just wait and see

Theseus’s paradox raises the question of whether an object that has had it’s component parts replaced is still the same object. I have been dwelling on this a fair bit recently and relating it to whether a human who has all their “parts” replaced is still the same person.

It arose because I was trying to marry the Space Odyssey concept of our body’s simply being containers to what it really means to be a person, and how the next step in human evolution, being biological and mechanical, will play out.

If you think about what surgery can achieve today and how almost every organ can be transplanted you can obviously believe that the parts of us that can be “replaced” aren’t fundamental to our being. Every organ can be transplanted I believe, except the brain.

The reason brain transplants aren’t possible is because there are hundreds of thousands of individual connections (Neural pathways) to the rest of the body, and they all have to be aligned. Its not like you can just stitch two different spinal cords together and they will match up (Other wise something like The Man with Two Brains could exist).

But ignoring the physical restrictions, if one were to magically transplant their brain into your body, what would happen? Obviously the transplanted brain would make you completely different person.

This means the brain is fundamental to who we are as a person (Or contains what is). It is why many cyborg images still have brains even though the rest of them is robotic. But if you have ever seen a human brain you notice that it is exactly like every other part of the human body, it is just flesh. Why is it so special?

When a person dies their physical brain is still there but the person isn’t. Where is the fundamental part of being human that exists within our brain, but can disappear upon death and leave the brain behind?

To Be Continued.