Oh man, the fretting and pearl clutching here over who the "self" is with body transplants among people who have forgotten nearly every other transplant, prosthetic, and cloning technology we've cooked up so far and the complete nothing burgers all of them have turned out to be and are usually formed by people who've never met an amputee, and transplantee, or doesn't believe they've ever met a person with prosthetics.
Get back to me when people are swapping brain hemispheres with each other. Then we can have a meaningful discussion over the nature of self in a transplant scenario.
Even if they spends years in physical therapy and in the end aren't able to move and walk like a "normal" person, this could transform the lives of many people in impossibly meaningful ways given it works even to the level face transplants work today.
The fact that this is uncontroversial to a lot of people mostly just shows how intellect-focused our society has become. Plenty of other value systems treat the Self as the entire body, not merely the head. Perhaps if we did too, we might not have so many issues with obesity and drug abuse. Dualism has consequences.
I once read someone describe academics as “floating heads with bodies attached.” I think that could apply to society at large.
We routinely replace every other part except the brain, whether by mechanical, artificial biological, or donor/transplant means.
Prosthetic arms and legs are normal, millions need things like insulin replaced in their bodies that is manufactured by yeast, and every day thousands donate blood to be put into other people and replacing kidneys, hearts, lungs, and various other organs from those who are brain dead is routine.
Everything except the brain is a swappable part (quality/success of swap may vary).
I remember reading some sci-fi story where gentleman had scrotum transplant and I had questions about that.
As it appears, now I know, that transplanted scrotum will produce semen with dna of previous owner - not recipient. Also, there are cases, where transplanted bone marrows are rewriting dna of receiver. So, brain is swappable in the end as well... sure.
Btw, your understanding of transplants is way too trivial - recipient body not always accept donor organs and people die because of it.
Prosthetics are not transplants and they too can be rejected by body - and people who have them still "enjoy" side effects of not having proper arm or leg... the videos of happy sprinters with "better legs" do not convince me after I had been living with such people together, where higher body temperature is just one of those side effects of lost limb, not to mention dramatic impact on mind, where those battles about loss of limbs has to be battled every day.
To the best of our knowledge and experience with it comes to transplanting organs, it seems to be?
> doing so has a lot of negative consequences for our actual embodied selves
Can you elaborate? Organ transplants (and most likely other medical procedures) definitely throw wrenches into various spiritual & religious beliefs, but in the physical world (which we can observe & study), beyond the immediate risks of the procedure and things like transplant rejection and the need for immunosuppression (which are by now understood well enough to do procedures with a reasonable likelihood of success), what other negative consequences are there?
Organ transplants are done because the alternative is death or severely reduced quality of life and the patients, the medical community and society at large appears to agree otherwise they wouldn't be done.
I'm not saying there aren't some hidden consequences we aren't aware of, but so far we haven't encountered any. As we push the envelope of what's currently possible we might stumble upon new ones and figure out way to mitigate them.
I think it’s definitely a complex topic and not one that can be hashed out in a HN comment.
My thought is something like this: because we treat our “real selves” as just our heads/minds, we unintentionally or intentionally disregard the rest of our body.
To me, this seems to be related to some specific negative things like obesity, for example. Many people don’t treat their body with the same level of respect as they do their perceptions or their minds. Some old Daoist stuff delves into this a bit.
In short, because we treat our minds separately from our bodies and we privilege consciousness and speech/thought, it has effects on what we do.
It is also probably just conceptually wrong to think that our bodies are just a side accessory, especially when it comes to understanding how much of our actual intelligence comes from being embodied.
>It is also probably just conceptually wrong to think that our bodies are just a side accessory, especially when it comes to understanding how much of our actual intelligence comes from being embodied.
There's not a single study to show this, so calling it 'probably wrong' is just disingenuous. All the current results simply say 'sensory data impacts our cognition', which people who think that the brain encompasses the whole of the mind also believe.
The real test would be whether 'faking' body parts by sending mock sensory data would lead to the same result as having the real body part.
Have you read your article? Embodied cognition comes in different forms. The 'basic' idea is simply that the body plays some role in cognition.
The view that's closest to traditional cognition - and generally regarded as uncontroversial - is that the body has a strong influence on the mind. A lot of (most?) computationalists would accept this idea with no issue.
It's the idea that our mind is actually distributed, that our body is part of our mind, which is actually contentious. It's a philosophical position you can argue for, but there definitely aren't a lot of studies to back it up, as all of them (or at least all that I know, feel free to prove me wrong), can just as easily be explained with a non-distributed model.
If our body is not a part of our mind, then where does the mind exist? Are we just loops of code controlling a mechanism? I'm curious why you casually toss away the possibility that our bodies and self are one inseparable thing when no scientist has yet been able to even get close to separating the two via any means. Our brains work through physical means with electrical and chemical impulses, so why think that the mind itself doesn't extend away from the brain?
If the mind extended to other parts of the body, I'd expect there to be tons of evidence for it, but there seems to be none.
Like, with the brain we know that the mind is deeply linked to it because it's just very obvious. Brain damage heavily impacts cognition, people lose memories, their personalities change, they lose the capacity to feel certain things or certain concepts - we even have some idea of damaging what area causes what.
Compare this with people losing limbs or sensory organs. Someone who loses their sight, doesn't lose their visual memory, their ability to visualize things, spatial concepts, etc. If these organs were actually part of the mind I would have at least expected some part of it to be lost.
So unless evidence for the contrary comes to light, it only seems reasonable to me to assume that no or at the very least minimal real processing occurs outside of the brain.
While I agree with you, I would add that most glands add a wrinkle to what you are saying. Hormones significantly impact personality and reactions, and their secretion is not happening in the brain. Now, the direction of causation is of course debatable, especially in a healthy person, but do you believe that replacing ovaries with testicles (assuming we were able to do it) would have no impact on the mind of the person? Or replacing a hyper-active thyroid with a regular one?
While the secretion may not happen in the brain, they affect the hormone receptors in the brain and that's where I think all the 'mind' changes come from. We know that e.g. people who undergo hormone replacement as part of sex reassignment will actually have noticeable brain structure changes.
If there was some other influence causing changes to the mind, I don't know of it. It doesn't seem like the hormone creating organs are itself is part of the mind, as just taking the hormones seems to cause the same effects. So what else could it be? I guess it's theoretically possible that some systems like the blood stream itself are part of the mind - but there's nothing that indicates this, so I think it's pretty unlikely.
Well, if some other organ can influence the mind, and if it is not under the direct control of the mind, in what sense can you say it is separate from the mind?
Or, staying closer to measurable things, glands mean that you should expect the personality of a brain being getting a full body transplant can become significantly different, just because of all the new hormone glands they will be exposed to. So in some sense, you are not moving a person to a new body, but creating a new person that will inherit many characteristics from the brain donor (memories, for sure, probably others), and many other characteristics from the body donor (personality traits, such as aggression or how sedentary they may be, very likely some dietary preferences).
The point is that you could physically separate the organ from the body and just make the person take a pill with hormones. Unless you're some crazy Extended Mind Thesis guy who thinks that the environment is part of your mind, having an influence on the mind is not the same thing as being part of it.
I'm not sure whether the changes would really be large enough to classify them as a new person. Hormone replacement therapy seems like a pretty damn large change, but I don't think I've heard of a case where there's truly radical personality changes. The same goes for other gland issues and their treatment. Though this is just guessing of course.
> The point is that you could physically separate the organ from the body and just make the person take a pill with hormones. Unless you're some crazy Extended Mind Thesis guy who thinks that the environment is part of your mind, having an influence on the mind is not the same thing as being part of it.
The same could likely be said for pieces of the brain, if we had a way to synthesize the right substances. What seems much more relevant to me is whether the glands are directly controlled by the brain, in which case they are simply a kind of support organ, just like the heart; or if they have their own signal processing and can "decide" (in the algorithmic sense) to secrete substances based on their own analysis of the internal or external environment, separate from the brain. If so, then I would characterize them as a part of the mind. The fact that their function CAN be replaced by taking hormones doesn't mean that X+testicles would be the same person as X+testosterone-testicles: the part of their mind that decided WHEN to produce testosterone would be gone.
Note that this is all an IF. It's quite likely that the decision to release certain hormones in certain quantities is controlled entirely by the brain, with the glands responding only to nerve signals.
> Hormone replacement therapy seems like a pretty damn large change, but I don't think I've heard of a case where there's truly radical personality changes. The same goes for other gland issues and their treatment.
From what I know, there can be pretty extreme effects from hormone issues, like extreme mood swings and defensiveness related to child birth, for example, or extreme aggression/irascibility related to high testosterone.
I’m not really committed to a particular model, I just think the body clearly plays an important, if not critical role - and that this is not what most people in the comments here agree with.
I agree with you. Our decisions are based on stimuli, hormones, and other physical factors that extend beyond what is traditionally considered the "mind." If I get a blood transfusion, does the slightly different chemical makeup of the introduced blood affect my behavior? If so, at what point does it affect my "self"?
I appreciate the coherent and open way that you have responded to so many different comments in this thread.
> The real test would be whether 'faking' body parts by sending mock sensory data would lead to the same result as having the real body part.
How about a test that fakes that body part which receives sensory data and triggers a response? Perhaps it can lead to the same results as having a real brain! /s
(Sorry, couldn't resist!)
On a serious note, articles about how for example the gut affects our mental state (all the way to links with autism) were posted to HN many times.
Calling the idea that our bodies are like side accessories attached to our brains “probably wrong” may be an overreach, but personally I suspect the stage at which it becomes a viable idea would also be one where we are able to just copy an entire human brain. (Which might just turn out not to be a meaningful proposition, but I guess we’ll see!)
And as long as we aren’t there/don’t know for sure, I’d put forward that the mere possibility of a “body replacement” actually destroying personality to an unknown extent is enough of a reason to never deploy it in foreseeable future except as last resort.
>On a serious note, articles about how for example the gut affects our mental state (all the way to links with autism) were posted to HN many times.
Of course, but that's because our gut is directly connected to the brain. Hardcore embodiment people will tell you that you're literally thinking with your gut. It's not like I'm saying you could just swap bodies and it wouldn't have an effect, it absolutely would, my point is simply that this is due to causation, because of the body influencing the brain, rather than distribution where the body is literally part of the mind.
>And as long as we aren’t there/don’t know for sure, I’d put forward that the mere possibility of a “body replacement” actually destroying personality to an unknown extent is enough of a reason to never deploy it in foreseeable future except as last resort.
Sure, but I'd say it's essentially what we're doing already. We know e.g. hormone treatment as part of sex reassignment causes changes to the brain and definitely influences personality. It's not like anyone is proposing this sort of stuff for fun (I think).
In a sense, everything you do, read, see, hear, experience, changes your personality. Usually the changes are so small that they can be observed only as they accumulate over the years. Sometimes, there are big changes (usually surrounding traumas of various kind, physical and mental). But the truth is, personality is a dynamic, ever-evolving construct.
> Of course, but that's because our gut is directly connected to the brain.
Along with the rest of the body; and note that we can’t treat autism by altering just the brain or the signals sent between the brain and the gut—we have to resort to introducing changes in the gut. To me it looks like a strong indicator that given current level of progress for medical purposes we ethically cannot assign personality and consciousness to any particular part of the body (including the brain).
> Hardcore embodiment people will tell you that you're literally thinking with your gut.
…and while I don’t quite identify with that position, we can’t deny they may be partially right until we exclude that possibility. We haven’t definitively concluded what consciousness is and where it arises.
Many people gravitate towards visualizing thought and consciousness as happening fully in the brain, but it’s not the only way of visualization—and perhaps neither is it even the most optimal: if gut microbiota affects us so much, doesn’t it make sense to include the gut into the feeling of “mind’s I”? Where then to draw the line?
> I'd say it's essentially what we're doing already. We know e.g. hormone treatment as part of sex reassignment causes changes to the brain and definitely influences personality.
For a while I’ve been thinking about continuity, and how it might be among the key puzzle pieces of consciousness. A sex reassignment brings a somewhat fast but still gradual change, while getting a body replacement may not be very different from a death from insider’s view: you go under anaesthesia; but is there a you that wakes up?
But then I guess should we be concerned with that “insider’s view”? What is that insider and does it even exist? (I know this is getting into the territory of the Star Trek Transporter thought experiment and the like, but that it’s easy to end up there might also hint at an insufficient level of knowledge we have about consciousness.)
> How about a test that fakes that body part which receives sensory data and triggers a response? Perhaps it can lead to the same results as having a real brain! /s
You're joking, but this "fake brain" would be an AGI, and building an AGI has many active fields of research and development around it. Of course most of these fields don't care about perfectly replicating human brains and embodying such artificial minds, because it's just extra work, and building a mind without a body is already hard enough.
AGI aside though, I was more hoping to highlight the so-called hard problem. If your brain is replaced, presumably it’ll be you as far as the rest of humanity is concerned; is that satisfactory? Replacing a body may not be entirely dissimilar.
That argument suffers considerably from a quick glance at how we treat our minds. If I take a quick survey of nutritional and intellectual fast food habits I can't pick a winner. It's bad on both sides and it doesn't even make much of a difference whether I look at society at large or no further than in the mirror.
You have a bunch of nerve tissue around your body, which contain information.
Your brain is also calibrated to your organs.
Your brain may notice you need to release X amount of adrenaline, and sends out a signal. Then your new body releases a different amount, because your new adrenal glands are used to a slightly different signal intensity.
And the body contains an enormous amount of complicated metabolical processes which are tightly coupled together.
Imagine the chaos, if everything starts to work a little differently, because “there is a new boss”.
I have no formal education in this yopic and my comment is only speculation, but it seems logical.
I think most people consider many body parts to be swappable because we've observed that they in fact are. The degree to which they are certainly varies, but every successful transplant is testament to the fact we can exchange body parts with one another.
What if I put you in a coma and wake you up a few days later and tell you a team of surgeons had replaced one of your internal organs with a lab-grown genetically equivalent version. Or maybe they just cut you open and closed you up again. Sure, there's a small scar left as evidence and some residual pain. But how would you be able to tell the difference? How does it connect to your perceptible self?
This is a really complex topic, but just to throw out a few questions:
- Why is our perceptible self the only thing that should determine our sense of identity? Aren’t there many aspects of our body and mind that aren’t we aren’t aware of on a conscious level?
- Is there a point at which replacing your organs replaces You? This is called the Ship of Theseus and is a pretty deep problem.
- Is the ability to be conscious or communicate via language the sole determiner of a thing’s existence? If I put my head on your body, what is this new thing? Just me? My head on your body? Even if your cells and body continue to exist, with anything like tattoos or personal elements. Etc.
In any case, I’m talking mostly about the metaphysical model of treating the mind (ergo the brain) as the real Self and the societal consequences that leads to.
> - Is there a point at which replacing your organs replaces You? This is called the Ship of Theseus and is a pretty deep problem.
Not really. Your molecules turn over in a matter of days to years anyway (depending on the tissue and compounds in question).
All that remains is information encoded in larger structures that are retained across that turnover. And the largest part of that is in the brain.
> - Why is our perceptible self the only thing that should determine our sense of identity? Aren’t there many aspects of our body and mind that aren’t we aren’t aware of on a conscious level?
By perceptible I meant observable in one way or another, even parameters that are only subconsciously noticeable such as hormonal balance, gut flora signalling, DNA methylation, immune memory or whatever is important to the stateful system of the body. These considerations add complexity if you want a high-fidelity replacement but they're still far fewer variables than the state maintained in your brain.
> - Is the ability to be conscious or communicate via language the sole determiner of a thing’s existence? If I put my head on your body, what is this new thing? Just me? My head on your body? Even if your cells and body continue to exist, with anything like tattoos or personal elements. Etc.
I would say it's mostly you, a little me. Consider it as an exercise in tallying the number of non-redundant bits persistently stored in something. Its kolmogorov complexity. The body carries a smaller fraction of that.
I think the parent poster makes a point not that the mind should be considered to be distributed throughout the body, but that "your identity" should extend beyond just your mind. So that even if your mind is not in your hand, your hand should still be part of your identity.
I don't think I agree, but it doesn't seem preposterous either.
Today we solved the Ship of Theseus, and yesterday I solved that one with the tree in the forest that makes a sound so I feel like we can finish solving philosophy by the end of the week.
Personally I’m not sure I care all that much. It’s just an interesting topic.
That said, pretty much our entire legal system is built on specific concepts of identity. And most contemporary political issues seem based around it too.
Okay this brings us to an interesting point. Let's say someone committed a crime. And we take another innocent person, we swap their bodies from the neck. Which one would you punish?
You consider genetical sameness, what about the epigenetic traits, aquired traits like sickness etc? It will be erased in a new organ, and it will make the brain function and percieve differently, which you may or may not be able to attribute to this particular transplantation, of course. But scientifically, we don't treat brain as some solid finite substance that exists (born? created?) in a fixed state forever, and thus can be moved here and there and stay same in it's uniqueness. Brain/mind main property is that it's dynamic, and this dynamism is brought through by the rest of the body, and the environment it lives in and senses and adapts to.
> what about the epigenetic traits, aquired traits like sickness etc?
No different than getting some drug that improves your organ's health without replacing them. Perhaps via gene therapy, stem cell manipulation or whatever.
> Brain/mind main property is that it's dynamic, and this dynamism is brought through by the rest of the body, and the environment it lives in and senses and adapts.
It does that whether you transplant organs or not. Your tomorrow's self will not be quite identical to today's self either way. Replacing body parts only changes the trajectory in a similar way a change of environment would. Perhaps a drastic change, but still a decision that people could consciously make.
You are right about the first, but then if these things could be captured and reconstructed at scale (not like now), there is no such thing as "conscious decision" anymore, at least for some. Because if someone is able to capture this molecular turn-over, which is a static snapshot of our interaction with the reality basically - then it's possible to manufacture and control it? Not like we are not controlled now, but this is like a kernel level of control, out of which we can't exist. Sounds problematic?
I think the "doing so" he said refers to the considering of our body parts as swappable, not the act of swapping them. By not feeling like they're important integral parts of our identity, we may be careless with their health.
That concern is reasonable because it is difficult to swap parts, so we should keep them in working order rather than relying on the remote possibility of replacing them. But conversely that means if it were cheap and easy to replace them there wouldn't be as much need to take care of them.
Integral part vs. disposable is not a binary distinction.
It doesn't just raise questions about the self, but also lots of legal questions. Imagine you would transplant a brain in a different body. Who is that person now legally? Technically, only a single organ got transplanted, and everything else is still the body donor. But of course the person has the memories and presumably the sense of self of the brain donor. But the finger prints, iris scan and DNA of the body donor.
Of course we don't even know whether this sense of self is really purely attached to the brain. That brain is still connected to the rest of your body, and who knows what the body chemistry of the body donor will do to the new brain? Maybe we'll end up with a completely new person. Maybe not all memories will survive the transplant, but even if they do, you'll have a person who has the memories of the brain donor, but will be recognised by everybody as the body donor.
Mind you, if you transplant the entire head and not just the brain, this issue will lean a lot more strongly towards the head donor.
> Of course we don't even know whether this sense of self is really purely attached to the brain. That brain is still connected to the rest of your body, and who knows what the body chemistry of the body donor will do to the new brain?
Imagine just one aspect of this. A thyroid disorder.
If the donor body was hyperthyroid, the head transplant would result in someone with the symptoms of hyperthyroidism. Angry, irritable, racing pulse, etc. If they had hypothyroidism, they would be depressed, lethargic, etc.
And that's just one organ in the body. It could radically alter the "person" who they are presuming lives only in the head.
A good point, though for some people, that would be a better fit than what nature and chance gave them.
The separation of cojoined twins is potentially even more drastic, especially if it could be accomplished in those whose self-aware consciousnesses are not entirely independent.
Everyone's entire body, brain included, is undergoing continual change, simply from aging if not from injury or disease, and the changes that are most challenging to the concept of self are those that affect the brain.
To take it further, imagine an even more futuristic procedure where a tumorous right brain is replaced alongside a healthy left brain. Who are you then?
Yep. Our whole legal system is built on the idea of one mind implanted in one body from birth. Things quickly start getting complicated when that breaks down.
To really cook your goose imagine if we could not only freely modify and "jump" between bodies, but also edit our memories. Kinda like Total Recall turned up to 110, where you can implant fake experiences, remove bad memories, take on an entirely new persona, or clone yourself and have a relationship with your clone. What really makes you "you" then?
Altered Carbon sorta plays with this concept a lot. But it's set in a world were it is common place, and people have already detached identity from body.
You're right, this is an interesting question even without brain transplants. Are you guilty of a crime committed under hypnosis? What if you have multiple personality disorder? What if that disorder is the somehow cured or mitigated, so there's no risk of the murderous personality coming up again? It's a gateway to a marsh of awkward questions.
Just because you don't like the implications, does not mean that it is false. If science shows that the vast majority of the "self" results from the brain, then we should try to find other ways to reduce obesity, drug abuse and general neglect of the body than to pretend that it is not the case.
The mass of communication (everybody talking to everybody. Media, social and otherwise) has become very self-referential. We have conversations about conversations and arguments about arguments. And the stronger argument does not refer to mere "observation" or "anecdote". No, it refers to a more authoritative argument. Be it a revered pundit or that-which-is-popular.
Thus the communicating, arguing culture becomes even more self-referential as time goes on. And all that does not concern talking, thinking and arguing gets forgotten.
And that forgotten part is 99.999% of reality.
The act of focusing attention, which is also, implicitly, an act of vast ignoring, is a fascinating phenomenon.
Consider how cyberpunk made people wish replacing body parts was possible. Adam Jensen “never asked for this”, but I bet many fantasized about having his see-through eyes and wall-breaking arms.
Maybe these people (I am one of them) just do not have a reason to object to a consensual procedure that could save or drastically improve lives, and that's it?
I think the patient would spend the rest of their life in physical rehabilitation. They would have to train their brain to remap every muscle movement. Coordination would be a nightmare and a major fall risk (very common way to die in a hospital). Then there is the whole digestive system, it is hard to believe it runs completely independently, and if that isn’t working right, it would be a horrible death.
Maybe with the right technology you could map out each nerves function for both donor and patient before the procedure and match them up. I wouldn't be surprised if brains and nerves don't work as simply as an API though.
You see this all the time in robotics, where you can do a sort of “brain transplant” by taking the controller of one robot and installing it into another “identical” body. I use quotes here because there are enough differences in the physical machines that the transplanted controller will not perform as well without a significant recalibration effort.
We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade.
And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family?
And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.”
This reminds me of the Greek paradox "Ship of Theseus" which asks the question if every part of a ship is reconstructed over time is it the same ship?
If any subset of the new ship is a subset of the original ship then surely. But this also raises the question if we take a subset and build a new ship. Which is the original?
Another interesting take is to introduce non-physical attributes such as a name of the ship. That way every piece of wood could be changed but the name attribute would still make it a subset
The article mentions Soviet jigsaw experiments on dogs, like reanimating dead dog heads [1] and grafting two dogs on to each other having one circulation [2].
How would we go about confirming this was more than propaganda?
The second video mentions that the head of an older small dog grafted onto a large younger dog got rejuvenated as far as the appearance of the fur goes. It'm almost angry that apparently no further research was done back then on what they now call heterochronic parabiosis. It's only in the recent years that this point of view, that aging is a programmed self-sustaining process, controlled via signaling molecules in the blood plasma, and not wear-and-tear, started emerging.
This equal part fascinating and terrifying. It reminds me of the concept of “stacks” in Altered Carbon, but keeping the original hardware instead of transferring the essence of you to storage device in another body. Given that there are enough dictators and ultra rich people who don’t want to die, I imagine that some of this research is being done in secret.
> there are enough dictators and ultra rich people who don’t want to die
I mean, who does? That’s why people have invented a myriad coping mechanisms.
> I imagine that some of this research is being done in secret.
Maybe if that was an engineering problem... But we lack so much fundamental knowledge. It’s the same as saying someone is working on time travel device. Good movie plot, completely implausible.
Is there such thing called transplanting a body? I thought it would be transplanting a brain because brain is part where memories etc live? Yea there are some philosophical queries but you know ...
As far as we know. But we really know so little and there's a lot of interesting work being done regarding the networks of nerves in other parts of the body.
It's extremely likely that the brain is where most of the memories are stored, things like your name and age and so on. It could turn out that a lot of other types of memory, like muscle memory or emotional memory, are more distributed.
Actually, we know that removing limbs and organs doesn't change memories or personality. Happens all the time. Plenty of gruesome accidents and conditions that can cause that. People seem to survive that kind of trauma without side-effects on memory or personality (well, besides the impact of major trauma).
We also know we can replace limbs and organs with replacements from donors and our brains remember how to use them. This has also been used to control artificial limbs even. Also, hand transplants have been performed already, for example.
Finally, we pretty much know the layout of the brain pretty well and personality changes because of brain injuries are well documented. Also companies like Neuralink seem to be well on their way to repair and augment brains. Also, there have been cases of musicians undergoing brain surgery while playing their instrument so the doctors could see the direct impact of their actions and avoid unnecessary damage.
All that suggests that if this distributed memory is a thing, it's a very minor thing that seems to survive transplants and amputations.
That's in the cerebellum, part of your brain, not in your muscles. The state that your muscles remember is mostly the amount and composition of muscle fibers, i.e. how strong and fast they are due to exercise.
I didn't mean literally in the muscles, although I should have been clearer. I meant probably in the gut or another area with large nerve clusters. That said, it's unlikely - and for sure, the cerebellum is the likely candidate. But it's not simple and we don't understand it will enough to make any definite claims yet. We'll need to actually do the transplants to find out.
> It could turn out that a lot of other types of memory, like muscle memory or emotional memory, are more distributed
They aren't. We've removed almost every body part/organ we can and it doesn't seem to have any effect on your emotional memory. Muscle memory actually involves the nerves of the muscles, we already know that, but it's not the kind of conscious memory the rest of the comment refers to.
In general you think of transplant as taking an organ from a donor (who doesn't need it anymore, in some sense) and giving it to a living patient. But it doesn't make sense to say that you are taking someone's brain to help keep someone else alive: the patient who is saved is the one with the living brain, not the body. There are various discussions and complications around identity, but I don't think anyone doubts that the person who wakes up would go home to the house of the brain, not the house of the body (to reduce this to a very simplistic notion of identity).
Aside from the moral aspects, it's also interesting to think about the results. Would a new brain have difficulty operating a different body? Would one's senses translate similarly? Would the person's idea of where their limbs are in space be all messed up?
Perhaps the results of hand transplantation procedures, which have already been carried out successfully [1], could provide some insight into this question.
The functionality that hand transplant recipients obtain from the transplant apparently varies, but the results can be quite impressive. The Wikipedia article notes one recipient was able to use his transplanted hand to drink from a bottle of water a week after the procedure, and tie shoelaces after a few months.
If brains can successfully adapt to controlling a transplanted hand, under the right circumstances perhaps they can also adapt to multiple transplanted limbs, or a whole body.
Yes, no/yes, and yes, would be my understanding. This of course assumes that we’ve magically attached all of the nerves correctly. No to the part about the senses since what is happening is the doctor is essentially attaching a new blood supply to a severed head that’s been put on ice, so the head-based senses like scent and sight are unchanged. I’d expect the sense of touch and pain to translate well since it’s a one-direction signal sent from the skin pressure sensors to the brain. That’s a simple enough signal processing task that wouldn’t change though the brain would probably have to get used to what sensations correspond to which part of the body. The bi-directional senses like knowing where your limbs are in space would be atrociously tough to recalibrate. That leads me to my Yes answers, because our brain would have an incredibly tough time recalibrating it’s ability to communicate with the body. This is similar to a victims of nerve damage that, after repairing the damage, have to learn how to walk all over again. The message is getting through but it’s a completely garbled mess and the two sides have to re-establish communication.
That was a fun thought experiment. Hopefully it answered your question. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
I think there would have to be a long, difficult adjustment period. Phantom limb syndrome is thought to be caused by the brain adapting to different/fewer signals from the missing limb. Covid-19 parosmia may be caused by the regrowing sustentacular cells. The physical interfaces between our brains and our inputs and outputs are very delicate
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Instead of transplanting brains, if we could format/update the brain OTA, we could prevent a lot of morbidity and recovery time associated with surgeries. All we will need is bodies to act as hosts for these memories/brain updates.
The whole concept is that you can transfer your stack (a digital version of your consciousness) between bodies. The show does touch on the issues of bodies, rich people can just buy them. Anyone else essentially has to wait for whatever body becomes available.
Its the old Greek "Ship of Theseus" argument, but in biology. If you replace every part of a person with a transplant over several years, who is it that remains? And if you do it one afternoon, does that change anything?
Well, except we forget that the _normal_ scenario for living systems is to constantly be replacing everything. Over the course of your life, my understanding is some cells are replaced every few days, and some live many years, but if you live a long life, very few will be intact from your early adulthood to your twilight years.
I think the distinguishing factor that people want to latch onto is that if "identity" applies to recognizable configurations or organization of parts, is replacing large chunks qualitatively different from replacing small ones (e.g. blood donation)?
Maybe another interesting comparison is virus recombination or reassortment -- where meaningfully large, recognizable chunks are put together in a new arrangement. We recognize this process as giving rise to a new strain, but you could just as easily view it as a successor to one strain, but with modifications.
Or changes among institutions or groups: we think the United States is a country with a ~245 year history, though its geography and population changed a lot, with sudden expansions.
I think we need to solve reconnecting a persons brain to their own body first before worrying about a massively complex cross body transplant but definitely an interesting thought experiment.
It doesn't really raise any interesting philosophical questions though: so long as we're moving at least an intact brain from body to body, nothing dramatic has really happened (and all the small stuff applies up and down the stack - you go under aneasthesia, we put a new part in, you wake up and get all sorts of different signalling from this part which is not genetically yours.
I don't think this is as interesting philosophically as people who have half brains removed, but note that a head transplant is more invasive than what you and the article acknowledge: the CNS is partly in the body, and the body regulates one's hormonal makeup which is in itself pretty complex and tied to one's sapience.
Someone here asked about gut-brain axis. The truth is that we don’t have even surface-level understanding of what truly shapes consciousness. Maybe it’s the whole package that makes you - you.
A colleague went on once about Star Trek transporters: what if they worked by "scanning" a person, sent that data over the airwaves, then, made a perfect copy of somewhere else (sourcing new molecules from wherever) — would this copy believe they were the original?
He went on: suppose you kill the original — did you "transport" the person?
I'm off the opinion that transporting is pointless from a selfish point of view: your duplicate will get to Jupiter or wherever, and think they're you, but your consciousness will stop so you will never get to experience it. I don't know what experiment you could do to prove this either way.
Assuming there is nothing like a "soul" which persists only in relation to the current cells in your brain, you aren't even the same person you were 2 seconds ago. It's literally no different for the transporter. The "you" of 2 seconds ago is no longer conscious either. Since consciousness is so mysterious, I think admitting our ignorance on the issue is probably the most reasonable approach atm.
I think the rational way to look at it is this: your whole purpose is to set conditions for your future self's success. For example, if you agree to be put under anaesthesia or an induced coma, you are agreeing to die so that your future self will live.
When you step into the teleporter, there will actually be two future selves created: one will stay in the teleporter chamber, the other will go to the destination. So to decide if you should do it your not, you need to weigh the benefits to 3 people: (1) your future self if you don't go into the teleporter; (2) your future self who arrives at the destination; (3) your future self who stays back anyway, so who is very similar to (1). If (2) is much happier than (1) and (3) is not significantly less happy than (1), you should rationally do it. If (3) would be significantly less happy, there is also the option of considering having them (painlessly) killed in the process.
Either way, the person making the decision will not get to experience either (1), (2), or (3)'s experiences.
Oh wow, never thought of that before. Now I'm feeling a little creeped out. Kind of makes me think of the difference between disk and RAM when rebooting a computer
There is a sci-fi/horror game called SOMA that explores a related theme. It has an "easy" mode that makes it almost a walking simulator, so even if one is not a gamer, they'd probably enjoy it. Highly recommended.
I always imagine this will be the divide between rich and poor in the future. The more expensive technology will break the person down and send their atoms to the destination to be reconstructed, it will be slower but it will be the same person. The less expensive technology will scan the person send that data and they will be printed out from a a futuristic atomic printer in a process that kills the original.
I imagine a mining colony around the asteroid belt where the CEO uses the more expensive tech that is slower to visit every so often but the workers are forced to use the tech that kills them everyday but they are just a light beam of zero and ones on their "commute"
For that to matter, atoms would have to be unique. But an identical atom is literally identical. A transported you wouldn’t be any different than a printed you.
I rather suspect that “you” are simply information. If that information is copied, there’s another you—at least for the instant before that “you” starts having its own thoughts and receives information through its own senses.
For you to die on transport and “someone else” to come out the other side, you’d have to exist in some way separate from your physical self; which might suggest you can survive death anyway.
You are presupposing that there is a material difference between these two. Whenever you have a discontinuation of your conscious experience (for example, when you go to sleep and wake up), you can view that as one person disappearing, and a copy waking up in the morning. In fact, unless you believe in a transcendent soul as the seat of consciousness, it must be equivalent.
So, when you step into the teleporter, you can perfectly equivalently think of the person that will come up at the other side as a "copy" of you, or "future you". Let's say that the teleporter doesn't affect the local copy, it just creates a remote copy. What reason do you have to care more about the local copy than the remote copy? Why are you imagining that hacking the body up into tiny pieces, sending the pieces, and reassembling them would be any different from just killing the local copy and sending the information away? You'd still die and another person would be assembled on the other side.
Now, if you do believe in a transcendent soul (I don't), things get much more interesting. In fact, teleportation in this way would amount to experimentation of this hypothesis. If humans have unique souls given to them by some god at the moment of birth, then copy teleportation should not be able to produce two copies - either one of the body copies would not be conscious at all, since one of the bodies would not have a soul, OR the two bodies would be completely different in personality, as one would have the original soul, and the other would have the new soul, which would be a completely different person. For the "move" style teleportation, the risk would be that the disassembly process kills the body and causes the soul to be separated, so that the reassembled body ends up being soul-less and doesn't function, or is inhabited by a different soul, so it must act differently.
> Whenever you have a discontinuation of your conscious experience (for example, when you go to sleep and wake up), you can view that as one person disappearing, and a copy waking up in the morning. In fact, unless you believe in a transcendent soul as the seat of consciousness, it must be equivalent.
Only if our conscious experience truly stops during sleep (which as far as I know isn't actually backed up - there's a world of difference between minimally consciousness and stopped consciousness. From my understanding we simply don't know enough about consciousness) and if you believe whatever makes up experience isn't baked into the physical i.e. panpsychism, unless you want to classify that as a 'soul' (but then I'd reject your characterization of a soul as some magical thing that influences personality).
The sleep example was a bad idea, I only complicated things with it. In fact, my claim is that there is that the continuous nature of consciousness is an illusion in general. Just because I remember when I started writing this comment doesn't mean I am the same thing that started writing it. From one moment to another, everything is different, or at least there are no clear boundaries. Am I the same thing as the feritilzed egg? Present-me and past-me are just as related as copy1 and copy2 with a hypothetical perfect copy machine.
And even if 'whatever makes up experience is baked into the physical', that doesn't give a path to a time-stable identity. In fact, it makes that even less plausible, as it implies that every atom leaving your body, every cell that dies, and certainly something like losing a hand or getting a transplant, fundamentally changes your psyche at the physical level.
>In fact, my claim is that there is that the continuous nature of consciousness is an illusion in general.
I'm not sure what that even means. How can an experience be an illusion? It seems to me that at point everything just breaks apart.
>Just because I remember when I started writing this comment doesn't mean I am the same thing that started writing it.
The point isn't that you remember it (false memories are a thing), but that you're experiencing continuity from moment to moment.
If you think this continuity doesn't exist, how could you care about anything at all?
>From one moment to another, everything is different, or at least there are no clear boundaries
How is everything different? On the contrary, I'd say that actually most things seem to change only marginally and as time periods approach the infinitesimal, so do the changes. And I don't understand what you mean by clear boundaries. Why would there be any? Isn't lacking clear boundaries what actually makes it continuous.
>Am I the same thing as the feritilzed egg? Present-me and past-me are just as related as copy1 and copy2 with a hypothetical perfect copy machine.
If you reject continuity, sure, but otherwise the key difference is that there's continuity between the objects.
Let me ask you, why do you care about your future 'self'? That is, why do you not just maximize _your_ (current) pleasure, rather than caring about the experience of someone that you seem to think isn't actually yourself. At the very least, it seems like from your point of view there is no reason to place more importance on your future self than any other future person.
>And even if 'whatever makes up experience is baked into the physical', that doesn't give a path to a time-stable identity. In fact, it makes that even less plausible, as it implies that every atom leaving your body, every cell that dies, and certainly something like losing a hand or getting a transplant, fundamentally changes your psyche at the physical level.
'time-stable' identity doesn't mean that it must be forever frozen, but rather that it's continuous in the time dimension and happens slowly enough that the subject can experience this. You can replace parts of the 'soul material', without identity being lost as long.
An illusion is an experience of something that doesn't really happen. When you have a fever, you may experience a feeling of cold, but it is an illusion, you're actually very hot (it can be argued that it's not an illusion, the feeling of cold is just misinterpreted, but that's beside the point).
This experience of continuity is built from memory, I think I am the same person I was 2 minutes ago because I can remember what it was like to be that person. If I take a roofie or drink too much or sleep walk, I will feel that the things that I did happened to another person, because I don't remember them at all. Likewise, the experience of continuity is often lost - I generally experience sleep as "falling asleep" -> "waking up", even if an EEG would show that I am not even entirely losing consciousness for this time.
> How is everything different? On the contrary, I'd say that actually most things seem to change only marginally and as time periods approach the infinitesimal, so do the changes. And I don't understand what you mean by clear boundaries. Why would there be any? Isn't lacking clear boundaries what actually makes it continuous.
Yeah, that phrase was really bad, I didn't get my point across at all. What I wanted to say is that in physics you actually look at every moment in time individually, even if functions of time are continuous; and you look at every piece of every object individually - any object can be equivalently represented as multiple objects held together by strings (or springs). There is no need or use for object identity across time.
> Let me ask you, why do you care about your future 'self'? That is, why do you not just maximize _your_ (current) pleasure, rather than caring about the experience of someone that you seem to think isn't actually yourself. At the very least, it seems like from your point of view there is no reason to place more importance on your future self than any other future person.
Because in this view, a single experience is extremely fleeting, far too little to gain any great pleasure. Also, my future "self" is the person I can empathize most with in the world, so I feel it is natural to want to help him. Not to mention, for any desire I have, he is the most likely to actually see it through.
Also, we often sacrifice our happiness for other people, often ones that we have much less reason to empathize with than our future selves. Not to mention, of course I occasionally sacrifice my future self's happiness for my current one - such as eating an extra piece of cake, or drinking another glass. But there has to be some limit, especially when I have such an intimate idea of how much the future person will suffer.
> 'time-stable' identity doesn't mean that it must be forever frozen, but rather that it's continuous in the time dimension and happens slowly enough that the subject can experience this.
Yes, I think we mean the same thing by time-stable. It doesn't have to be frozen, but it must be well defined for more than one moment of time (it's pretty trivial to define an object at time T, even the Atlantic Ocean, but it's much harder to define an object that remains itself over some interval T0-T1).
> You can replace parts of the 'soul material', without identity being lost as long.
This is the part I don't understand. In the materialistic computational theory of the mind, it's pretty clear why the mind doesn't change just because cells die and are replaced, or just because every atom in a body is replaced. But if each atom carries a part of the soul, I really don't understand how this works, or at least what it buys you in terms of identity or mind.
> unless you believe in a transcendent soul as the seat of consciousness, it must be equivalent.
That is a big claim considering we have no idea what causes consciousness. It is however certain that the copy is not you. Whether the original gets destroyed on teleportation or not, the original you will not feel, see, hear etc anything that the copy does.
That's not certain at all, and depends on how we define "you". And, as you say, we don't know enough about consciousness to flesh out that definition.
If consciousness depends only on the layout of neurons in the brain (for example), then a teleporter that destroys your body and makes an atomically (quantum-ly?) identical copy at the destination actually does move "you" from one place to another. But if there's more to it than just that, perhaps it doesn't.
Sure, the two copies won't feel, see, hear anything in common. But I also don't hear the sounds I heard yesterday, or feel the sand I felt last year, or even taste the tea I tasted this morning. Regardless of what gives rise to consciousness, there is no continuity in physics, every moment is separate, even if it is caused by the previous one. If you copy me, I am not either of the copies, I am the thing that existed for a brief moment while the copies were created. Even if I stepped into the teleporter, stood right there, and a copy emerged 2m away, the one that stood in the pad is no more identical to the one that walked onto the lad than the one that materialized 2m away.
There is no known process in physics that could give meaning to that identity. So regardless of whether consciousness is emergent or quantum or computational or whatever we will discover it to be, unless it is transcendental, there is no way to physically define this continuity or give it some special meaning, such that teleportation would be meaningfully different from the normal passage of time, or that perfectly copying an individual could be said to produce anything different than moving them.
> There is no known process in physics that could give meaning to that identity.
I am arguing that we don't know enough about consciousness or about the universe to claim there is no difference between the original and the copy. So saying "there is no known process in physics" doesn't undermine my position.
Here is one possibility, perhaps a bit silly, but if we are in a simulated universe, not that I think this is likely, but if we are then each person could maybe have a unique hash. A copy then would have a different hash to the original.
Like I said I am not saying we are in a simulation. It is just an example scenario where a perfect copy would not be the same as a move.
Sure, there is always the possibility of new physics being discovered. But we know A LOT about the universe, and the fact that we can explain so much about how things work, from the atomic to the galactic level, without any kind of a time-stable identity being necessary does suggest that we shouldn't hold our breath hoping for one to be discovered.
Also note, a hash or a mind in a higher-level universe is exactly a transcendent soul: it transcends what we call physical reality (or it transcends 'the simulation' in that story). Just because it's framed in scientific concepts doesn't make it any more or less scientific than Brahman or Christian souls.
Yes, we know a lot, but we don't understand consciousness or even why the universe exists at all. You are probably right, there is unlikely to be a necessity for a "time-stable identity". But who knows, as Lord Kelvin said 1901 “there is nothing new to be discovered in physics now"!
If you are killing someone to print them elsewhere why not print more copies? Teleporting people this way seems to be a faster horses way of thinking method of travel.
There is a long tradition in academic philosophy of using this model of teleportation as a device for investigating questions of personal identity. Derek Parfit's 'Reasons and Persons' is probably the best-known treatment [1].
I think there are good reasons to believe this is not generally how the writers of Star Trek thought the transporters in their stories were supposed to work, but they weren't always perfectly consistent on the subject.
> I think there are good reasons to believe this is not generally how the writers of Star Trek thought the transporters in their stories were supposed to work, but they weren't always perfectly consistent on the subject.
I remember one episode of one of the TV shows (I forget which one), they used a transporter to transport a bomb off the ship, so it detonated in space instead. If transportation is converting matter to information, transmitting the information, then reassembling it at the other end, why would one bother doing that to a bomb? Just do the first step of converting matter to information, and then instead of transmitting it and reassembling it somewhere else, just send the information to /dev/null
(I think if someone was designing a bomb, in a situation in which such technology was known, they'd try to design it so that any attempt to dematerialise/transport it would detonate it instantly.)
In the philosophy of personal identity, teleportation is an intellectual contrivance only intended to help clarify thinking about personal identity. Another version of the same concept is the 'Swampman' thought experiment [1], which is also obviously not intended to be taken seriously as a scientific possibility. Most thought experiments in the philosophy of mind and personal identity have this character, e.g. Mary's Room [2], the China Brain [3], Philosophical Zombies [4], the Chinese Room [5] etc.
Thought experiments are often not intended to be carried out empirically (Schrodinger did not poison cats, Maxwell could not summon demons, Einstein did not throw people off buildings or construct clocks made of light, and so on), but they are nevertheless useful tools that can lead to insights about the real world, or serve as inspiration for actual experiments (Bell tests [6] are perhaps a good example of this, as they derive directly from Ian Bell's careful consideration of a famous thought experiment of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen [7]).
Quantum teleportation is also of course a real phenomenon [8], and it does have some of the same properties as the imaginary teleportation device that Parfit and other philosophers consider in their work, albeit that it has only been demonstrated at the atomic scale for now.
but all the scientists you mentioned engaged in thought experiments that actually had real life parallels. Philosophising about personal identity, is completely irrelevant to us since it isn't, and never will be, possible to switch bodies.
The original article being discussed in this thread is about a doctor who believed that a form of 'body-switching' should be possible for humans, albeit in a relatively crude surgically-mediated fashion.
With the benefit of current scientific knowledge, most people who think carefully about personhood identify the brain as the seat of consciousness, and will tend to assume that any procedure that leaves the brain intact will leave the person intact too. If a brain (or a head in this case) can receive a 'body transplant' though, some will find it natural to wonder whether other radical interventions in the nervous system are possible; for instance whether subdivisions of the brain can be successfully transplanted, and what the effects of that might be.
That kind of speculation in turn prompts questions about the consequences that physical changes in the brain might have for conceptions of personal identity. Thought experiments about teleportation — in which all the physical matter of a brain is replaced while preserving its structure and function — offer a template for thinking about these questions by allowing their scientific and ethical consequences to be examined in the most extreme cases. The most extreme cases may or may not be realisable, but legitimate conclusions can nevertheless be arrived at by thinking about them.
Many of the most influential thought experiments in science were never conceived with the belief that they could be carried out in reality; that is often why they were thought experiments rather than laboratory exercises. The purpose of thought experiments is typically to help extend the theoretical investigation of scientific and philosophical ideas into realms beyond the reach of current empirical methods. They are a tool for considering interesting questions where attempts to test them cannot be made; sometimes this helps to inform practical experimental work, and sometimes the thought experiment itself is sufficient to reach reliable conclusions, if the reasoning is rigorous, and the underlying theory is demonstrably valid in enough areas where verification is possible for its extension to be trusted.
The person who wrote the Star Trek TNG Technical Manual mentioned this, and how - as described in the show - it's probably killing you and building a clone with your memories instead of transporting you. He thought about tweaking the lore so it didn't do that, using wormholes or the like, but decided to stay true to the show's established canon.
Star Wars: cloning takes ages, clones have to be raised and trained. Lets make a clone army to fight the mass produced robot army.
Star Trek: cloning takes seconds. You can have as many copies of a veteran warrior as you want. Dangerous mission? just send in the red shirts and a few highly trained veterans in the hope that nobody important dies (again).
I found it interesting how Star Trek (at least TNG) avoids the ethical dilemmas via vague technological handwaving. Because, right, if you beam down a bunch of redshirts and they die, can't you just have the transporter remember their patterns and resurrect them? Of course they'd have no memories of the away mission that killed them, but that seems like a small price to pay to avoid death.
But instead we have "pattern buffers" that "degrade" quickly, and presumably keeping around copies of the full quantum states of many humans would require too much storage.
Schlock Mercenary does a great job handling the nature of consciousness boundaries and death in a post-Singularity world (technologically speaking - digital minds retain their own personalities in this story), as well as some of the ethical concerns.
It really takes off in the book "A Little Immortality":
There was an episode of some scifi anthology show where interstellar FTL travel is achieved by a similar matter copying.
Occasionally something goes wrong and the source is not "deconstructed" properly by the equipment so the procedure is for the transporter crew to terminate the original person.
I feel it's more like a gap in memory. We are usually not trained to remember our dreams. Even if I'm waken up in a non-REM phase, there is usually a kind of remembrance of how I felt during sleep.
Edit: Made my statement more vague. There is definitely more to sleep though than turning consciousness off and on again.
The video game SOMA asks this question yet in the game both the original and the copy live. It seemed like the copy still thought they were the original and the original wrestled with the idea that their conscience wasn't transfered.
Something similar happens in telephony today. When you talk to your Mum over a phone that uses a predictive vocoder, you're not really talking to your Mum. You're talking to a voice synthesiser that is being instructed to talk like your Mum.
Does it really matter though? It's just a different way of encoding the information. These things force one to think about the nature of what is real and what matters. Is the important thing actually hearing your Mum (whatever that means), or making the connection with her at an emotional level?
A science fiction book explored the idea that this destruction was imperfect leaving behind an echo that could only interact with other echos. I was called "Echo Round his Bones"
Transplantin a twins brain would still render the person a complete legume, not even the cranial nerve connections would be the same(sight, smell, hearing, touch of the face), let alone the spine nerves.
All the nerve wiring would be wrong.
DNA does not contain all the intricate nerve connections, just a meta-summary on how to build them.
I was talking about the cloning philosophical question (e.g. being copied by a Star Trek transporter), not the surgery which I agree sounds very risky.
Reminds me of Anime One Piece where they want to fix the ship named Merry. But at the end luffy crew realized even if they fix the ship they have to replace the core component and after they replace the ship would no longer be merry.
At the end they had to free merry by burning it :)
This, like so many other “philosophical quæstions” is a futile quibble of semantics that answers nothing.
The simple answer to this problem, and many other problems, is that the exercise of giving clouds of atoms in vicinity to one another “identities” is not one based in salient thought. — there is no such thing.
All Theseus' Ship shows is that, indeed, this theory is flawed, and easily reduced to the absurd, but that is a trivial conclusion an unindoctrinated child should be able to easily make in a multitude of ways. It's as though one come with a thought experiment that demonstrates that the borders of countries are an artificial man-made construct, rather than an actual physical property of the universe. — it is rather obvious.
I tend to agree. It's difficult to draw a good shell around what I call myself. Yes, there is the body, the brain, some part there somewhere that is "Me", but I also have children, and ideas that are part of my identity.
I tend to draw the border of self a little looser than most. I'm a human, a living being, and a piece of me extends both forward and backward in time far beyond the start and end of this meat bag at a keyboard.
It's a “simple answer to many problems” in the same way “Hoṃœopathy is nonsense.” is a “simple answer” to explain the complexity of “how can water have a memory?”.
There is no problem, and there is no answer. There is only a complex problem from assuming a falsehood and trying to explain it. — there is nothing arrogant about calling out obvious nonsense.
> The simple answer to this problem, and many other problems, is that the exercise of giving clouds of atoms in vicinity to one another “identities” is not one based in salient thought. — there is no such thing.
Are you implying identies don't exist? Because that either has to be sophistry (i.e. trolling) or insanity.
The notion of an object, in the human sense, doesn't have any solid relationship with the physical world. I hope we are agreed on this much. For some objects, there is a stronger correlation between the human concept and the physical world (i.e. you could find a formal definition that matches to some extent what I mean by a particular spoon), but for other objects in our minds there is nothing in the physical world that truly matches our understanding (the Atlantic Ocean, as an object separate from the Pacific Ocean, is not a physical object, it is just a human abstraction).
In particular, our notion of the identity of an object has no relationship with the physical world, as the Ship of Theseus shows. Our idea that objects "shatter" and "transform", so that if I break a glass the pieces are a different object than the glass; or if I mix of bowl of flower with water and roll it into a dough, the dough is a different object than the bowl of flour and the water - these are not physically definable notions.
When it comes to human identity, the identity perceived by myself, the same logic MUST apply, unless you believe in a soul. The fact that I can think of myself as the same identity as myself 2 seconds ago, or myself when I was a handful of cells in my mother's womb, is obviously an artifice of the human mind. There is no such continuity in the physical world.
And this has all been said from the perspective of classical physics. If you go into QM, where any notion of identity of particles would contradict the theory and observations of it, things really break down.
“exist"? I would hardly use such words in this frame of reference.
I'm saying that “identities” are a fuzzy human “You know it when you see it, and different men see it differently.” category that is bereft of any definition that can be objectively measured and reasoned about, and that what I just said is a trivial and obvious conclusion.
They “exist” in the same way that borders between different oceans exist, arbitrarily drawn, and different people will think differently as to where they lie.
If you wish to call that an “existence”, then be my guest, though many others would præfer to not call it such. — ironically the border between “existence” and “nonexistence” is of a similar quality.
> Do triangles exist? Is the definition of triangle "bereft of any definition that can be objectively measured"?
Certainly not, the definition of a triangle is quite a rigorously defined mathematical construct.
> Is the Ship of Theseus fundamentally different than a triangle, or is it merely a difference of degree?
It is not a difference of quantity but quality. A triangle is an objectively defined, mathematical concept; identities are as I said “You know it when you see it, and different men see it differently.”. — you will not find many mathematicians disagreeing on what is, and is not a triangle.
Another fundamental difference is that a triangle is an abstract reasoning tool, not an empirical one, and no mathematician would suggest that real life objects are, or are not, triangles.
> Ask any random human to define some extremely complex mathematical entity, and you'll get various fuzzy answers.
A lay human being with no mathematical understanding perhaps, but all of these entities have been defined rigorously in mathematical terms.
> Does that mean complex math doesn't really exist?
You were the one who speaks in such terms as “existence”. I will not have you put words in my mouth.
All I said is that one has an objective, rigorous definition such that you will find that every single educated man in the field agrees on what is, and what is not a triangle, such that a machine proof assistant can be fed this definition, and verify machine-level proofs that reason about them, and that the other lacks this such that you find that nigh any man, expert or not, has a different definition of what constitutes the identity of a physical object, and where a new object starts.
The fact that borders exist doesn’t imply that there are different centers of power. In fact, for most of history borders were notoriously ill-defined.
But power in practice does not adhere to how different parties arbitrarily define where borders lie.
Most of nations of the world officially define Crimea to be within the Ukrainian border, but it is the Russian government who wields the actual, practical power there.
It took a rather long time for many countries to stop defining mainland China as falling within the power of the R.O.C. government, despite the R.O.C. wielding no practical power there any more, and the R.O.C. still defines mainland China as falling within it's power.
If “borders” of nations were defined descriptively based on sovereign entities having control over them, then they would certainly be more useful, but, this would also assume a simplified world where it is easy to decide what powerbase is sovereign, and what powerbase binarily has control over what surface of the planet; it is often not so simple and often multiple parties vie for control over a single area, and whether a powerbase be sovereign is not so easy to simply answer.
If the law is observed broken once, that is a falsification of the entire theory.
And I assume you live in a rather peaceful area if you think powers adheres to borders. In many parts of the world governments have a harm time enforcing their law upon fringe areas where effective anarchy is quite common. — the picture is certainly not as simple as you paint it.
The idea that one can transplant a brain and thus a human's consciousness is based on erroneous concepts. Because humans currently have only physical senses they assume, naturally, that all of reality is based on matter. The situation however is that the brain just mirrors the reality of consciousness. Therefore the brain is not the center of consciousness, but only reflects the activities of mind. Just as looking in a mirror you see a reflection of a person which is not the reality of the person but only a reflection of something that is real, so seeing the activity of the brain is only the reflection of the activity of mind.
Evidence requires observation. Observation in this case requires a strenuous experiment (see 10,000 years of religious/mystic technology for "seeing far" for more about that).
Get back to me when people are swapping brain hemispheres with each other. Then we can have a meaningful discussion over the nature of self in a transplant scenario.
Even if they spends years in physical therapy and in the end aren't able to move and walk like a "normal" person, this could transform the lives of many people in impossibly meaningful ways given it works even to the level face transplants work today.