Consciousness and Character

The strange occurrence of Mel Blanc responding to the identity of Bugs Bunny rather than his own brings one question to mind:

Were the characters he voiced operating as parts of and within his own consciousness, or were they occupying totally separate consciousness through him?

Considering his response in waking up from the coma in being able to channel the characters before he became aware as himself speaks to the possibility of the human mind being able to operate within several consciousnesses at once on different levels. The presence of these characters as identifiable individuals confronts the same dilemma which Nagel addresses in Mind and Cosmos, that is the elusiveness of consciousness when is comes to physical reality and the world as explained by physical science.

He states that, "The existence of consciousness seems to imply that the physical description of the universe, in spite of its richness and explanatory power, is only part of the truth, and that the natural order is far less austere than it would be if physics and chemistry accounted for everything." The characters that Mel voiced existed outside the ream of the concrete physical, and so escape explanation by physical science. The neuroscientists speculate that Mel picked up on cues which told him that it was time for him to perform, and because he had the ability to draw up the characters so quickly, and t was so routine for him to have to do so, it was easier for his brain to respond to "Hey Bugs, how are you?" then "Hey Dad" or "Hey Mel". However, this is still not an answer for the question of how the characters manifested themselves in his brain.

Mel's son points out that when he was doing his voice acting, the characters also took on a physical persona in his body. Nagel tell us, "It has become clear that our bodies and central nervous systems are parts of the physical world, composed of the same elements as everything else and completely describable in terms of the modern versions of the primary qualities—more sophisticated but still mathematically and spatiotemporally defined." Our nervous systems, all the things we think and feel, are the result of a physical action that happens within out body. A hormone is released, a nerve sends a signal to the brain, and then the thought occurs. All of these aspects of consciousness live physically within our nervous systems. Nagel goes on, "Finally, so far as we can tell, our mental lives, including our subjective experiences, and those of other creatures are strongly connected with and probably strictly dependent on physical events in our brains and on the physical interaction of our bodies with the rest of the physical world."He points out this invariable link between our conscious reality and our physical reality. So, these "characters" that lived inside Mel Blanc's head also resided in him physically. 

Though we will never really know what was going on inside Blanc’s brain when he woke up from the coma, we can say, following Nagel’s writing, that it is wholly possible that the characters he voiced occupied totally separate physical space in his brain. They had their own separate consciousnesses and operated on a different level than Mel’s own consciousness. What does this say about the identity of the self? Did Mel Blanc consider Bugs Bunny to be a part of his own self, or a different self entirely? Did his opinion affect the way he apprached his work. If He did in fact believe that Bugs was a separate person, did Bugs act independently, on his own intuition that day in the hospital to save Mel’s life?