Why study philosophY?

 I have always been fascinated with the human brain and the nature of consciousness. I could hardly believe it the first time I was told that everything I thought, felt, knew, believed - my entire inner universes, and everyone else's, were somehow produced in these 3 pound soggy lumps of flesh. How could it be possible?

It is truly an incredible organ. The human brain is creative, adaptive, flexible - think of all the things we have done with them. Discovered galaxies. Invented ever-increasingly complex technologies. Conceived of ourselves as agents in the world and effected change in it. It allows us to care for our families, plan for our futures. One thing that excites me about the human brain is its inherent drive to find a kind of sense: brains look for patterns. But what is a pattern, and how does the brain know? How does it find signal in the noise? And how do we get from pattern-detection to rational or interpretative processes? How is it that humans come to be understanders? Is it possible to harness the power of human understanding and ingenuity?

While I am not directly addressing these questions now, I think my background interests are partly epistemic. It’s difficult to really disentangle the way we make sense of our worlds from the experiences through which we do so.

So, my interests are very big picture. Brain anomalies have always fascinated me, and I think I have chosen useful cases as tools to push our concepts to their limits. Can a singular experience fracture but remain singular? Is it possible to conceive of minds in a way that doesn't require them to always be determinately countable in whole numbers? My dissertation will center around my interpretations of cases. I explain the cases that I'm looking at right now below. In the future, I'm interested in using my research to inform work on autism spectrum condition, synaesthesia, and conscious experience in infancy.

The craniopagus case

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.

Here I am presenting some work on the Craniopagus twin case at a conference at JHU.

THE Split-Brain CASE

This diagram characterizes how I think about two prominent models for the structure of conscious experience in the split brain: Bayne's "switch" model and the "two-streams" model. I want to argue that neither are the end of the story, because of what is presupposed when we individuate conscious experience into "streams." If there is no metaphysical fact of the matter about how many "streams" of conscious experience an organism really has (as I argue), a big-picture framework shift for how to think about 'neurocognitive phenomenology' (the relationship between brain states and felt-experience) is implicated.

We might take the craniopagus case to imply that minds can (in principle) extend beyond themselves, and access experiences that are not rightly called their subject's own. Can we also fragment within ourselves, failing to access experiences that are our own? The "split-brain case" refers to patients whose corpus callosum is severed, disrupting information integration between brain hemispheres. This provides an example of a conscious system whose representational contents become fragmented. I'm interested in the spaces between one-mind and two-mind interpretations of this case. What are we really asking when we ask "what it is like" to be a given organism or subject of experience? Does answering it for the split-brain patient require deciding whether it should be asked once or twice? If we can remain neutral and still interpret the case, what implications does that have for our concept of mindedness and our commitment to whole number countability?