No, Split-Brain Patients Do Not Have "Two Conscious Minds in One Skull"

Once again, we have an article in which a neuroscientist misinforms us very badly on the very important topic of split-brain patients. This time it is an article I read recently at the MIT Press Reader. The article is entitled "What Split-Brain Patients Reveal About Consciousness." After discussing facts that contradict his claim, the author (neuroscientist Christof Koch) senselessly refers without any warrant to "two conscious minds in one brain." 

A split-brain patient is typically a patient who underwent an operation severing the corpus callosum, a mass of fiber-like nerves that connect the left hemisphere of the brain and the right hemisphere of the brain . Each of these hemispheres makes up half of the brain. 

Such an operation is typically done to treat very severe and frequent seizures. Below is a Google Gemini infographic on the topic of this operation, called a corpus callosotomy. 

After this operation is performed, a person is left with two disconnected brain halves. If it were true that your brain makes your mind, such an operation should produce two minds in the same individual. But no such thing happens. 

In 2014 the wikipedia.org article on split-brain patients stated the following:

"In general, split-brained patients behave in a coordinated, purposeful and consistent manner, despite the independent, parallel, usually different and occasionally conflicting processing of the same information from the environment by the two disconnected hemispheres...Often, split-brained patients are indistinguishable from normal adults."

Neuroscientist Koch tells us something similar in the middle of his article. He states this:

"Remarkably, once these 'split-brain' patients recover from the surgery, they are inconspicuous in everyday life. They see, hear, and smell as before; they move about, talk, and interact appropriately with others, and their IQ remains unchanged. They have their usual sense of self and report no obvious alteration in their perception of the world — no shrinkage of their visual field, for example. The surgeons who pioneered this operation, including Joseph Bogen at Loma Linda University in Southern California, were puzzled by this lack of clear symptoms." 

Koch then goes into an account claiming that certain things were observed in split-brain patients. It is the kind of account that typically goes on when authors will be making false "two minds in one skull" claims: an account that has no link to particular papers. What we have is flimsy anecdotal evidence making claims about what supposedly happened in a handful of patients. We don't have straightforward accounts of what was observed, but accounts that are littered with dubious or unbelievable interpretations. And we don't have specific mentions of what exactly one particular identified person did. Koch states this:

"If specific data are given to one hemisphere, that information is not shared with its twin on the other side. Furthermore, only one hemisphere, typically the left one, speaks. That is, if the right hemisphere is lost or silenced by anesthesia, the patient can still talk, which is why the left hemisphere is called the dominant hemisphere. The right hemisphere by itself has only limited language comprehension and is mute, though it can grunt and sing. So, when engaged in conversation with a split-brain patient, it is the person’s left hemisphere that is doing all the talking."

Data is given to persons, not to single hemispheres in the brain. And there is never any evidence that learned information is stored in a brain.  The microscopic examination of brain tissue has never revealed the slightest trace of anything anyone learned,  nor have any brain scans. It is not a hemisphere of the brain that speaks or comprehends or sings, but a person who speaks and comprehends and sings. So Koch is writing erroneously when he states "only one hemisphere, typically the left one, speaks"; and he is speaking just as erroneously when he says that the right hemisphere sings; and he is speaking just as erroneously when he claims that the right hemisphere comprehends something.   Both hemispheres of the brain are equally active in normal people and split-brain patients, so it is ridiculous to say of anyone "only one hemisphere, typically the left one, speaks." Brain hemispheres don't speak or sing or comprehend; people speak and sing and comprehend. 

In the paragraph quoted above and his next paragraph, Koch fails to link to any scientific papers, and fails to mention any specific persons who were observed.  He mentions some alleged perceptual difficulties in split-brain patients. Using the phrase "the patient" in an ambiguous way, he claims that "The patient can’t name an object presented in the left visual field because that image is processed by his mute right visual cortex." We can't tell whether he is referring to only one patient or to split-patients in general. Koch also makes this claim:

"If a key is placed in the patient’s right hand, with the hand under the table and out of sight, they will quickly name it. Touch information from their right hand is transmitted to their left hemisphere, where the object is identified, and its label is relayed to the language center. If the key is placed in the person’s left hand, however, the patient is unable to identify it and rambles on."

But what confidence can we have in such claims, as Koch does not mention any source for such generalizations? If there were actually good evidence for such claims, why would Koch have failed to link to the relevant paper reporting this claim? And if a single paper reported seeing such a thing in one person, why should we assume that such a thing is generally true of split-brain patients, without substantial replication of such a result?

We then have this extremely weak piece of evidence, which consists of an anecdote involving one person, and a dubious self-report provided by that person:

"Victor Mark, a neurologist at the University of North Dakota, videotaped an interview with a split-brain patient. When asked how many seizures she had following her operation, her right hand held up two fingers. Her left hand then reached over and forced the fingers on her right hand down. After trying several times to tally her seizures, she paused, then simultaneously raised three fingers with her right hand and one with her left. When Mark pointed out this discrepancy, the patient commented that her left hand frequently did things on its own. A fight ensued between the two, looking like slapstick comedy. Only when the patient grew so frustrated that she burst into tears was I reminded of her sad situation."

As evidence of anything, this is extremely weak. We have no link to the original account. We do not have a link to this video, or a transcript of what the patient said.  Someone (maybe Victor Mark) has claimed that the "patient commented that her left hand frequently did things on its own." But we don't know exactly what the exact words of the patient were, and we don't know whether that was a response to some "leading question" suggesting such a thing. What we have is a second-hand account of someone claiming that a brain-damaged person said a particular thing. That is extremely flimsy as evidence. We don't know what exactly the patient might have meant by saying such a thing; and we can't be sure that any such thing was said as Koch suggests.

Koch then states this, making an outrageous misstatement that has no warrant in  the few anecdotes he has presented:

"Studies with split-brain patients, work for which Sperry was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1981, teach us that cutting the corpus callosum cleaves the cortico-thalamic complex in two but leaves consciousness intact. Both hemispheres are independently capable of conscious experience, one being much more verbal than the other. Whatever the neural correlates of consciousness are, they must exist independently in both hemispheres of the cerebral cortex. Two conscious minds in one skull. "

Two conscious minds in one skull? Nothing that Koch has discussed provides any warrant for such a claim. To the contrary, Koch's previous statement contradicts such a claim.  As I previously mentioned, Koch stated this:

"Remarkably, once these 'split-brain' patients recover from the surgery, they are inconspicuous in everyday life. They see, hear, and smell as before; they move about, talk, and interact appropriately with others, and their IQ remains unchanged. They have their usual sense of self and report no obvious alteration in their perception of the world — no shrinkage of their visual field, for example."

Split-brain patients do not have two conscious minds, but a single unified conscious mind.  The result of split-brain operations dividing a brain into two separated halves is a result the opposite of what we would expect under claims that brains make minds. 

It is almost always the same when neuroscientists or layman  materialists tell this  outrageous falsehood that split-brain patients have two minds. Almost always, they do not link to any relevant papers. Almost always, all that is offered is a few crummy anecdotes, which usually take the form of second-hand evidence or third-hand evidence.  Basically what is going on is a tactic of "give them an inch, and hope they take a mile." Don't fall for such silliness, which is not following decent standards for evidence. 

In Chapter 7 of the book you can read here, we have on page 111 a paper from 1944:

We have a report on two split-brain patients who had their  corpus callosum severed, leaving them with two separated brain hemispheres. The first one (called Case 1) was a married farmer. On page 113 we read that his "corpus callosum was sectioned completely" to treat seizures. This means the fibers connecting his two brain hemispheres were completely severed.  

Here is the page discussing the patient's split-brain operation severing his corpus callosum,  and the patient's status after the operation:

We have no report of anything very unusual. There is nothing to justify any claim of "two conscious minds in one skull." Contrary to Koch's claim about dysfunction in the left hand of people with split brain operations removing the corpus callosum connecting the two brain hemispheres, we are told on the page shown above that this Case 1 split-brain patient with a severed corpus callosum "was able to write with either hand with eyes open or when blindfolded." 

Page 115 suggests that a later examination indicated there were no big problems detected with this split-brain patient:

There is nothing in the account of this paper to give any support for the claim that split-brain patients have "two conscious minds in one skull." We are told that the patient could correctly interpret skin writing, and the wording suggested this skill persisted in both hands. 

The scientific paper "Functional outcomes in adults following corpus callosotomy: A systematic review" (which you can read here) summarizes case studies of split-brain patients who had their corpus callosum severed.  We have a systematic methodology that approaches this topic in a scientific way, unlike Koch's palm-full-of-wobbly-anecdotes affair. The paper summarized 15 different studies reviewing 73 different subjects having the split-brain operation.  18 of these subjects are identified as "Total CC," by which the paper means a total corpus callosotomy completely severing the corpus callosum, leaving two disconnected brain hemispheres.  

We read at the beginning of the paper that "Intellectual quotient is largely preserved post corpus callosotomy of different extents." We later read this: "Three individuals that underwent a total CC [corpus callosotomy] were reported to have maintained their pre-surgical level of intellectual functioning at the time of post-surgical follow-up [[18], [19], [20]], while one individual was reported to show a decline despite a reduction in seizure burden [21] (Table 2)." 

Under the "brains make minds" dogma, we should expect that this "total CC" (corpus callosotomy) involving a complete severing of the corpus callosum should have produced radical intellectual disability or total mental incapacity. But the paper says that "intellectual functioning (refer to Section 3.1), whether divided into verbal and performance based abilities, or a general IQ, appeared to be largely preserved following varying extents of ACC as well as complete CC [corpus callosotomy] , with 27/30 cases across all reviewed studies for GIQ reporting a positive outcome (i.e. stable or improved)."  

Contrary to what we would expect from "brains make minds" claims, the people left with two divided brain hemispheres mostly maintained their intelligence at the same level, as measured on IQ tests. 

We hear no mention at all in the paper of anything like "two conscious minds in one skull" being the result of the corpus callosotomy that splits a brain into two separated hemispheres. The continued repetition of such false claims about split-brain operations by some neuroscientists should cause us to ask: in what other cases do brain experts blatantly misinform us?

A  scientific study published in 2017 set the record straight on split-brain patients. The research was done at the University of Amsterdam by Yair Pinto. A press release entitled “Split Brain Does Not Lead to Split Consciousness” stated, “The researchers behind the study, led by UvA psychologist Yair Pinto, have found strong evidence showing that despite being characterised by little to no communication between the right and left brain hemispheres, split brain does not cause two independent conscious perceivers in one brain.”

The press release states the following: “According to Pinto, the results present clear evidence for unity of consciousness in split-brain patients.” The paper states, “These findings suggest that severing the cortical connections between hemispheres splits visual perception, but does not create two independent conscious perceivers within one brain.”

Searching on Google Scholar for the term "corpus callosotomy" which describes the operation cutting the corpus callosum and separating the brain into two halves, I find several other long systematic reviews and meta-analysis papers, none of which say anything about any "two conscious minds in one skull" effect. Another example is the paper here. Should we believe that all those very many pages discussing the effects of this operation would fail to mention it producing a "two conscious minds in one skull" effect so spectacular and important, if it actually occurred? No, we should not. It's far more credible that neuroscientist Christof Koch simply told us a groundless "old wives' tale" to try to prop up some narrative claiming brains make minds. 

See my post here for a citation of many other scientific articles and scientific papers debunking the groundless myth that split-brain operations produce "two conscious minds in one skull."

Split-brain patients who underwent surgery to split their brains are not the only people with two separated brain hemispheres. Sometimes split-brain subjects arise when the corpus callosum fails to form during the mother's pregnancy. This is called agenesis of the corpus callosum. Making a generalization about people born without a corpus callosum connecting the two sides of the brain, a scientific paper states this:

"The major anatomic feature of Primary AgCC  [agenesis of the corpus callosum] is the absence of the corpus callosum....Primary AgCC has surprisingly limited impact on general cognitive ability. Although the full-scale IQ may be lower than expected based on family history, scores frequently remain within the average range."

We hear no mention of any "two minds in one body" effect. Another paper states this, using the term "agenesis of the corpus callosum" which means a failure of someone's body to ever have  the corpus callosum connecting the two halves of the brain:

"In the 37 adult cases of agenesis of the corpus callosum, 19 (51%) had some degree of intellectual impairment, with the remainder being judged to have a normal IQ. Of those with learning difficulties, two thirds had a mild impairment, and one third had a moderate or severe problem."

So roughly half of these 37 split-brain people had a normal IQ. You can find papers on the condition of being born with no corpus callosum by searching on Google Scholar for papers having the phrase "agenesis of the corpus callosum."  You will not find any discussion of "two minds in one body" in such papers about split-brain subjects, which helps show that the claim of such an effect is groundless.   

Postscript: Making no mention of any such effect as two minds being produced in one skull when there is a lack of a corpus callosum, a medical doctor states this:

"Meantime numerous reports have been published of post-mortem examinations performed by distinguished neurologists on persons who during life showed no signs of mental defect, and yet in whom there was no corpus callosum between the two hemispheres. In each of these subjects also there was no other abnormality present in the brain. Most of these cases were only accidentally discovered in the bodies of persons dying from ordinary diseases, because nothing in their antecedent history suggested the existence of their anatomical peculiarity. Thus Eichler reports the case of a man forty-three years of age, ' a laborer who during life had showed no mental peculiarities, but was a diligent, capable workman, a good husband, and in every respect sober, quiet and well-behaved, and could read and write,'  but in whom the corpus callosum was entirely absent. The eminent neurologist, Professor Erb, in reporting two similar cases, remarks that 'when the brain is otherwise well-developed, with absence of the corpus callosum, there may be no disturbance of motility, coordination, general or special sensibility, reflexes, speech or intelligence.' "

Soon thereafter the doctor notes, "It is these demonstrated truths which, as we have remarked before, prove so embarrassing to those who hold the view that the brain makes the mind." 

More Old Newspaper Stories Relevant to Whether Brains Make Minds

The Chronicling America web site allows you to make a full-text search of many decades of American newspapers. Below are some interesting clips from old newspaper articles, all having some relevance to whether the human brain makes the human mind.  

The news account below is from 1957:

You can read the report here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1957-09-02/ed-1/seq-3/

The account below is from the nineteenth century. We hear of a man who apparently did not suffer intellectual damage from losing half of his brain. 

You can read the 1876 account here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84038123/1876-01-21/ed-1/seq-1/

The newspaper account below is from 1898:

You can read the story here:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85066387/1898-07-03/ed-1/seq-19/

Using an OCR feature of the page above, I get this quotation of its middle part:

"In instances in which it was discovered after death that the connecting bridge between the hemispheres

was entirely wanting, neither derangement in intellect was observed, nor any other abnormality of life in the way of movement or sensation. Thus, in the notable case of Bichat, one of the foremost anatomists of his day, one lobe of his brain was found markedly smaller than the other. He was, in fact, deficient in one-half of his brain, and yet his mental and physical life was in its way notably of a high order. In another case, reported by Cruveilhier, a man died in the hospital at the age of 42 years from heart disease. He exhibited no lack of intelligence, yet after his death it was discovered that his left brain was practically destroyed and replaced by a watery substance. Another case, reported by Andral, was of a man who died at the age of 2S. He had suffered from a fall when three years old, and as a result was paralyzed on his left side. The right half of his brain had practically disappeared, so that the parts below this half constituted the floor for an empty space. Andral says of this

man that he 'had received a good education, and had profited by it; he had a good. memory; his speech was free and easy; his intelligence was such as we should expect to find in an ordinary man.' "

Below is a news story from 1938. We read of a girl "with half a brain" who carried on in a "remarkably satisfactory manner":

You can read the news story here:

https://digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca/islandora/object/uofm%3A1837343?solr%

We have below a report that is not at all what we would expect if the brain produces the mind.  The report is of patients who underwent surgeries that surgically severed the two halves of their brain. But instead of this producing a drastically different mind, or two minds, we have apparently minimal effects:

You can read the story using this link:

https://digitalcollections.lib.umanitoba.ca/islandora/object/uofm%3A2307311?solr%5Bquery

The 1905 newspaper account below tells us of a man who seemed to have suffered little mental damage from losing most of his brain:

You can read the account here:

https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=teh19051201-01.1.8&srpos=6&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-%22half+a+brain%22---------

Here is a news account from 1987 telling us of a big improvement in reading ability after half of a girl's brain was removed. 

You can read the full story here:

https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=jou19870907-01.1.4&srpos=3&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-%22half+her+brain%22---------

A fact contrary to all claims that brains make minds is the fact that very severe pain can be completely cancelled by the use of hypnosis. Below is a news story documenting the effect. 

On pages 27-28 of a book by Dr. James Esdaile he lists a host of dramatic painless surgeries he performed without using anesthesia, but only hypnosis on patients. The list includes about 20 amputations, and 200 removals of scrotal tumors ranging from 10 pounds in weight to more than 100 pounds in weight. Another book on this topic by Esdaile can be read here. 

In the following quote from a nineteenth century work, we learn of a great irony: that physicians took up a chemical method of anesthesia, one which would often kill people, rather than using hypnotic methods of anesthesia that were proving very safe and effective:

"In Dr. Brown Sequard's lectures upon 'Nervous Force,' delivered in Boston in 1874, he speaks of this form of anaesthesia as follows : 

'As regards the power of producing anaesthesia, it seems to me unfortunate that the discovery of ether was made just when it was. It was, as you well know, in 1846 or 1847 that the use of ether as an anaesthetic was begun. It started from this city (Boston). At that time in England, Dr. Forbes was trying to show from facts observed in England, and especially in India, from the practice of Dr. Esdaile, that something which was called Mesmerism, but which, after all, was nothing but a peculiar state of somnambulism induced in patients, gave to them the idea that they were deprived of feeling ; so that they were in reality under the influence of their imagination, and operations were performed that were quite painless. I say that it was a pity that ether was introduced just then, as it prevented the progress of our knowledge as to this method of producing anaesthesia. My friend Dr. Broca took it up in 1857-8 and pushed it very far; and for a time it was the fashion in Paris to have amputations performed after having been anaesthetized by the influence of Braidism or Hypnotism. A great many operations were performed in that way that were quite painless. But it was a process that was long and tedious, and surgeons were in a hurry and gave it up. I regret it very much, as there has never been a case of death from that method of producing anesthesia, while you well know that a great many cases of death have been produced by other methods.' "

Integrated Information Theory's Tangled Metaphysics Does Nothing to Explain Consciousness

A theory called "integrated information theory" purports to be a theory of consciousness. We should always be suspicious of any theory claiming to be a "theory of consciousness."  "Consciousness" is the most reductive term you could use to describe human minds and human mental experience.  A person trying to explain  a human mind by advancing what he calls a "theory of consciousness" is rather like a person trying to explain planet Earth by advancing what he calls a "theory of roundness." Just as roundness is only one aspect of planet Earth,  consciousness is only one aspect of the human mind and human mental experience. What we need is not a "theory of consciousness" but something very much harder to create: a theory of mentality that includes all of the main aspects of human mentality (including consciousness, comprehension, thinking, memory, imagination and creativity). 

When I go a website devoted to selling integrated information theory (www.integratedinformationtheory.org), I get a home page that has at its first link a link to a paper behind a paywall. But the second link is to a paper that anyone can read. Let's take a close look at that paper, entitled, "From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0," and authored by Masafumi Oizumi, Larissa Albantakis, and Giulio Tononi . 

The abstract of the paper should leave us very discouraged about integrated information theory:

"This paper presents Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of consciousness 3.0, which incorporates several advances over previous formulations. IIT starts from phenomenological axioms: information says that each experience is specific – it is what it is by how it differs from alternative experiences; integration says that it is unified – irreducible to non-interdependent components; exclusion says that it has unique borders and a particular spatio-temporal grain. These axioms are formalized into postulates that prescribe how physical mechanisms, such as neurons or logic gates, must be configured to generate experience (phenomenology). The postulates are used to define intrinsic information as 'differences that make a difference' within a system, and integrated information as information specified by a whole that cannot be reduced to that specified by its parts. By applying the postulates both at the level of individual mechanisms and at the level of systems of mechanisms, IIT arrives at an identity: an experience is a maximally irreducible conceptual structure (MICS, a constellation of concepts in qualia space), and the set of elements that generates it constitutes a complex. According to IIT, a MICS specifies the quality of an experience and integrated information ΦMax its quantity. From the theory follow several results, including: a system of mechanisms may condense into a major complex and non-overlapping minor complexes; the concepts that specify the quality of an experience are always about the complex itself and relate only indirectly to the external environment; anatomical connectivity influences complexes and associated MICS; a complex can generate a MICS even if its elements are inactive; simple systems can be minimally conscious; complicated systems can be unconscious; there can be true 'zombies' – unconscious feed-forward systems that are functionally equivalent to conscious complexes."

We have heard in this abstract no sign that any compelling reasoning will appear in the paper. To the contrary, we have got two signals that the paper will be pushing nonsense. The first signal is the  absurd insinuation that logic gates (a low-level building block of a digital system) can be somehow configured to generate conscious experience.  The second signal is the claim that "simple systems can be minimally conscious."  There are minimally conscious organisms on our planet, but none of them are simple systems. When we consider all of the complexity of its cells, each as complex as a factory, we should realize that even the simplest maybe-barely-conscious ant is not at all a simple system. 

After the paper asks a bunch of questions, in the section entitled "Models" we read this: "The main tenets of IIT can be presented as a set of phenomenological axioms, ontological postulates, and identities." That sounds like metaphysics, not anything like a scientific theory. 

After the paper defines an "axiom" as a self-evident truth, we read some "axiom" defined by the paper.  One of these "axioms" is listed as follows:

"COMPOSITION: Consciousness is compositional (structured): each experience consists of multiple aspects in various combinations. Within the same experience, one can see, for example, left and right, red and blue, a triangle and a square, a red triangle on the left, a blue square on the right, and so on."

It is not true that "each experience consists of  multiple aspects in various combinations," although many experiences do consist of such a thing. A person can have a simple experience consisting of a single aspect. For example, you may lie on a beach looking up at a clear blue sky, while thinking of nothing. Such consciousness has only one aspect: your perception of the blueness above you.  Similarly, while waiting to fall asleep at night with your eyes closed, you may perceive nothing and be thinking of nothing.  Such an experience does not consist of  "multiple aspects in various combinations."

We then read this "axiom":

"INFORMATION: Consciousness is informative: each experience differs in its particular way from other possible experiences. Thus, an experience of pure darkness is what it is by differing, in its particular way, from an immense number of other possible experiences. A small subset of these possible experiences includes, for example, all the frames of all possible movies." 

No, it is not correct that "consciousness is informative." Something is informative if it supplies information.  Consciousness by itself does not supply information. A conscious person may or not be involved in supplying information.  

We then read this "axiom":

"INTEGRATION: Consciousness is integrated: each experience is (strongly) irreducible to non-interdependent components. Thus, experiencing the word 'SONO' written in the middle of a blank page is irreducible to an experience of the word 'SO' at the right border of a half-page, plus an experience of the word 'NO' on the left border of another half page – the experience is whole. Similarly, seeing a red triangle is irreducible to seeing a triangle but no red color, plus a red patch but no triangle."

The word "integrated" means "with various parts or aspects linked or coordinated."  The human mind may be thought of as being integrated (for example, consciousness is linked with memory and understanding). But mere consciousness is not intrinsically integrated. At some moment I may be aware of the blue sky ahead of me, but such awareness does not consist of multiple parts.  An experience does not have to consist of multiple parts.  As for the logic about "SONO" written on a blank page, of course that is "irreducible to an experience of the word 'SO' at the right border of a half-page, plus an experience of the word 'NO' on the left border of another half page," because that would give you "NOSO" not "SONO."  

So we have a very shaky foundation. We have three supposedly "self-evident axioms" that are not actually self-evident at all. Next we have a section called "Mechanisms" that suddenly starts dogmatizing about three characteristics that would be possessed by a "mechanism that can contribute to consciousness."  The results sounds like extremely dubious metaphysics.  No foundation has been laid establishing that there can be any such thing as a "mechanism that can contribute to consciousness."  

To the contrary, we can imagine no physical "mechanism that can contribute to consciousness."  Consciousness is an immaterial thing, and mechanisms are material things. We can get no plausible idea of how it can be that material things or material mechanisms could "contribute to consciousness."  If I have one neuron existing by itself, there is no reason why such a neuron should "contribute to consciousness." If I have 100 billion neurons that are all connected, there is no reason why such an arrangement should "contribute to consciousness."  If we think that connected neurons should somehow give rise to consciousness, that is only because we have been brainwashed into thinking such a thing by endless repetitions of such a groundless claim.  Similarly, if we had been endlessly told all our lives that consciousness was caused by electron collisions, then we might think that some glass jar with lots of colliding electrons would produce a conscious mind. 

We then have in the paper (under a title of "Systems of Mechanisms") three paragraphs making dogmatic claims such as the claim that "a set of elements can be conscious only if its mechanisms specify a conceptual structure that is irreducible to non-interdependent components (strong integration)." We are deeply mired now in arbitrary metaphysics, as we would be if we were reading a work of G.W. Hegel. Nothing has been done to show that "a set of elements can be conscious," so the writers have no business making such claims.  Organisms are not correctly described as "a set of elements." 

A little later in Box 1 of the paper we have a glossary, which defines more than thirty terms that will be used in the paper.  The glossary is very dense metaphysical gobbeldygook.  An example is the term "cause-effect repertoire" which is defined with this gibberish  definition: "The probability distribution of potential past and future states of a system as constrained by a mechanism in its current state." 

The paper then has a whole bunch of strange diagrams that have many circles, circles within circles, diagram, arrows pointing from one circle to another, and so forth. None of this does anything to clarify how humans have consciousness. 

Below (in italics) are some of the dubious metaphysical claims we read in the paper:

• "Recall that IIT's information postulate is based on the intuition that, for something to exist, it must make a difference. By extension, something exists all the more, the more of a difference it makes." No, it is not true that for something to exist, it must make a difference. Dust clouds in interstellar space exist, and rocks in the center of distant planets exist, without making any difference. And something does not exist "all the more" depending on the difference it makes. A person with no influence on the world exists just as much as some influential person. 
• "The integration postulate further requires that, for a whole to exist, it must make a difference above and beyond its partition, i.e. it must be irreducible." No, a whole does not have to be irreducible. A whole consisting of three people can be reduced to three individuals, and a molecule consisting of five atoms can be broken up and reduced to its individual atoms. 
• "Complexes cannot overlap and at each point in time, an element/mechanism can belong to one complex only." No, complexes can overlap; for example, the brain complex overlaps with the circulatory system in the body. And an element can belong to more than one complex. A blood vessel in the brain belongs to both the brain system and the circulatory system.  
• "The exclusion postulate at the level of systems of mechanisms says that only a conceptual structure that is maximally irreducible can give rise to consciousness – other constellations generated by overlapping elements are excluded."  Since humans have no understanding at all of how any structure can give rise to consciousness, it is unwarranted to be making some claim with the form "only X can give rise to consciousness."  Describing such a claim as a postulate (an assumption) indicates its weakness. 
•  "The exclusion postulate requires, first, that only one cause exists. This requirement represents a causal version of Occam's razor, saying in essence that 'causes should not be multiplied beyond necessity', i.e. that causal superposition is not allowed." Occam's razor is not the principle that something cannot have multiple causes. It is the principle that in general we should  prefer a simpler explanation that requires postulating fewer things in order to explain something.  Many things do have multiple causes, and it is dead wrong to claim that causal superposition (assuming multiple causes of a single effect) is not allowed. Very many things do have multiple causes. 
• "Simple systems can be conscious: a minimally conscious photodiode."  This is a followed by text claiming that a tiny unit called a photodiode is minimally conscious.  Since a modern digital camera contains very many such photodiodes (one for each pixel captured), integrated information theory would seem to predict that every digital camera is substantially conscious -- an idea that is extremely nonsensical.  

No, this is not conscious

Later in the article we have an inaccurate appeal to one of the phoniest myths of neuroscientists: the claim that split brain patients have two different minds. We read this:

"Under special circumstances, such as after split brain surgery, the main complex may split into two main complexes, both having high ΦMax. There is solid evidence that in such cases consciousness itself splits in two individual consciousnesses that are unaware of each other."  

No such evidence exists. A similar bogus claim is made in another article on integrated information theory appearing on the www.integratedinformation.org site (one authored by Giulio Tononi, one of the three authors mentioned above): "It is well established that, after the complete section of the corpus callosum—the roughly 200 million fibers that connect the cortices of the two hemispheres—consciousness is split in two: there are two separate 'flows' of experience, one associated with the left hemisphere and one with the right hemispheres." That claim is untrue. To the contrary, in 2014 the wikipedia.org article on split-brain patients stated the following:

"In general, split-brained patients behave in a coordinated, purposeful and consistent manner, despite the independent, parallel, usually different and occasionally conflicting processing of the same information from the environment by the two disconnected hemispheres...Often, split-brained patients are indistinguishable from normal adults."

In the video here we see a split-brain patient who seems like a pretty normal person, not at all someone with “two minds." And at the beginning of the video here the same patient says that after such a split-brain operation “you don't notice it” and that you don't feel any different than you did before – hardly what someone would say if the operation had produced “two minds” in someone. And the video here about a person with a split brain from birth shows us what is clearly someone with one mind, not two. 

A  scientific study published in 2017 set the record straight on split-brain patients. The research was done at the University of Amsterdam by Yair Pinto. A press release entitled “Split Brain Does Not Lead to Split Consciousness” stated, “The researchers behind the study, led by UvA psychologist Yair Pinto, have found strong evidence showing that despite being characterised by little to no communication between the right and left brain hemispheres, split brain does not cause two independent conscious perceivers in one brain.”

The press release states the following: “According to Pinto, the results present clear evidence for unity of consciousness in split-brain patients.” The paper states, “These findings suggest that severing the cortical connections between hemispheres splits visual perception, but does not create two independent conscious perceivers within one brain.”  The recent article here in Psychology Today describes the bizarre experiment that was used to make the groundless claim that split-brain patients have two minds. It was some experiment based only on visual perception, using some strange experimental setup unlike anyone normally encounters. The article shreds to pieces claims that results from such an experiment show that split-brain patients have two minds:

"Not so fast. There are several reasons to question the conclusions Sperry, Gazzaniga, and others sought to draw. First, both split-brain patients and people closest to them report that no major changes in the person have occurred after the surgery. When you communicate with the patient, you never get the sense that the there are now different people living in the patient's head.

This would be very puzzling if the mind was really split. Currently, you are the only conscious person in your neocortex. You consciously perceive your entire visual field, and you control your whole body. However, if your mind splits, this would dramatically change. You would become two people: 'lefty' and 'righty.' 'Lefty' would only see what is in the right visual field and control the right side of the body while 'righty' would see what’s in the left visual field and control the left side of the body. Both 'lefty' and 'righty' would be half-blind and half-paralyzed. It would seem to each of them that another person is in charge of half of the body.

Yet, patients never indicate that it feels as though someone else is controlling half of the body. The patients’ loved ones don’t report noticing a dramatic change in the person after the surgery either. Could we all — patients themselves, their family members, and neutral observers — miss the signs that a single person has been replaced by two people? If you suddenly lost control of half of your body, could you fail to notice? Could you fail to notice if the two halves of your spouse’s or child’s body are controlled by two different minds?"

A 2020 paper states this about split-brain patientis: " Apart from a number of anecdotal incidents in the subacute phase following the surgery, these patients seem to behave in a socially ordinary manner and they report feeling unchanged after the operation (Bogen, Fisher, & Vogel, 1965; Pinto et al., 2017a; R. W. Sperry, 1968; R. Sperry, 1984)."  Misleading statements by neuroscientists are extremely common, and claims by some of them that normal-speaking and normal-acting split-brain patients have two minds (based merely on differing results produced in very weird artificial experimental setups not like real-world cases) is one of the most egregious examples of inaccurate speech by neuroscientists. 

What we have in the "From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0" paper is mainly metaphysics following the opague oracular style of Hegel and Heidegger, often careless and poorly reasoned metaphysics. The claim often made that integrated information theory is a "scientific theory of consciousness" is untrue. Integrated information theory is a very errant metaphysical theory that includes a few appeals to scientific observations, to give a little scientific flavor to its gibberish gobbledygook.  The most important reference the theory makes to an alleged scientific observation is a bogus claim that splitting a brain by severing the corpus callosum produces two  minds, something that has never actually been observed, with the actual observations telling us that no such thing occurs. 

Besides inaccurately predicting that split-brain patients should have two minds, integrated information theory inaccurately predicts that "widespread lesions" of the cortex should cause unconsciousness. In the scholarpedia.org article on the theory, Giulio Tononi states this: 

"IT provides a principled and parsimonious way to account for why certain brain regions appear to be essential for our consciousness while others do not. For example, widespread lesions of the cerebral cortex lead to loss of consciousness, and local lesions or stimulations of various cortical areas and tracts can affect its content (for example, the experience of color)."

To the contrary, it is a fact that many epileptic patients with severe seizures underwent hemispherectomy operations in which half of the brain (including half of the cortex) was removed, without any major effect on either consciousness or intelligence.  Many of John's Lorber's patients with good intelligence and normal consciousness had lost most of their cortex.  A French person who held a job as a civil servant was found to have "little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue." In the paper here we read on page 1 of a case reported by Martel in 1823 of a boy who after age five lost all of his senses except hearing, and became bed-confined. Until death he 'seemed mentally unimpaired.'  But after he died, an autopsy was done which found that apart from “residues of meninges" there was "no trace of a brain" found inside the skull. This was good consciousness, with little or no cortex. In the same paper we read of a person who had a normal life despite having "very little cortex"  because of hydrocephalus in which brain tissue is replaced by fluid:

"A man was examined because of his headache, and to his physicians' surprise, he had an 'incredibly large' hydrocephalus. Villinger, the director of the Cognitive Neurology Department, stated that this man had 'almost no brain,' only 'a very thin layer of cortical tissue.' This man led an unremarkable life, and his hydrocephalus was only discovered by chance (Hasler, 2016, p. 18)"

Postscript:  Below is a quote from a scientific paper "The integrated information theory of

consciousness: A case of mistaken identity," a paper that refers to the theory's "failure to provide

a credible account of consciousness"::

"Giulio Tononi’s integrated information theory (IIT) proposes explaining consciousness by

directly identifying it with integrated information. We examine the construct validity of

IIT’s measure of consciousness, phi (Φ), by analyzing its formal properties, its relation to

key aspects of consciousness, and its co-variation with relevant empirical circumstances.

Our analysis shows that IIT’s identification of consciousness with the causal efficacy with

which differentiated networks accomplish global information transfer (which is what Φ in

fact measures) is mistaken. This misidentification has the consequence of requiring the attribution of consciousness to a range of natural systems and artifacts that include, but are not

limited to, large-scale electrical power grids, gene-regulation networks, some electronic circuit

boards, and social networks. Instead of treating this consequence of the theory as a disconfirmation, IIT embraces it. By regarding these systems as bearers of consciousness ex hypothesi,

IIT is led toward the orbit of panpsychist ideation. This departure from science as we know it

can be avoided by recognizing the functional misattribution at the heart of IIT’s identity

claim."

In the paper "On the axiomatic foundations of the integrated information theory of consciousness" a philosopher makes criticism similar to some of mine above, saying that the theory's "axioms" are invalid:

" I then examine the five axioms of IIT, asking: what each axiom means, whether it is indeed axiomatic and whether it could constrain a theory of consciousness. I argue that none of the five alleged axioms is able to play the role that is required of it, either because it fails to qualify as axiomatic or because it fails to impose a substantive constraint on a theory of consciousness."