I just found this article titled, “Could Dissociative Identity Disorder Explain Life, the Universe and Everything?” that discusses a 2018 paper about how DID, Dissociative Identity Disorder, may offer explanations for consciousness. It’s lovely. It’s brief. It raised some questions with me. For example, the first paragraph was practically raving about how researchers using fMRI’s discovered that a sighted person experiencing DID switched out with a blind alter, and the scans revealed a brain map confirm the visual centers of the brain were not active. The eyes worked. I assume the brain had normal size occipital lobes. (It is my understanding, someone blind from birth would have smaller, or nonexistent occipital lobes, as the other senses, like hearing, would have been enlarged to compensate.)
Why am I curious about that? Well, I have been reading about DID back when it was Multiple Personality Disorder. One of the things that interested me the most was that when personalities switched out, weird things happened. A person who didn’t need glasses switched out with someone who did. Their eyesight was measured- the new personality needed glasses. The other personality didn’t and would take off the glasses. There were personalities that diabetes, and host didn’t, and you gave the one insulin and the personality switched to someone not needing insulin, they suddenly found themselves in crisis. I am also sure I read that anesthesiologist don’t like working on folks with DID because if you go to knock out an adult and a child personality switched in, you have a problem. Or if it was a child and adult switched in, they didn’t give them enough gas and they woke up during the surgery.
So, is my memory faulty? Did none of that stuff really get measured and it was just anecdotal? I would think if any of the above artifacts were witnessed by medical professional, it would be accepted truth and you don’t have to have a fMRI scan to confirm it. Like the placebo, you don’t need an fMRI scan to know it is a real thing. I am sure drug companies would like to dispense with triple blind studies.
The hard problem of consciousness and the combination problem have been a pain in the ass for the materialists. In Michael S. Gazzaniga book, ‘Who’s in Charge,’ he was very clear that ultimately it’s all the brain all the time. I love the book, I am just not a materialist at heart. I especially like the studies he discusses on the people who had the corpus callosum removed and the two hemispheres were disconnected, and…
