From the inside, conscious experience seems to exhibit a kind of essential unity. In my dissertation work, I subjected the intuition that minds are numerically singular and necessarily unified to critical scrutiny using test cases. I argued that questions of “counting minds” do not always have metaphysically determinate, whole-number answers. On this page, you can find a video summary of the project as well as descriptions of two of my case studies.
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Krista and Tatiana are remarkable little girls, and their existence was a big reason for my initial interest in Neuroscience and philosophy of mind (see the documentary Inseparable, and Susan Dominus' New York Times piece on the girls). They are craniopagus twins conjoined at the head, sharing a "thalamic bridge" connecting the sensory processing areas in their brains. This allows them to share sensations, control each other's limbs, and even hear each others' thoughts. This motivates the idea that biology doesn't place necessary constraints on the privacy of mental contents.
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