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 once read someone describe academics as “floating heads with bodies attached.” I think that could apply to society at large.