if i cut my arm off am i still me? how many pieces of me can i remove and still be me? at what point do i remove too much and am no longer myself?
probably the point where i die from removing too much lol but assuming im kept alive somehow for that
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yesman@lemmy.world 4 days ago
YSK the idea that the “self” or “consciousness” is centered in the brain is called Duality and it’s a philosophical position, not a scientific one. It’s the same idea that “mind” and “body” are separate things and it’s most common iteration is the idea of the “soul”.
You probably can’t upload yourself to a computer or be preserved in a frozen brain.
ngdev@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
Windex007@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I mean, there was that one guy where the mob cut off his entire body
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 3 days ago
it wasn’t until recently Robert-François Damiens became something of an aspirational tale rather than a cautionary one.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Our whole nervous system is a big neural network that extends through the entire body. There’s additional networks at each of our organs and muscle groups. They are already known to contribute to finer control of the organs, eg the brain doesn’t need to send signals to each individual heart muscle for each beat, the heart’s “brain” can handle that on its own. Reflexes and muscle memory can be handled more locally, too. Same with stress level, your liver might decide you’re irritable because of all the alcohol it needs to process.
But at the end of the day, it’s just a massive self-learning neural net that can encode other things. If you play a music instrument, maybe your finger neurons store more of the memory of how to play specific songs than you’d expect. So if you’re an expert piano player and lose your hands but replace them with prosthetics that can easily outperform normal hands, you might not be able to play the songs you could expertly do before. Hell, maybe even foot tapping along with a beat means that part of the experience in hearing or remembering some or all songs involves neurons in your legs.
You’d still feel like you, but parts would be missing. It’s not very well understood to what extent, but it does look like there is an extent, and not just for the gut “brain”.
Rhaedas@fedia.io 4 days ago
What's the philosophical term for thinking that "you" are not in the brain either, but rather riding along the electrochemical signals and formations throughout the brain, and this would include the rest of the body in the sense of feeling and control of it and its feedbacks (which is the point of OP). It's not really duality or a soul, as its dependent on both body and mind to be functioning correctly and intermingled.
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
So are you saying it’s literally impossible even with future technology to put a medically preserved brain in a new body and have that be a person that can do stuff and you could talk to, or just that it wouldn’t be the same person or consciousness somehow?
The former seems pretty out there as an idea. There are people whose brains are cut off from the rest of their nervous system and are still alive. The other connection the brain has to the body is the bloodstream, but blood transfusions are a thing and doesn’t kill you.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 3 days ago
i remember reading something back in the 90s that something like that had been done on a primate (maybe it was a head transplant and not a brain transplant), and it only survived a few days or something. given that, not a lot of people were that excited about the prospect of getting new bodies every few days. maybe i’m misremembering.
chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
I think most of that is just because it’s really tricky to get right though and there’s a lot of medical complications, not because it’s impossible for philosophical reasons.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I’m not disagreeing with you
Amir@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
What do you mean it’s not a scientific one, you can put someone’s head on a machine keeping them alive and they would still be the same consciousness…
scarabic@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Never have so many unrelated points been made so quickly, incisively, and fruitlessly!
Windex007@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Not exactly related, but I think the typical conception of self being centered around the head at all is maybe just because that’s where our eyes and ears are. Curious how deaf and blind people conceptualize the physical location of thier consciousness
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Wouldn’t the typical conception of self being centered around the head be due to the fact that that’s where all of our memories are stored, bodily signals are sent to instructions to the body are sent from, where emotions are processed, and cognition is generated?
Windex007@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I could be wrong, but I don’t think awareness that the brain being “where memories are stored” is innate. I think that’s something we are told. If I’m recalling correctly, a surprising amount of what we perceive as cognition is offloaded to other distributed parts of our nervous system, so it’s maybe not even quite as true as we think it is.
Rhaedas@fedia.io 4 days ago
If you're playing a 1st person game and it's very immersive, your "self" migrates to the screen point, i.e. right behind the character's eyes location. So I think your statement is right. A good test would be to ask someone blind from birth (to avoid previous experience with sight) where their sense of being is. Maybe it's a bit back, between the ears?