Philosophical analysis compares self-conception in dissociative identity disorder and split-brain cases, highlighting implications.
The split‐brain phenomenon and dissociative identity disorder (DID) have been posed as candidate cases of multiple persons in one body. Philosophers have typically argued that DID subjects are better candidates for multiple personhood because their behavior is more disunified. While a DID subject is intuitively more like multiple persons than is a split‐brain subject, I argue here that the grounds of this intuition do not concern disunified behavior per se. Rather, they concern the differing self‐conceptions of split‐brain subjects on the one hand and at least many DID subjects on the other.
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Elizabeth Schechter (2026) studied this question.
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