Self-Consciousness and "Split" Brains - The Minds' I - Grand Format

The largest pathway in the human brain connects the two cerebral hemispheres. In the second half of the twentieth century, a number of people had this pathway cut through as a treatment for epilepsy. After being surgically separated in this way, the two hemispheres begin to operate unusually independently in the realm of thought, action, and conscious experience-almost as if each hemisphere had a mind of its own.
The puzzle of the so-called "split-brain phenomenon" is this. On the one hand, under experimental conditions, split-brain subjects often act as though they were animated by two sources of conscious thought and agency. This is the duality intuition : that a split-brain human being is composed of two psychological beings. On the other hand, a split-brain subject nonetheless seems in an important sense to be one of us-rather than two people sharing one body.
This is the unity intuition : that a split-brain subject is one person. Elizabeth Schechter argues that both intuitions are right. There are in fact two minds, subjects of experience, and intentional agents inside each split-brain person. Key to reconciling these intuitions are facts about the way self-consciousness operates in split-brain subjects—and in us all.