Article What removing large chunks of brain taught me about selfhood

[C C]

https://psyche.co/ideas/what-removing-la...t-selfhood

EXCERPTS: I’ve severed the brain in two and watched in amazement as my patients wake up feeling like their complete and undivided selves. When I first did this type of operation, I had fantasies that they might suddenly refer to themselves as ‘we’ rather than ‘I’. Thankfully, this never occurred.

[...] So why didn’t these split-brain patients, post-surgery, feel like they had two selves? The answer is that their brains fooled them into thinking that only one self existed and that it was in charge. When one of their hands did something unexpected, they made up a story to explain why. I changed my mind. I didn’t like the way that shirt looked.

These stories or confabulations show the power of the illusion of selfhood – a feeling that evolutionary psychologists believe evolved because it is adaptively useful. [...] The illusion of the self makes us feel unique and provides us with a goal-oriented purpose to our lives. Time and again, I’ve seen the resilience of the selfhood illusion in my surgical work.

[...] More than once, I’ve even removed an entire half of a brain, as a treatment for epilepsy in young children. Each time, I knew intellectually that the surgery should help, and took comfort knowing that the healthy remaining brain would have already begun compensating for its diseased partner. But, emotionally, it was hard not to imagine how devastating such radical surgery would be to the patient. Yet, despite what felt like my desecration of their brains, these patients too never felt that their identity and sense of self had diminished.

If our sense of a coherent, unified self is an illusion, as brain surgery so convincingly reveals, what does this mean for our innate and powerful intuition that ‘we’ are in control of our actions? The idea that we have free will is fundamental to most of the world’s religions and our legal systems. Yet, simply put: how can I be in charge if there is no I? (MORE - missing details)

[Magical Realist]

In everyday life, the illusory nature of the self and free will is irrelevant because we can’t lift the veil to see the world any other way (certain meditation techniques that can lead to a dissolution of the sense of self might be the only exception).

Perhaps this requires we transcend the historical dichotomy of self and brain, freewill and fate, and rethink what is meant by freedom and being. Because if we are only ever being what we in our cerebral depths are programmed to be, why is this not in fact the freedom of being itself? Does being free require us to be able to be in ways not indemic to our being? To be a fire hydrant for instance or perhaps a goldfish? Not hardly.

That we are not in fact chimerical phantoms shape-shifting into any random form that fancies us, popping out of nothingness ex nihilo in some sort of surrealistic farce, but in fact rooted in order and intelligence and being itself. It is good news in the end that there is nothing else to be but who we must be, nothing else to choose but what must be chosen. Have we even fathomed the depths and the dimensions of what our being contains? For me it is freedom and utter peace itself that we come to want and to accept being nothing else. Of course life may be just a kind of illusion, dreamlike and story-like and fleeting like dust in the wind. Let's just be glad that we got to be at all.

[Syne]

If our sense of a coherent, unified self is an illusion, as brain surgery so convincingly reveals, what does this mean for our innate and powerful intuition that ‘we’ are in control of our actions? The idea that we have free will is fundamental to most of the world’s religions and our legal systems. Yet, simply put: how can I be in charge if there is no I?

Notice how this starts with the assumption that "our sense of a coherent, unified self is an illusion," even though brain surgery doesn't reveal anything of the sort. These sorts of brain surgeries only reveal that the sense of self is not a one-for-one relationship to the entire brain. Even with a bisected brain controlling half the body, that doesn't imply that the half unidentified with has its own identity. It just has stimulus responses, like subconscious instinct.