Sisämaiset näköalat kuvastuvat läpi runoelman sangen

Sen säteiden hellittäessä nousee

Paimen ajaa silloin karjansa laitumelle, ilon raikuessa:

»Lampahat meni mäkeä, vuonat vuoren kukkujata, paimen

Ja keskikesän aikana seisoo koko metsä jonkun hetken

»Kuuna paistoi kuusen oksat, päivänä petäjän latvat, metsä

Kesäisenä näkynä kangastaa Kalevalassa monet

»Neitoset kisaelevi, kaunokaiset karkelevi mannerpuolella

Kaukana pohjoisessa häämöttävät tämän kesäisen maiseman

Näille maille pakenee Lemminkäisen edellä Hiiden hirvi. Näitä

»Veti virkkua vitsalla, paiskasi pajun vesalla, ajoi matkoa

Kuinka säät vaihtelevat Kalevalan kankahilla, siitä antavat runot

»Laskip' Ukko uutta lunta, viskoi hienoista vitiä, se katti

Välistä taas kauheita rakeita:

»Satoi hyytä, satoi jäätä, satoi rauaista raetta, pienemmät

Välistä sakeaa sumua:

»Ututyttö, neiti terhen, u'un huokuvi merelle, sumun