>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.

I linked to an article about embodied cognition. It’s a serious topic studied by scientists and philosophers.

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).

Edit: clarified first sentence.

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.