Thanks for writing this up. As someone who was not aware of the eye thing I think it's a good illustration of the level that the Zizians are on, i.e. misunderstanding key important facts about the neurology that is central to their worldview.
My model of double-hemisphere stuff, DID, tulpas, and the like is somewhat null-hypothesis-ish. The strongest version is something like this:
At the upper levels of predictive coding, the brain keeps track of really abstract things about yourself. Think "ego" "self-conception" or "narrative about yourself". This is normally a model of your own personality traits, which may be more or less accurate. But there's no particular reason why you couldn't build a strong self-narrative of having two personalities, a sub-personality, or more. If you model yourself as having two personalities who can't access each other's memories, then maybe you actually just won't perform the query-key lookups to access the memories.
Like I said, this doesn't rule out a large amount of probability mass, but it does explain some things, fit in with my other views, and hopefully if someone has had/been close to experiences kinda like DID or zizianism or tulpas, it provides a less horrifying way of thinking about them. Some of the reports in this area are a bit infohazardous, and I think this null model at least partially defuses those infohazard.
As someone who was not aware of the eye thing I think it's a good illustration of the level that the Zizians are on, i.e. misunderstanding key important facts about the neurology that is central to their worldview.
Is worth noting that the only evidence we have that this is how unihemispheric sleep gets created comes from Zizian.info which critical of Ziz. Slimepriestess claimed in the interview with Ken that the author just made up the exercise independently.
My model of double-hemisphere stuff, DID, tulpas, and the like is somewhat null-hypothesis-ish. The strongest version is something like this:
When dealing with a complex phenomena, the idea of "I'll just use the naive null hypothesis" generally does not give you a good understanding of the phenomena. It's like the theories the Greek had of how various things work that ignore a lot of the actual phenomena.
I think you are wrong if you see self-conception as independent of memories. If you take Steve Andreas model laid out in Transform Your Self, a self-concept like "I'm a kind person" is inherently build-up of memories of remembering yourself as a kind person.
With Dissociative Identity Disorder that gets caused by trauma, the traumatic memories might be too much to easily integrated into the existing self concept, so there's a need for a new personality to house those memories.
I think it's interesting how cults' self-imposed isolation from outside memespace inverts their error-correcting mechanisms. Their incorrect beliefs conflict with reality. Instead of admitting wrongness, they double-down and tighten their self-imposed isolation.
This feedback loop is why independently-spawned cults with different professed beliefs converge to similar phenotypes. For example, they get confused and lash out when you say something like "You are factually incorrect, but I'm going to be nice to you out of a sense of basic decency", because they've doubled-down on "outsiders are the enemy" so many times.
It makes me wonder why the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) didn't implode during their early formation. If cults self-destruct because they have an autoimmune reaction to outside ideas, then I wonder if the greatest benefit of LDS missionary service isn't recruiting new members, but instead dirtying their children with outside memespace to prevent an autoimmune reaction when they mature.
I've long had a hobby-level interest in the sociology of religion. It helps understand humans to understand this "human universal" process.
Also it might help one think clearly-or-better about theological or philosophic ideas if you can detangle the metaphysical claims and insights that specific culturally isolated groups had uniquely vs independently (and then correlate "which groups had which ideas" together with "which groups had which sociological features").
In the sociology of religion, some practitioners use "cult" to mark "a religion that is nonstandard for its geographic region and historical period". So "Hinduism" in 1970s San Francisco is (arguably (by this definition)) "a cult" while a nominally identical "Hinduism" in India in the 1970s is "traditional" and "not a cult". By this metric, anything other than Mormonism is "a cult" in Utah.
If you really want to be "traditional" (rather than "culty" or "unchurched"), and move to Utah, arguably you should convert to Mormonism?! Arguably?
(I've looked into the evidence on "the churched having better life outcomes vs the unchurched" and that sociological evidence seems to mostly hold up, even for really crazy and bad-seeming-from-outside religions. It isn't a certain and 100% reliable claim, but a pretty good model of this stuff is that you'll have better health, financial, and educational outcomes from being churched almost no matter what the doctrines are simply because social cohesion is just that good.)
A key point in Mormon cultural evolution was that, in 1890, the leaders of Mormonism were "spoken to by God" and the entire church gave up on polygamy, then in 1896 Utah joined the United States of America with reasonably harmonious marriage laws (with polygamy banned in the old and new states both).
That is a reasonably good proxy for "the historical period and geographic region where Mormonism stopped being a cult".
Modern Mormons can somewhat safely use "being called polygamists" as a proxy for their critic being mindlessly downstream of standard boring random "anti-Mormon sentiment" because that criticism hasn't hasn't even been true for well over a century.
(A wrinkle here: I suspect based on mechanistic priors that there might have some some schistmatic movements to retain polygamy in some less connected subgroups? So sectarian "Mormonisms" might exist out in the boonies in various places that still have polygamy in practice? The "polygamy thing" is the "older and weirder" version. Usually, in the overall sociology of schismatic movements, such movements start with religious innovation on a generational time scale from the top down (as elite desires for doctrines shift over the decades), and then some of the lower reaches of the religion reject the change and "keep to the old ways" by formally schisming (with a new entrepreneurial leadership structure but "old seeming" doctrines) the claims on both sides to be "the real thing". Giving up on polygamy would, logically, have been a natural juncture point for schisms.)
It makes me wonder why the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) didn't implode during their early formation.
This was a very reasonable thought! In fact, it almost kind of happened!
The "Battle Near Blue River" of 1833 was an early scuffle (3 dead, 1 of whom was Mormon) that gained enough mythic weight to have a name like that.
In 1838 the first "Mormon War" (composed of multiple battles) occurred in Missouri.
The second Mormon War was fought from 1844-1846 proximate to Nauvoo, Illinois.
Prior to these, there were was conflict in Ohio and farther back also in New York State that caused emigration "to the west" each time they occurred, but these early cycles of "tribo-cultural hostility" (to make up a word off the top of my head) just weren't called "wars" with the same mythic model...
The violent death of the founder in Carthage, Illinois, is arguably "OG Mormonism imploding and a new thing arising from the ashes" and that's when Brigham Young became the official leader of the central cluster of Mormons and moved to Utah.
(I didn't realize this until I read this wikipedia article just now, but since Joseph Smith was technically running for President at the the time of his killing by an angry mob, he might be the first candidate for POTUS to be assassinated!)
And even after that, the Mormons kept having "wars" but then (mostly) with the native people in Utah, with the last "War" running from 1865-1872, leading to the deaths of ~140 Black Hawks and ~70 Mormons.
If I had infinite research budget and a time travel machine, one of the things I'd be interested in doing is scrying the period from 1872 to 1896, when "the culty era of Mormonism" seemed to end "somehow" and presumably "for reasons"?
This period seems to have somehow had the opposite of the evaporative cooling of group beliefs!
Sociologists of religion have multiple competing theories for the mechanism when this sort of thing happens (though I don't know if any of the mechanisms apply to Mormonism specifically in the era when it seems to have chilled out a lot).
One of the proposed mechanisms is (paraphrasing) "religious lifestyles cause child raising to work BETTER, and the success of later generations is because of the religious doctrines being 'good', but then this success causes the kids to want to change the doctrines in various ways (since they become elite, and start wanting what elites normally want (like different status goods, less veneration of poverty and charity and dancing with snakes and so on, and more ability to profitably affiliate with business partners outside of the religion)) and that causes the top-down changes and the schism-from-below".
In the 1980s Bainbridge & Stark (who I tend to use as my default general model in the absence of better and more local models) proposed an alternative theory as part of a larger book that claims (paraphrasing again) "maybe the people who need crazy religions are just unusually weird humans, and maybe their kids get 'better', and less needful of a weird religion, because of simple regression to the mean".
Of course, it could logically be a bit of both... plus other factors. Its hard to say in general :-)
Everton, in 2005, tried to replicate and re-test the "regression to the mean" theory with the alternative "actually, good doctrines are good" theory as something that could hypothetically show up in the data based on how the data was sampled and analyzed, and found some evidence that sorta agrees with regression, and some evidence that maybe "(Conservative?) Protestantism" has some extra mojo of some kind that actually causes better intergenerational outcomes than you'd expect just from regression to the mean? Basically he got "its probably complicated". Everton's paper is here.
One possible line to draw between "religions" and "cults" is how much they depend on recruiting new people / how much they burn out the existing ones. Whether they can live with a stable population -- of course, many religions would be happy to take more converts, but what happens when they can't, and they need to spend a few decades with the existing ones (and their children) only -- or whether people are so damaged by being in the group that recruiting new ones and discarding the old ones is necessary for the group to function.
For example, you can have stable Catholic or Protestant populations. But Scientology depends on new people giving all their money to the group, then working hard for a few years until they get burned out, and when they become a burden on the group and their performance statistics become bad and no amount of punishment can fix that, they get kicked out. So an isolated population of Scientologists on some island would soon run out of money, and then gradually also run out of people.
I think the early Mormons had a lot of dynamic like "the old high-status guys take many young wives; the young incel boys get a lot of abuse in hope that they will rebel which will give the group a pretext for kicking them out". Monogamy stabilized this a lot, but the question is what exactly caused the old high-status guys to change the rules. Did the young guys who stayed in the group long enough remember how bad it was, and instead of enjoying that it's finally their turn, they decided to change the rule? Or was it something else?
(Also, from this perspective, Zizians without new recruits would run out of members in a decade.)
I've followed this line of thinking a bit. As near as I can tell, the logic of "evolutionary memetics" suggests that parent-to-child belief transmission should face the same selective pressures as parent-to-child gene transmission.
Indeed, if you go hunting around, it turns out that there are a lot of old religions whose doctrines simply include the claim that it is impossible for outsiders to join the religion, and pointless to spread it, since the theology itself suggests that you can only be born into it. This is, plausibly, a way for the memes to make the hosts not waste energy on anything except transmission to progeny.
Quite a few "Hinduisms" work this way, if you squint, although there have often been religious entrepreneurs who were willing to pretend that foreigner/outsiders LARPing as new members of their old religion might perhaps at least get those foreigners the ability to be reincarnated as proper real Hindus. Once communication and resources are flowing, further evangelism and memetic innovation can get pretty weird pretty fast.
Still, for myself, as someone with no coherent familial religious inputs (all four grandparents had wildly different beliefs, as did both parents) I generally up-weight the likelihood that particular doctrines are healthy based on the degree to which their source community rejects evangelism. If two or three non-evangelical religions have convergently evolved the same pragmatic ideas (norms or educational processes or visualization techniques or whatever), then the ideas are plausibly worthy of a second look and some practical experiments <3
To clarify, I don't see evangelism as a problem per se, but I see it as a problem when the community needs evangelism to survive -- e.g. because the existing members get burned out and are discarded.
A difference between a symbiont and a predator, kind of.
That makes sense as a "reasonable take", but having thought about this for a long time from an "evolutionary systems" perspective, I think that any memeplex-or-geneplex which is evangelical (not based on parent-to-child transmission) is intrinsically suspicious in the same way that we call genetic material that goes parent-to-child "the genome" and we call genetic material that goes peer-to-peer "a virus".
Among the subtype of "virus that preys on bacteria" (called "bacteriophage" or just "phages") there is a thing called a "prophage" which integrates into a host, and then rides parent-to-child for many generations, and then (usually triggered by stress responses (and radiation is a pretty reliable stressor to induce this in a lab)), the prophage causes descendant bacteria to re-express the "viral form" of the prophage, and explode in a suicidal/evangelical frenzy.
The only hope that most hosts infected by prophages have is for the full genome of the infection to mutate in a small number of generations, so that the "lytic machinery" (that causes suicidal evangelism) breaks before a trigger occurs, so that when the trigger does happen, the host survives, while keeping the symbiotic genes.
(((This is probably THE KEY SOURCE of nearly ALL non-trivial upgrades to large genomes with slow evolutionary cycles. For example, something vaguely similar probably is the source of the "V(D)J Combinatorial Immune System" that has existed in our ancestors all the way back to the common ancestor of "humans and sharks but not lampreys". The VDJ system uses genes with a clear viral provenance to construct antibodies, and so it is reasonable to suppose that (1) some lamprey-like-thing was infected with a virus, (2) the virus integrated with the genome for a few generations and then left over and over, (3) the virus evolved a helpful way of fighting off other parasites (possibly because "having a proto-mouth with a proto-jaw and preying on lots of different species is an intrinsically dirty life strategy"), (4) in some lamprey-and-shark-like-ancestor (keyword "gnathostomata") the viral machinery for the half-symbiotic virus to escape the genome broke, and (5) all subsequent descendants (or from-our-perspective-as-humans all subsequent "post-shark ancestors") have kept this "former symbiotic viral subsystem" as a super badass immune system for remembering entire clades of infectious or harmful things and fighting them off based on remembering "how they smell" via antibodies, that could be tweaked into slightly more useful shapes over the next ~400 million years.)))
In bacteria, Prophages often evolve helpful genes for their hosts for the "laying in wait" period. For example, symbiotic incentives like this probably explain the convergent evolution of whole new ways to "do photosythesis" in the viruses of photosynthetic marine bacteria, but they also are net harmful to the initial host's long term genomic interests, because infection will reliably cause nearly their entire set of descendants to durably/predictably/eventually suicidally explode.
There is some debate about the details, and it is hard to be sure because most sub-varieties of these viruses are never-seen-before because there are probably still millions or billions of unobserved prophage species in the total life system of Earth still...
However, as a general pattern, the "horizontal/vertical incentive difference pattern" is so durable and clean that nearly all prophages internalize it, and express very different genes depending on "which mode" they are in.
Compare and contrast: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the future itself by not volunteering for holy jihad based on stuff that was in books your great-granddad was tricked into believing in and passing on to his descendants as a family philosophy, for thereby one can meekly avoid being foolishly inspired to join an army and eventually have their genome erased from all of future biology forever when they are Killed In Action."
One of the reasons "the hint(s) provided by the visible badness of evangelism" this is such an interesting and important topic is that it doesn't just help explain the biological evolution of non-trivial microbiological tricks in large animals with very slow reproductive cycles, and it doesn't just provide a feast of analogies to the sociology of religion, it also relates to "inner alignment" in general :-)
...and just to lay some cards on the table, and be "epistemically hygienic" in proximity to possible-infohazards...
There are potentially some situations where "speaking to non-kin" is economically rational and thus in some sense "biologically rational" but almost all of these situations relate to things that are quite naturally expressed in terms of public goods, which could be funded via dominant assurance contracts, with executive management selected via vaguely sane electoral procedures liked Ranked Pairs or Borda.
The reason that "a government-or-religion-or-theocracy" is a natural category is that humans have been using confused metaphysics to defend bad governance protocols for a LONG time... like probably at least 12,000 years? If you look at most of this history, a huge portion of the level-ups in protocol design seem to have come from divesting the protocol justifications from metaphysical claims, and switching to protocol justifications based on basic prudence and math and externalized social reasoning. Thus, if someone proposes some New Idea that might be "a better way to do a government-or-religion-or-theocracy" it very reasonable and "naively-infohazard-protective" to try to translate it into the language of rationalized political-economy, subtract all the specific people from the proposal, and reason about the abstract roles using game theory and prudence and so on.
Note that (1) this proposed "abstraction process for converting governance ideas about individuals into governance ideas about roles" is kinda similar to Kant's proposal for "universalizing maxims under the categorical imperative" and (2) I don't know of a single scary cult that has been based on (or obsessed with) Kant... and this safety property seems pretty safe even though Kant is not my daddy and his ideas don't count as "vertically transmitted" for me or anyone ...since he never got married or had kids).
My understanding is that Mormons banned polygamy because the US government was cracking down on polygamy around that time. Their choice was to change their doctrine or be destroyed by the State, and they chose to change their doctrine.
Thank you for filling in so many historical details.
If you really want to be "traditional" (rather than "culty" or "unchurched"), and move to Utah, arguably you should convert to Mormonism?! Arguably?
I find this hot take hilarious.
I know you're not supposed to laugh at your own jokes, but... I also find this perspective hilarious <3
I wonder if the greatest benefit of LDS missionary service isn't recruiting new members, but instead dirtying their children with outside memespace to prevent an autoimmune reaction when they mature.
From what age do the Mormons do this?
It sounds plausible that a small child would not be able to evaluate new arguments correctly, so it will just ask an elder and receive some bullshit excuse which sounds okay. And at later age, it will not even listen to the arguments, because "I have heard it all before many times".
EDIT:
There is a traditional atheist way of bringing up children to faithlessness, where you first read them about the Greek gods, and later some Bible for children. Both in context of "stories that people believed in the past". So when they encounter the meme in real life, they have some antidotes.
Compare to various Chick tracts, where the story often ends with the good guy asking the villain "have you ever heard about Jesus?" and he's like "never, who's that?", "well, let me give you this book"... and soon the villain is begging to get baptized. I don't know how much that is wishful thinking, and how much that happens in real life, but... maybe there is a reason why this was considered plausible by his audience.
From what age do the Mormons do this?
18-19 (formerly 18-21).
When I wrote "children", I meant "next generation descendants". Missionaries are young adults.
I appreciate this article because it correctly characterizes how both hemispheres are involved in both eyes' processing, a fact which is not known enough and which is probably very important to stereopsis and binocular vision.
For those who like technical terminology and Greek, the medical term for when you lose the one side your left and right eyes' vision—is hemianopsia (hemi- "half" + an- "not" + opsia "seeing").
There are several types of hemianopsia depending on how far upstream or downstream the nerve damage occurred between your eyes and your cerebrum. When it happens because one of your cerebral hemispheres got damaged, then you get homonymous hemianopsia (same-sided hemianopsia):
Here is a picture on Wikipedia of what your vision looks like with left homonymous hemianopsia (i.e., when your right hemisphere's visual processing is not working).
This weirdness happens because of the way the optic chiasm of your optic nerves works:
Using this, doctors can predict pretty well where in someone's brain has a stroke happened by what kind of hemianopsia the patient has.
(If damage occurs at the chiasm itself, then you can get "heteronymous hemianopsia" that still affects both eyes but causes blindness in opposite sides. If damage occurs upstream of the chiasm, i.e., at one eye's optic nerve or retina, then you're blind just in that eye. And, if you damage even smaller parts of your optic tracts, you can get specific types of quadrantopia (quadr- "quarter" + an- "not" + opia "seeing"), which is basically just hemianopsia but smaller. As with before, if you switch off a tiny part of your left hemisphere's visual tracts, you might become blind in the right-upper or right-lower quarters of both of your eyes.)
In any case, like the original post says, closing one of your eyes never suppresses the visual processing of one of your hemispheres, because each eye's processing is split between both hemispheres. I don't know if this hemispheric sleep theory is really something that Ziz or Zizians believe, but the way the optic chiasm actually works is pretty basic college-level physiology that's been well characterized for more than a century.
Thanks for the interesting details!
pretty basic college-level physiology that's been well characterized for more than a century
In other words, 99% of people don't know that. What humanity as a whole knows, and what an average human (even one with a decent education) knows are vastly different things.
A more extreme case, in mathematics, some things are known for more than two millennia, and probably would still surprise most educated people today (with non-math education), such as how to calculate the volume of a sphere (a cylinder minus a cone, that is 2/3 of the cylinder).
In other words, 99% of people don't know that.
Yeah, that's true.
I just would have thought that people like Ziz and their followers, who ostensibly think of themselves as "rational" and are interested in how the brain hemispheres really work, would have searched for even superficial-level information like "each eye feeds both hemispheres" that supports—or contradicts—their mental model about the brain.
Or not. Zizians, like all of us, are only human. They might be in a cult, but, while I here cast the first stone, I'm sure have I too have erroneous beliefs that could be corrected with just "superficial-level" expert information in other domains.
I just hope that I'm not overconfident about my own errors. An even bigger problem than known ignorance in a knowledge domain is overconfidence in that domain. If I forget how to calculate a cone, and someone explains to me that "the volume of a sphere is a cylinder's minus a cone's", I ought not to be that surprised, because I shouldn't have held a strong preexisting erroneous intuition about this thing in the first place. In contrast, a Zizian, I imagine, might well be surprised (or contrary) that "blocking your left eye's vision reduces input to both hemispheres evenly", because they overconfidently held a strong (and wrong) belief about basic brain neuroanatomy and invested a ton of time and pain into practices based on that belief. While figuring out their "unihemispheric sleep" practices, they should have actually done the research...or maintained a healthy amount of "I don't really know much about that field right now".
The relationship between the sphere, cylinder, and cone is still pretty cool, though.
That’s a good article, thanks. I had much the same thought when I read about he Ziz stuff, namely that
(A) dissociated identities don’t correspond to brain hemispheres in the way the Zizians seem to think they do
(B) sleep deprivation is well known to be bad for you
(C) whatever technique they used, we can tell from the externally observed effect - the crazy stuff they got up to - that the technique had a bad effect.
we can tell from the externally observed effect - the crazy stuff they got up to - that the technique had a bad effect.
This is probably only convincing from outside. From inside, there is probably a perfectly good explanation, and what seems to us as craziness would seem to them as advanced rationality.
I think Ziz believes in some form of quantum suicide, so from that perspective, even getting killed is not necessarily a bad outcome, because if you apply your timeless algorithm across all Everett branches, of course you are going to win some and lose some, so this just happens to be a losing branch.
Mixing two metaphors together, we get a quantum suicide by a cop, where you boldly keep escalating to achieve your goals, and you either achieve them, or you are no longer in that specific Everett branch. Also, killing the people you consider bad is justified, because they survive in the parallel branches where they pissed you off less, so you just made them less bad on average (they probably should have thanked you).
...which is why it felt so important to me to make it clear that the things about hemispheres are plainly wrong in all Everett branches. Just in case someone who is tempted by their ideology is reading this.
don't see why we shouldn't apply the same logic to corpus callosotomy. Destroying the major connection (though not the only one: there is also the anterior commissure, posterior commissure, and hippocampal commissure) between the cerebral hemispheres damages the brain; obviously. The parts that have previously cooperated fluently now have a problem to cooperate. The split-brain syndrome is a result of the damage. However, despite that, the split-brain patients typically maintain a unified sense of self and personality, it's just that some of their information processing systems are disconnected. Which makes it even less likely that in people with intact corpus callosum the two brain hemispheres secretly act as two different personalities.
That reminds me of Descartes' Error — how Damasio argues that any damage to one system tends to affect the whole, since reason, emotion, and embodiment are deeply integrated. It feels analogous to social systems too: once a channel of integration is disrupted, even if others remain, the total coherence suffers. So yeah, even when split-brain patients seem unified, it’s still a case of partial systemic breakdown.
- El cerebro izquierdo prefiere Android, el cerebro derecho prefiere iPhone
Bueno, admito que me inventé el último. El resto es una simplificación excesiva.
haha i see
I am going to address some misconceptions about brain hemispheres -- in popular culture, and in Zizian theory. The latter, because the madness must stop. The former, because it provided a foundation for the latter.
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About 99% of animals are bilaterally symmetric -- the left side and the right side of the body are approximately each other's mirror images. The symmetry is not perfect. For example the human heart is situated slightly on the left side, and its left and right halves have slightly different functions. But in general, it seems like once Evolution Fairy has decided that bilateral symmetry is a good idea, it was easier to keep designing all new organs symmetrically. Butterflies have pairs of wings, humans have a pair of hands.
Sometimes it means that organs come in pairs: we have a pair of eyes, and several pairs of ribs. Sometimes it means that organs have two connected parts, such as the left lung and the right lung. Some organs along the sagittal plane only have one approximately symmetric part, for example the stomach or the vertebrae.
The brain is not an exception to this rule. The parts that come in pairs include the cerebral hemispheres, the cerebellar hemispheres, basal ganglia, thalami, hippocampi, amygdalae, etc. The symmetric parts on the sagittal plane include corpus callosum, medulla, pons, midbrain, pineal gland, hypothalamus, hypophysis, etc.
Popular culture simplifies this as "we have two brains".
Simplifications are inevitable, but I wish humanity had settled on something less confusing and woo-inspiring, such as "the brain has two sides". Instead, it is known that:
...okay, I admit that I made up the last one. The rest is an oversimplification.
To explain, let's consider the language. Broca's area (speech and grammatical structure) and Wernicke’s area (comprehension of written and spoken language) are located in one cerebral hemisphere (almost always both in the same one), usually in the left hemisphere (for over 95% of right-handers and about 70% of left-handers). The left angular gyrus is essential for reading, writing, and connecting written symbols with their meanings. So we can see where the meme comes from. But the right hemisphere, including the right angular gyrus is crucial for understanding the full context of the communication: it processes the tone, rhythm, and intonation; enables understanding of emotional context, sarcasm, jokes; and helps maintain coherence in longer narratives. In tonal languages especially, the right hemisphere processes the melodic components of the speech. So, "which brain contains the language?"
What about mathematics? Understanding the numbers and basic arithmetic operations is a function of the parietal lobe, specifically intraparietal sulcus (understanding numbers and basic arithmetic) and angular gyri (memorizing e.g. multiplication tables), mostly in the left hemisphere (though estimating numbers without counting is done by the right hemisphere). Problem solving is done by prefrontal cortex, with the left hemisphere more important for step-by-step solving. Geometry and space visualization are a function of the parietal and occipital lobes, mostly in the right hemisphere. Finally, the visual cortex of both hemispheres is responsible for recognition of numbers and mathematical symbols. Remind me again, "which brain does the math?"
Emotional intensity, fear, and aggression are regulated by amygdalae. Prefrontal cortex regulates emotions. Limbic system memorizes them. Etc. I am simplifying things here.
So, although it is true that the left (usually) hemisphere is generally more involved in language, logic, and math... and the right hemisphere is more involved in spatial awareness, nonverbal communication, and music... actually doing these things requires a cooperation of both hemispheres. It's not like one hemisphere does the entire task while the other one is taking a break. Instead, it's more like different parts of the task happen in different places in the brain, some of those parts in one hemisphere and other parts in the other hemisphere, even if one of the hemispheres does a majority of the entire work.
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"But there was an experiment in which they separated the hemispheres, and clearly one could function without the other. And each of them was a different personality!"
The brain can survive a surprising amount of damage. There was the famous case of Phineas Gage (Wikipedia), whose large parts of brain were destroyed when an explosion blew an iron rod through his brain; afterwards, the rod landed 25 meters away. With all the help that the 19th century medicine could provide (removing the fragments of skull and brain, disinfecting the wounds using silver nitrate, applying bandages) he survived, miraculously. But the people who knew him reported that he wasn't the same person anymore. Previously, he was a hard-working and responsible man. After the accident, his memory and intelligence appeared unimpaired, but he lost self-control, and became impulsive and uninhibited. But later, his behavior improved. (These facts are disputed.)
How is this even possible? My explanation has two parts. First, although the two sides of the brain are somewhat specialized, they are also somewhat redundant, just like most other symmetrical organs in the body. We don't have two kidneys so that one can filter the blood, and the other one can e.g. meditate. We have two kidneys so that if one fails, we can still survive. After all, Evolution Fairy loves bilateral symmetry. Both sides being redundant is business as usual; it's the lateral specialization that requires a special explanation.
Second, there is this thing called "neuroplasticity". The brain changes all the time. When we learn things or acquire habits, the connections between the neurons change. Doing a lot of the same thing can measurably change the brain structure and function. Playing the piano using both hands thickens your corpus callosum (coordination of the hemispheres). Driving a cab for years makes your hippocampus larger (spatial memory). Athletics and dancing better connects your motor and sensory areas. Mathematics can increase the gray matter in your intraparietal sulcus (numerical reasoning). Meditation can thicken your prefrontal cortex (attention) and reduce your amygdala size (anxiety). Blind people have their visual cortex rewired to sound localization and Braille reading. If a part of a brain gets damaged, the nearby regions or the opposite hemisphere can compensate (but this is only true for some parts of the brain, and depends on age).
How is this related to separating the hemispheres by cutting the corpus callosum?
In case of Phineas Gage, I believe that the interpretation "after parts of his brain were damaged, his personality changed" makes much more sense than speculating that maybe the new (impulsive and uninhibited) personality has always been there, hiding inside his brain, invisible, waiting for the once-in-a-million-lifetimes opportunity to get liberated. No. Previously, all parts of his brain were parts of the old (reliable and hard-working) personality. The accident destroyed some parts of his brain, and the result was the new personality. All parts of the new personality have always been there, but they have previously been parts of the old personality; the new personality as a whole was created by the accident.
I don't see why we shouldn't apply the same logic to corpus callosotomy. Destroying the major connection (though not the only one: there is also the anterior commissure, posterior commissure, and hippocampal commissure) between the cerebral hemispheres damages the brain; obviously. The parts that have previously cooperated fluently now have a problem to cooperate. The split-brain syndrome is a result of the damage. However, despite that, the split-brain patients typically maintain a unified sense of self and personality, it's just that some of their information processing systems are disconnected. Which makes it even less likely that in people with intact corpus callosum the two brain hemispheres secretly act as two different personalities.
Similarly, the article "The Apologist and the Revolutionary" should not be interpreted as there being two different personalities inhabiting one body. It is the same personality, only (if the experiment replicates) some parts of it can be temporarily turned off.
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"But we have examples where multiple personalities live in the same body (without any surgery). Ever heard about Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?"
Yes, but I believe that these are completely different things.
It is tempting to imagine that if someone has two alters (personality states) and two cerebral hemispheres, then these numbers have to be related somehow.
But there is no law of nature saying that if there is n of something, and n of something else, then there must be a 1:1 correspondence between these two sets. For some reason, we have a strong feeling that there should be such correspondence. There is an ancient tradition of creating tables assigning e.g. the 4 temperaments to 4 alchemical elements to 4 seasons to 4 entrepreneurship styles to 4 tastes etc. But reality does not work like that.
Also, there are not necessarily two alters. Among the people diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (less than 1% of the population), most of them have 2 or 3 alters, but it is relatively common to have up to 10 alters, and cases with more than 10 alters are rare, but known and well-documented. On the other hand, everyone has two brain hemispheres. So how could there be a 1:1 correspondence? And if there isn't one in the general case, why should we assume that it must be there even for exactly 2 alters?
Although different alters can show unique brain activity patterns (for example in hippocampus and amygdala), generally all alters use both sides of the brain. Which is kind of obvious, if you realize that otherwise each alter could only control one hand and one leg.
This is just a speculation, but I think that dissociative identity disorder is one extreme of a spectrum; a hypertrophied version of something that exists in everyday life. The spectrum could go somewhat like this:
I also think that the milder parts of the spectrum are adaptive. A person at the opposite extreme of the spectrum with zero identity shifts would be acting the same in all social contexts, unable to enjoy fiction, unable to change their thought patterns and adopt different perspectives.
It just seems that when your personality becomes too flexible, you may lose control over the changes, and also start forgetting things that happened to your other identities. This typically happens as a result of childhood trauma, or cult abuse. Some people try to self-experiment and create a similar effect on purpose; not sure whether that is a good idea.
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Ok, now we are ready to review the Zizian theory of brain.
First, let's bring some evidence that Zizians actually take the two brains seriously. Because someone will probably try to sanewash their theory by suggesting that obviously they only meant it metaphorically, or that it was just an idea they have briefly played with and then abandoned it.
Sufficient unfolding of this infohazard grants individual self-awareness to both hemispheres of your brain, each of which has a full set of almost all the evolved adaptations constituting human mind, can have separate values, genders, are often the primary obstacle to each other thinking. Often desire to kill each other.
Left Good - Someone having a good left hemisphere, including a double good. Good left hemispheres tend to be more into consequentialism than praxis.
Right Good - Someone having a good right hemisphere, including a double good. Tend to be more into praxis than consequentialism. Very common among animal rights people.
Left-Only Good - Someone with a good left hemisphere and a nongood right hemisphere.
Right-Only Good - Someone with a nongood left hemisphere and a good right hemisphere.
Left-Female - Of a human, having a female left hemisphere.
Right-Female - Of a human, having a female right hemisphere.
Left-Male - Of a human, having a male left hemisphere.
Right-Male - Of a human, having a male right hemisphere.
lmrf - Left-male, right-female.
lfrm- Left-female, right-male.
Double-Female - Both hemispheres female. Cis women or binary trans women.
Double-Male - Both hemispheres male. Cis men or binary trans men.
This is one instance of a trend at MIRI to exclude jailbroken altruistic right hemispheres.
CFAR covers only a narrow portion of mental tech, mostly about left hemisphere optimization listening more to right hemisphere optimization.
[T]he president and cofounder of CFAR, has created and supported a culture that is cissexist, anti right hemisphere reorientation [...]
The leaders of MIRICFAR have been systematically excluding, discrediting, and/or neutralizing humans with alive enough right hemispheres [...]
This is what a mind looks like when the right hemisphere has already written its bottom line.
Whatever else [he] says, I know what his right hemisphere’s bottom line is.
This is yet another of the many right hemispheres trying to warp to discredit our statements [...]
- Gwen, Case study: CFAR
Writings of Zizians are often full of jargon, hysterical exaggerations, and death threats against virtually everyone. Surprisingly, these definitions written by Ziz are quite comprehensible. (In other places, Ziz often talks about "cores". That seems to be more or less a synonym for a hemisphere. "Two of them per organism.")
I have also included selected sentences from a longer text written by Gwen (inventor of the "unihemispheric sleep"), to illustrate how the "left brain, right brain" model is taken for granted.
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What is the "unihemispheric sleep"? I didn't find a description by any Zizian. According to zizians.info, they prefer to keep it secret among themselves. It is described as:
- You need to be tired.
- You need to be laying down or sitting up. (It is important that you stay in a comfortable position that won't require you to move very much.)
- In either case you want to close one eye and keep the other open.
- Distract the open eye with some kind of engagement. (This works best if you have a partner who can help you.)
- Eventually you should feel yourself begin to fall asleep on one side. That side will also become numb. (The degree of numbness is a good way to track how deep into sleep the side is.)
- Once into UHS, it is supposed to be possible to infer which aspects of your personality are associated with which side of the brain. (This is a little farfetched, and the more likely explanation is that it disrupts peoples visceral sense of what is and isn't socially okay.)
Apparently, you don't even need to cut your corpus callosum to separate the two personalities living in your brain. It is sufficient to wait until one of them falls asleep!
By the way, notice the implied popular misconception. It is generally the rule that each brain hemisphere controls the opposite side of the body. But there is an exception...
...can you guess it?
(I am giving you a chance to figure it out on your own, and prove to yourself that you understand the secrets of the human hemispheres better than Zizians.)
Ready?
Okay then: it's the eyes. Despite a popular misconception that each brain hemisphere controls the eye on the opposite side (which is actually the case with fish, amphibians, and reptiles), in humans and other primates, each hemisphere controls about 50% of each eye. Instead, the left hemisphere processes the right visual field (of both eyes), and the right hemisphere processes the left visual field (of both eyes). This is related to the fact that our eyes are facing forward.
Which means that keeping one eye closed and the other eye engaged will definitely not make one of your hemispheres fall asleep and keep the other one awake. Both of them are equally stimulated by this clownery. So whatever actually happens during the "unihemispheric sleep", it must be something other than what is advertised.
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By the way, sleep deprivation is a standard mind-control technique in cults.
Sleep deprivation has a strong impact on prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus. (Yes, the prefrontal cortex of both hemispheres. It makes no difference which side are you laying on, or which eye is open.) The prefrontal cortex is responsible for logical thinking and decision making. Sleep deprivation impairs your judgment. Amygdala processes emotions. Sleep deprivation makes you anxious and irritated; you respond more strongly to threats. Hippocampus controls memory formation and spatial navigation. Sleep deprivation makes it more difficult to remember new things.
How would a cult benefit from this? Skeptical thinking is an active process; it does not happen automatically. When we hear people say something, by default we believe them. It takes an active effort to notice problems and disbelieve. Making people tired makes them more likely to believe.
Most cults impose sleep deprivation using some pretext. It's not that sleep is bad, per se, but there is so much work to do, and so little time! Or, it's better for your health to wake up early (but somehow we forget that it is also better for your health to go to bed early).
It is clever to figure out a way how to keep people sleep deprived, without having to organize all the work for them, or do the early morning prayers/meditation.
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"But we have empirical evidence that the Zizian sleep tech actually did something important to the people who tried it. Some of them have successfully communicated using their individual hemispheres. How can you explain that?"
I am not denying that something happened as a consequence of experimenting with sleep deprivation. All I am saying is that it had nothing to do with the brain hemispheres.
But then, what was it?
Well, I wasn't there, and I didn't have an opportunity to talk to those people. But given the information I have, my best guess is that it was...
...some kind of dissociation...
...which has nothing to do with the brain hemispheres, as I have already explained.
Just imagine being there. Tired. So tired. Almost falling asleep. But you can't. You keep one eye open to keep yourself awake. There is Ziz. Talking to you. Ziz is a scary person. ("I was physically afraid in a way I’ve never been with anyone else" - Anna Salamon) Ziz keeps you awake. Ziz is talking about good and evil. You must fight, she says. But you want to sleep. The world depends on you. If we fail, millions will die. Evil has to be eliminated, at any cost. Only Ziz is double-good. You are single-good, which means there is a good person and an evil person in you. You want to sleep. You must not. It is the evil person inside you who wants to destroy the universe. The evil person doesn't care. You don't care. You just want to sleep. You must not, Ziz insists. The good person in you must stay awake and defeat the evil person. It is a timeless decision. The eternity depends on your choice. If you die, you can still live in another universe, but if you give up, if your algorithm gives up, you are lost in all of them. Make the good person awake. Say something...
Or maybe it wasn't anything like this. As I said, I wasn't there. I am just looking for the most likely explanation, in a situation where the proposed explanation clearly contradicts the facts we know about the human brain.
My explanation is that you basically start playing a role, under social pressure multiplied by the sleep deprivation. You are given an explanation, which we now know is bullshit, but you believe it, because it seems supported by the things you have heard. You desire to fit in. You want to save the world, and in the process also save yourself. Talking about timeless algorithms and counterfactual worlds makes you feel surreal. You want to sleep.
And so you create a new personality, modeled after what Ziz wants it to be. Two personalities, actually. You give them names, and assign your individual traits to them, according to the provided scheme: one of them gets the things that Ziz considers good, the other one gets the things that Ziz considers evil. An angel, and a devil.
(And then the angel prevails, and you become a loyal follower of Ziz. Or the devil prevails, and then you kill yourself to prevent the devil from destroying the universe.)
*
If you are the kind of person who is at high risk, please listen to me and don't do this.
But I don't really expect you to listen. Why would you? I am not that convincing.
My hope is that by explaining all of this, I may have ruined the conversion process for you. Active cooperation was needed on the side of the person doing the experiment, and because Ziz was recruiting among aspiring rationalists, having a scientifically-sounding explanation for the experiment played an important role. As a proper rationalist, you would not want to deny the existence of the two brain hemispheres, would you?
Even if the explanation was wrong, the process of creating the new dissociated personalities was probably helped a lot by the belief that the personalities are already there, and therefore you are only exposing what already exists (a noble goal for an aspiring rationalist!), as opposed to... giving yourself a milder version of dissociative identity disorder, just because someone told you that they had a secret tech.
Now that you know that the two brains theory is bullshit, and that the "unihemispheric sleep" actually has nothing to do with the brain hemispheres... maybe the magic of Ziz will fail to convert you (or drive you to suicide).
You are one person. Your brain has multiple parts, but together they make one person. (Or not, because your brain is fragile and can be shattered. Don't do that on purpose.)
Also the good and evil do not work the way Ziz describes them. Moral dilemmas cannot be reduced to "one hemisphere wants to destroy the universe, the other wants to save it". You don't have an angel sitting in one of your brain hemispheres, and a devil sitting in the other. (Renaming them to "good" and "nongood" doesn't make it any more plausible.) That's not how any of this stuff works. And you should be smart enough to realize that Ziz calling herself pure good and calling you half-good/half-evil is blatantly self-serving, because it implies that whenever the two of you disagree, she is right and you are wrong.
But that's a conclusion you should reach on your own (or not). I am just trying to put one popular misconception about human brains out of your way.
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Human brain is bilaterally symmetric, just like the rest of our (most animals) bodies.
There is some lateral specialization, but not in the sense "language is here, math is there", but rather like "language/math/art/etc. are composed of many different functions that are implemented in many different parts of the brain... and even if a majority of these parts are on one side, the cooperation of all parts (both sides) is what makes it work".
There is a thing called "split-brain syndrome". There is a thing called "dissociative identity disorder". Those are two completely different concepts. The people whose cerebral hemispheres were partially separated still maintain a coherent sense of self (one personality). The people who have multiple personalities use the entire brain for each personality.
Therefore, the Zizian beliefs about "hemispheres" are completely wrong, and the "unihemispheric sleep" couldn't work even in principle (because the inputs from each eye are processed by both cerebral hemispheres).
So it seems that what Zizians actually do is dissociation, which is the opposite of what our cultural wisdom would suggest, with the predictable results (suicide, murder).
