In order to resolve these two objections, I have created a revised psychological continuity theory that builds on the memory theory and on Derek Parfit’s continuity theory. Parfit sees psychological continuity as the chain of person stages at a moment in time. He believes that two person stages are connected if they have enough overlap of psychologies connecting person stage A to person stage B. Therefore, X and Y will be psychologically continuous if Y is the end of a chain of person stages that begins with X. Parfit’s argument builds on Locke’s because the overlapping psychologies account for a person’s beliefs, desires, experiences, character traits, etc. This extends personal identity to more than memory, to accommodate for lapses in memory
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A mad scientist conducts a hemispherectomy on you and your friend (they cut the brain along the corpus callosum -- the wire of nerves the connects the left and right brains). He then fuses your left brain and your friends right brain together to create one new brain. Since your memories and psychological features exist in both the left and right side of the brain, this new being could be psychologically continuous with both you and your friend – but this would be absurd. So, who are you then: you, your friend, a new person, or no one at all? The revised psychological theory states that you would become a new person. This is because your right and left-brain control opposite sides of the body but without the corpus callosum cannot communicate between the two parts. Your left brain can provide information in a form that the right brain can understand. Although, what happens is once the left brain gives the information to the right brain, the right brain has to create stories to explain past actions to its current self, these stories are usually incorrect. So, when the brains are fused, the psychological continuity breaks since half of the brain is making incorrect stories to explain the memories of the other half. In this case, personal identity would not continue and instead a new person would be created, separate from you and your friend. More research into brain fusion could change the outcome of this
A mad scientist conducts a hemispherectomy on you and your friend (they cut the brain along the corpus callosum -- the wire of nerves the connects the left and right brains). He then fuses your left brain and your friends right brain together to create one new brain. Since your memories and psychological features exist in both the left and right side of the brain, this new being could be psychologically continuous with both you and your friend – but this would be absurd. So, who are you then: you, your friend, a new person, or no one at all? The revised psychological theory states that you would become a new person. This is because your right and left-brain control opposite sides of the body but without the corpus callosum cannot communicate between the two parts. Your left brain can provide information in a form that the right brain can understand. Although, what happens is once the left brain gives the information to the right brain, the right brain has to create stories to explain past actions to its current self, these stories are usually incorrect. So, when the brains are fused, the psychological continuity breaks since half of the brain is making incorrect stories to explain the memories of the other half. In this case, personal identity would not continue and instead a new person would be created, separate from you and your friend. More research into brain fusion could change the outcome of this