It seems that very few men lose their brains, but quite a few men lose their minds. Following Leibniz’s law of identity, for mind and brain to be one and the same they would have to be indiscernable.
What of permanent and irrecoverable amnesia? Rare but nevertheless. If you lose your mind, in the sense that you lose all connectedness and continuity with who you once were, would you still be you? Or would you be a new person?
And what of brain transplants? If your brain was transplanted into another body, and a new brain was transplanted into your body, then which would be you? If you had to choose which would inherit your posessions, to whch would they go? Would your mind survive such an operation? Or would you lose your old mind and be forced to find a new one?
It is often experienced in life that people undergo radical transformations. It is not uncommon to hear it said of someone “He’s not himself” or “He is not the same person he once was”. Are such statements true? Do people leave themselves behind and become a new person? And if that is true, what was it exactly that they shed of that old person? Was it their mind? Does changing who you are mean to lose your mind and create a new mind?
Decartes thought the pineal gland in the brain connected to the soul. I don’t know if scientists have found another function proper to it yet.
According to Aristotle’s work (De Amima), the soul is immaterial and uses the body’s imagination which must be physical, since it deals with physical things and the mind with non-imagined things.
I would theorise based on this, that if you lost your mind or developed multiple-personality-disorder, your imagination would be mixed-up and the intellect would not know what to make of it.
In a brain transplant, if the Descartes guessed right, your brain would have a new body, but you would probably have many memories of the last person in cellular memory. If Decartes was not right, you would probably die as certainly as decapitation would do it, i think.
I have a friend who suffers form mental illness. They’re on medication. They say when you start taking a drug there is a frightening feeling of their thinking changing. This probably makes sense if the brain is a tool for the mind.
a quote here, “[the pineal gland] is sensitive to different levels of light and is essential to the functioning of an animal’s biological clock. In many animals, including humans, the pineal gland synthesizes a hormone called melatonin in periods of darkness. Melatonin synthesis is halted when light hits the retina of the eye, sending impulses to the gland via the optic nerve. Besides influencing daily, or circadian, rhythms such those of as sleep and temperature, the pineal gland and melatonin appear to direct annual rhythms and seasonal changes in animals.”
from what i have found it seems to be fairly accepted that the glad produces melatonin (precursor to serotonin)
I liken the nuerons of the brain to ants in an ant hill. It would be very difficult to accomplish any sort of communication with an ant. However, the ant hill can convey a great deal of information. Likewise, if the mind is the collective result of the actions of millions or billions of individual ant-like nuerons, then it follows that any disruption to the ant hill would impact the mind. However, what I am wondering about is when all is well with the ant hill and yet the mind departs anyway. Or the mind makes radical shifts and reconstructs itself in entirely different ways such that it is nearly impossible to recognize the new as being a continuation of the old.
[size=125].::[/size]Speaking strictly from a medical science standpoint and putting aside metaspiritual musings for the moment: Whereas the whole of one’s sense of “self” has been proven to reside in the brain (i.e., not your left arm, or your heart, or your right big toe, etc.)[size=125]::.[/size]
Yes, although a totally different you.
You’d still be you, just not the same you.
Why naturally, the real you would reside in whomever had the original brain. Working from the premise established at this post’s outset, it would be preposterous to posit anything else!
Y’know, Caveman. That is a damned good question, starting with would one’s “mind” survive the “move.” Damned good question, possibly unknowable until the first one is (shivers) …uhm, actually performed!
People’s personalities can appear fundamentally altered in response or reaction to trauma, yes, but unless we are speaking of permanent and complete amnesia then such statements as you cite are true only in a partial and/or superficial sense.
Just to reaffirm: I don’t believe it possible for one to consciously make a choice to “leave their old selves behind.” Barring physical brain trauma, the self is still the same old self, even if new and improved for the drastic better.
That is a clever analogy, likening brain & neurons to ant hill & ants! And you raise some TOUGH questions. Even if I put my metaspiritual hat on - I’m hard-pressed to conjur up answers.
Maybe Alien Corpuscle Bath would care to take a stab at this shit. (You know that whenever I get to cussin’, it means I’m pretty stumped!)
I don’t think a brain transplant would be possible, especially with modern science as it is. We would have to have a very good understanding ot the human spirit, and it’s relation to the human brain. If you transplanted your brain, who is to say that your spirit would go with it? I hold the belief that coma patients are bodies without souls. With enough shock to your body, (in theory) it causes one’s soul to leave the body assuming it is dead. It’s my guess that if you had a brain transplant the result would ultimately be coma. That’s not to say that you would stay that way forever. You would probably have the same chance of recovering as any other coma patient would (which isn’t too good). Also, you would have to match the brain and body geneticly to some extent otherwise the body would begin attacking the brain just like any it would any other mismatched organ transplanted. It may be even more complex with brains, however, due to cerebral fluids, and other things little understood by science. Anyway, I guarantee you it’s not going to happen any time in the near future. You would have to remove the brain from the skull, without spilling too much blood in the process of cutting the skull open, and somehow keep all the vitals flowing through it in the process of transplanting. The brain isn’t like other organs in the body which can be put on ice, and still work afterwards. It’s quite finicky like that.
As far as the identity thing goes, like I’ve said before, in my belief your memories are simply the ego. It is what you identify your physical self by. Were you to aquire amnesia you would still have a tendency to exhibit the same idiosyncrasies inherent to your being that were inherent with your last identity. Spirit is the essence of thought. It guides beliefs and behaviors, and only establishes identity in the physical realm. Amnesia would probably be like being born again. Just as confusing for sure.
Damn Alien you know, I hadn’t considered that. I don’t know then, in terms of sheer plausibility, whether it could EVER done. The brain requires a constant supply of oxygenated blood. CONSTANT. You can’t just chuck 'er in a bowl of ice-chips while you’re busy doing other things. Heh.
Prolificisticationist asked me to post this here so here goes. What if (and I am not saying that I believe this either) one posits brain as the receiver of the mind, and your brain tunes to receive from your mind. So mind doesn’t exist inside the brain, but outside. So, in the case of transplants the mind would stay intact, since after the transplant it would still receive from the same source. This goes with the theories of Rupert Sheldrake and morphogenetic fields, google will help if you’re interested.
Hmm, a thought just came up. What if schizophrenia is actually an inability to restrict what you receive, so you receive from other minds too? Besides the subject, but it’s funny anyways
One interesting facet of the brain/mind problem is that it appears not all desire may be in the brain. I watched on the news many years ago the accounts of two people who received heart transplants; each reported having peculiar desires several months after their operations. One gentleman had an odd urge to play the guitar, and promptly bought one and began playing. He was surprised to later find out that his donor was an avid guitarist, one who took much joy in playing music. The other fellow, oddly enough, began knitting! He received the heart of a lady that loved to knit.
In light of the above information, the mind/body problem still exists, but perhaps there are other factors than merely the brain that determine identity.
The irrecoverable loss of memory would create an entirely new and different person. But medically you would still be you.
This seems fatastic to me. For two things to be the same thing, they have to share all characteristics in common, including space and time. How could that new person still be me? The ONLY thing we have in common would be space and time. A better explanation seems to me to be that I would no longer exist. Who this new person might be is yet to be discovered, but I am gone forever. Irrecoverably lost. It is like the I Robot example of the robot’s positronic brain getting blanked and reformatted.
The cellular memory theory,
It sounds like urban legend to me. I get a heart transplant from a mass murderer and suddenly turn evil. Good scary movie fodder, not reality. I think.
The mind exists independent of the brain? The brain is merely a receiver.
Well, I began my discussion with this very point. The mind and the brain are not one and the same because you can lose your mind but still have your brain in-tact and working fine. It seems undeniable. However, it seems impossible to lose your brain and still have your mind.
The mind transplants along with the brain
I would of course be compelled to agree because your mind is going to go if your brain goes. Whether or not a brain transplant is ever medically possible (I tend to think it will be possible someday) is beside the point. If it were possible, it seem evident and undeniable that one of two results would happen, Either your mind would be lost forever or your mind would reside wherever your brain resides. It seems impossible that your mind would remain behind in your body absent the brain.
I know. I know it sounds weird, but I’m tellin’ ya man: He and I both saw it on some (legitimate - not tabloid) news program, we just can’t remember which one!
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Now allow me to point you guys in another direction. (You can click on the quote for its source.)
My dad underwent a quintuple bypass procedure in 1993 and, almost to a letter - exhibited the same personality change as described above. From that time onward, he was never the same man again (he was still himself, but with that incredible streak of meanness). It made (and still makes) me so goddamned mad that, if I were to be given the choice today of having open-heart surgery or dying… Well. It makes me mad.
In the medical literature it’s referred to as (and I’m not making this up…) open-heart psychosis. This doesn’t happen in every case, obviously or there’d be 20/20 specials & Primetime specials all over the place. But I wonder how this might fit into our discussion of identity, brain, and mind? I assure you, you don’t ever want to see a loved one change like my dad did. It just tears your heart out (unintentional pun) - he was incredibly cruel, spiteful, hurtful, mercilous.
Maybe having a near death experience just turns 20% of the people down the way of selfishness? Trauma is always the catalyst for change in human behavior, whether for virtue or for vice. Selfishness is a way, it is just not The Way. I could see how a man could decide that whatever time I have left I am living it for ME, to please ME, and to hell with everybody else. Not saying I agree with the choice but it is a choice.
In a sense, the brain is just a signal organizer. Its a secondary system created by the body to manage the signals the body produces. The mind might be in the whole body, just with the most frenzied acitivity in the brain. The mind here being the result of a synthesis of brain and body.
So in the hypothetical brain transplant the signal organizer would be the same but with different incoming singals.
So lets imagaine that we took the brain from Thomas and placed that into the body of Richard, then you would get a whole new person. He would be a synthesis of traits from both the old Thomas and the old Richard. Because some of Thomas’ traits came from his body, not his brain.
I am no longer ever surprised by the radical transformations of which men are capable. I would bet on states of chracter tending to repeat those actions by which they were formed. A snake tends to behave like a snake. But men are quite capable of choosing alternative behaviors. It useally takes trauma of some sort to trigger such a change. So I would keep a close eye on any trauma victim for behavior changes.
As to the coldness of the behavior, men have always been capable of cold-blooded, selfish, calculating behavior. It is common place for Parents to betray the trust of their children. In the words of Three Dog Night, t is easy to be hard.
But yes, I know I take a cold, hard attitude toward a selfish parent who betrays the trust of his children. It is inexcusable to me, and I do not look for urban myths such as cellular memory to explain or justify a selfish bastard.
(You know that whenever I get to cussin’, it means I’m pretty stumped!)
You and ol’ Alien Corpuscle Bath are going to hit it off just fine, I can see that right now.