Mary Shelley wrote something about this a couple of centuries ago.
If a brain transplant were possible...
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Mary Shelley wrote something about this a couple of centuries ago.
Not exactly. That was about reanimation of the dead, while this was a pretty realistic treatment of what the experience of waking up in a new body might be like.
I tend to be cautious of claims that brain activity creates consciousness. I just find that hard to believe that consciousness would be a function of electrical activity. I don't think electrical activity is that special. I wouldn't expect a computer to become aware just because it is processing so much data. I don't think speed or parallelism add anything new to that - it's still just electronics and nothing more. It doesn't seem feasible to me for a mind to be defined by electronics.
I'm more inclined to think of the brain activity and consciousness as being correlated. Where the brain stores information and processes data electronically, encoding for memories and personality also, but that in itself isn't conscious. Outside of that, universally throughout space, imagine some kind of conscious ether, which you might choose to think of as god.
A "person" occurs where the two interact. So the brain serves a secondary role as an antenna, allowing its electronic information to be experienced by this universal consciousness, and that is who/what we are.
I'm more inclined to think of the brain activity and consciousness as being correlated. Where the brain stores information and processes data electronically, encoding for memories and personality also, but that in itself isn't conscious. Outside of that, universally throughout space, imagine some kind of conscious ether, which you might choose to think of as god.
A "person" occurs where the two interact. So the brain serves a secondary role as an antenna, allowing its electronic information to be experienced by this universal consciousness, and that is who/what we are.
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There is now evidence showing that the heart has brain functions - it contains 40000 neurons. So, actual intelligence resides in the heart. Might this not affect the personality of a brain transplant patient?
http://www.heartmath.org/research/science-of-the-heart.html
http://www.heartmath.org/research/science-of-the-heart.html
These are sensors, they do not process the information, the brain does that. Sure there might be some preprocessing done in the heart region before its sent to the brain, but I wouldnt call that an "intelligence". It's pretty much automated.from said article said:
So this neuron bundle in the heart is a bit like a modem?
As a preprocessor, it's taking a large set of data from the heart, inferring some general facts from that, and sending that little bit of data to the brain, so avoiding the huge bandwidth (big nerve fibre) that would otherwise be required.
Yeah, at least I guess so... I'm an engineer, not a doctor
So this neuron bundle in the heart is a bit like a modem?
As a preprocessor, it's taking a large set of data from the heart, inferring some general facts from that, and sending that little bit of data to the brain, so avoiding the huge bandwidth (big nerve fibre) that would otherwise be required.
.A few things...
First, there's more then just electrical activity going on in the brain... the activity going along synapses, for instance. Secondly, I don't think anyone believes that it's the electrical activity that's all that special or that anything in the brain is really a function of it... rather, electrical activity is merely functioning as a convenient medium for the information processing itself to take place in. So just because the brain runs using electrical activity doesn't mean that any function would have to be emergent from electricity... rather, it would be emergent from the structure that was created with that electricity. To be a little more specific, it's the physical structure of the neurons themselves that's important, not what they're using as a transport medium.
And lastly, a computer's information processing isn't built out of electricity either... it's again the structure that's important, in this case the transistors, not the electricity itself. The fact that both the human brain and computers both use electricity to varying degrees is practically incidental... on a functional level, they're both entirely different. In fact you can build a computer without using any electricity if you are so inclined; manipulating electricity is just convenient because it's the only way we know how to build a computer that's small and fast. But it isn't the electricity that imbues a computer with its ability to process information... it's the structure that does that.
And the gut has about a 100,000,000 neurons, but I wouldn't call it intelligent either. Neuronal numbers alone do not define intelligence. It's about the nature of the processing that occurs. Intelligence is the ability to interpret stimuli in a particular cognitive way. That occurs in the brain, not in the heart or the gut (with the perennial caveat of "as far as current science can tell").
What this topic is really about though, isn't intelligence, but consciousness (which governs our conception of self/identity)... that age-old question of where is "the seat of the soul"?
Personally I believe that our sense of a soul or a self arises out of critical mass of neuronal connectivity/complexity/processing that occurs in humans in the brain. Therefore the brain acts as seat, so a brain transplant is done for the benefit of the brain being transplanted, not the body it's been transplanted into. Essentially, as farmkid says, it's really a body transplant (nice phrase, by the way).
The nature is exactly what they're talking about. This is what the researchers actually said:
"We observed that the heart was acting as though it had a mind of its own and was profoundly influencing the way we perceive and respond to the world. In essence, it appeared that the heart was affecting intelligence and awareness."
Sounds as though they're also talking about consciousness when they mention "awareness".
Here's the link, again:
http://www.heartmath.org/research/science-of-the-heart.html
They seem to be categorically suggesting these neurons are of the type found in the brain. Here are the actual slides for anyone curious:
http://www.heartmath.org/research/research-our-heart-brain.html
It may not be just a matter of a new personality arriving with the new brain... According to this research, the host heart may have some input, too. It might be that by the end of the procedure, we are left with an entirely new person, a strange sort of hybrid, and perhaps very different from both former individuals. A bit like the symbiont lifeform featured in DS9... Trek reference in MISC - YAY!
"We observed that the heart was acting as though it had a mind of its own and was profoundly influencing the way we perceive and respond to the world. In essence, it appeared that the heart was affecting intelligence and awareness."
Sounds as though they're also talking about consciousness when they mention "awareness".
Here's the link, again:
http://www.heartmath.org/research/science-of-the-heart.html
They seem to be categorically suggesting these neurons are of the type found in the brain. Here are the actual slides for anyone curious:
http://www.heartmath.org/research/research-our-heart-brain.html
It may not be just a matter of a new personality arriving with the new brain... According to this research, the host heart may have some input, too. It might be that by the end of the procedure, we are left with an entirely new person, a strange sort of hybrid, and perhaps very different from both former individuals. A bit like the symbiont lifeform featured in DS9... Trek reference in MISC - YAY!
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My take on the issue is that the question is pointless.
If someone has the power to replace someones brain, they should have the power to fix whatever is the reason for the brain transplant first.
Assuming you could remove the brain and connect it back into the new body, why not use a robot body designed to look just like the old persons body?
If you did move it into the new body, i'd suspect both would die. The amount of drugs needed to keep an organ transplant receiver alive is one reason why it isn't the first thing thats done.
Plus with chemicals going to and from the brain, you very well could end up with someone very different than what they used to be.
If someone has the power to replace someones brain, they should have the power to fix whatever is the reason for the brain transplant first.
Assuming you could remove the brain and connect it back into the new body, why not use a robot body designed to look just like the old persons body?
If you did move it into the new body, i'd suspect both would die. The amount of drugs needed to keep an organ transplant receiver alive is one reason why it isn't the first thing thats done.
Plus with chemicals going to and from the brain, you very well could end up with someone very different than what they used to be.
Ganglia is just a fancy name for a constellation of neurons - you find them in the brain, the heart, the spinal cord, the gut...
The language used across that website is really appallingly imprecise/quasi-scientific. For instance, they're using the word intelligence in a completely inappropriate way and misconstruing a number of basic physiological principles. I haven't read it all, but a couple of pages is more than enough for me to draw conclusions.
I'm not denying that mind and body influence each other through internal stimulus detection, neuronal interaction, hormonal changes, immunological effects, and a number of other exceedingly complex feedback mechanisms, of course they do or our bodies would collapse into a chaotic maelstrom within hours... but this is a LONG stretch from saying the heart has intelligence, in the true sense of the word.
Since by the site's own admission, it is an "overview" of the actual research... it's probably something they whipped up to make it accessible to the lay person - they probably expect an interested doc to read the research paper itself in the relevant journals - no doubt completely indecipherable to anyone outside the field. I guess some things might have been "lost in translation." I am interested in the "gist" of it, and that's what it gives.
the heart with a mind: you could pioneer a new career holdfast in cardiopsychiatry.
"Doctor, my atrium has an inferiority complex."
Actually, some of the stuff quoted on that site about mind/body interacting with feedback mechanisms, Cannon-Bard theory, etc, etc is already used in psychiatry, as some of the theoretical framework behind CBT (no, not THAT CBT).
It IS interesting how we use a language of symbolism referring different body parts to express various emotions, but I don't really feel it's much more than the physical correlates of those emotions rather than anything else. Call it a gut instinct.
I suspect that would be an even bigger task than a brain transplant. It would have to be a pretty advanced robot. Could you enjoy sex the same way, for example?
I suspect that would be an even bigger task than a brain transplant. It would have to be a pretty advanced robot. Could you enjoy sex the same way, for example?
Depends on how good the engineer is who designed the robot.
^ Or how saucy he is? 
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