Let’s say their brain was turned to much, but they somehow created new circuitry in there … would it be the same person or a different person animated in their body?
Also what about a person who’s become unconscious and the anesthesia ends? What is it that makes them the same person when they wake up? Do the underlying physiological processes of the body cause the inner subjective experience to persist despite it temporarily ceasing? Or is someone under anesthesia still conscious in a minimal sense?
I want to take a guess before the experts show up. I believe that our most basic brain activity is the result of chemicaly stimulated responses to our senses. We will only know what we have experienced by sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing etc. Our particualr senses stimulate the same chemicals each time and they react on very specific regions in the brain. The electrical reaction to these chemical stimulators will be consistent and become what we call memory.
I have thought of both of these questions and have yet a third state in between I have thought about.
Assume these two things:
– Anaesthesia completely stops the mind.
– Brain cells repair themselves such that eventually, while the cells have not died and are arranged the same, the atoms in each individual cell will be completely replaced.
If these are true under the hypothetical, then if you undergo anaesthetic for long enough that your brain cells have completely replaced their atoms, are you still you? Your neurons are still the same cells, and their structure is the same, but you contain completely different atoms than before the anaesthetic.
I have wondered the difference between this and simple brain-stopping anaesthesia (assuming of course that the brain can completely shut off.) Why should it matter if the atoms are the same atoms if the brain has stopped?
However, to answer a variation of your first hypothetical, if the contents of the brain were slowly replaced by different circuitry that completely replicated the old functionality, I believe you would continue to be the same person, no matter if the replacement circuitry was biological in origin or not. So long as there was an unbroken chain of consciousness and the functioning of the brain did not differ, you could eventually become a completely silicon-based lifeform and still be you.
There’s no way our self-awareness can be an “illusion” if that’s what you are getting at. The fact you exist as a self-aware being is possibly the only thing that’s truly knowable.
The problem you are touching on is known in philosophy as Personal identity, and it is not generally considered a solved problem.
Here’s my 2c:
The “common sense” position, that it’s meaningful to talk about a “you” that has continuity of the self between conception and death, and can survive unconsciousness, but once dead, could never be restored, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny very well.
The simplest way out of it is to say we never really have continuity at all and every instance of consciousness is actually separate to every other.
But I think that’s a pretty extreme conclusion to accept, especially given that the only support for it is by elimination of alternatives.
Most ordinary anesthesia does not not produce an isoelectric (flatline) EEG. Anesthesia in conjunction with hypothermia does, though. (EEG is probably only a crude indicator of absolute brain silence.) In properly managed patients, no neurologic or personality defects result, and the reason for the medically-induced hypothermia is indeed to preserve function.
The question for a cryogenically preserved brain would be if the initiating process and the recovery process could avoid altering anything at all (assuming the cryogenic state itself truly suspends molecular change). If absolutely nothing were altered by the process, the same person with the same personality would be restored. However since we have zillions of pathways being constantly stimulated, enforced and lost, it seems a daunting proposition to make the transition from Me Now to Me Post-Cryopresrvation without some alteration.
Some have only their heads preserved cryogenically because it is cheaper than freezing your whole body. But if one can be brought back it would be a tough go walking around. I remember what a cryogenic salesman said to me, but I can’t repeat it here, when I told him I had been out of my body and loving it. Don’t freeze me I don’t want to come back here that way.
Indeed, another conundrum is looking at a snapshot of a person from 20 years ago versus that person today. Many if not almost all of the individual atoms in that person’s brain have been replaced, (and I believe that’s true, not the hypothetical “definitely all” of my previous posts), not to mention the neuronic connections themselves. So they are not the same person, in one way of speaking: they are both physically not composed of the same “stuff” and structurally composed very differently.
I don’t know what you mean by “illusion”, but if we figure the brain to be an extremely intricate self-organizing computer, then its “state” (i.e. the personality, knowledge and abilities of the person) at any given moment has no existence independent of the circuitry of that computer. If it was possible to freeze a brain’s state and continue it later, there’d be no detectable gap in the “personhood”. If we could perfectly copy the state, we could duplicate the personality.
Basically, that the brain is extremely complex and beyond our full understanding (for now, at least), doesn’t suggest to me that personality or soul or whatever has any independent existence of the physical.
Which would be an assumption, not a fact.
Note that the claim that the brain is a computer is more specific than the claim that it is a machine.
Duplicate, yes, but the key point, and what the OP asked, is would it be me?
As I said upthread it’s easy to assume that from birth to death there is the same entity “you”, but once dead, it’s gone forever.
But this common sense view does not stand up well to the various thought experiments, and can be shown to be inconsistent. I’m not talking about souls, just what is required for an entity to be numerically identical to me.
You will be you for an eternity, whether you are “dead” to this world or not.
Consciousness is the key, not the brain. Science will figure it out someday.
That relies on some concept of “me”-ness that exists independently of the physical brain, and thus is not duplicated even if the physical brain is, and that’s an assumption, not a fact.
I’ll assume for the sake of argument that it’s the common sense view, but I don’t see the contradiction. The “you” is a reflection of the state of your physical brain at a given moment. As the physical brain changes, so does the “you”, and when the physical brain ceases to function, the “you” does as well. If a long dead (or somehow frozen) physical brain could be perfectly restored to an earlier state and reactivated, it would be reflected in the resultant “you”.
Well, if you brain could be scanned and copied, I don’t see why another “you” does not now exists. Of course, since the brain is heavily dependent on the senses, we’d have to duplicate the physical body as well for that duplication to last for any length of time, and since almost instantly you and other-you will have differing experiences, I’d expect both of you to diverge, as identical twins do.
Additionally even if you and other-you are placed in determinedly identical environments to face determinedly identical events, there’s some degree of randomness in how the physical brain adapts (or at least is sufficiently complex to seem random) and there’s a divergence. In any case, I’m not sure how an outsider is supposed to determine which is the “real” you (assuming a “real” you exists) without relying solely on looking for flaws in the copy process itself. It’s not like some iron-clad test for you-ness exists and if, for example, one asks you and other-you for opinions on pepperoni pizza and got varying answers, maybe the copy process didn’t work and there’s some unduplicable ethereal quality to an opinion on pepperoni pizza, or you or other-you just changed his mind about it.
This is not in fact how the brain works. It is (very roughly, and in very broad strokes) the way we used to think the brain worked from the 19th (or even the 17th) century until about 10 years or so ago. In fact, the brain is spontaneously active, even when there is little or no sensory input, such as when you are asleep or anesthetized. The brain’s primary function (as evolutionary theory should have told us) is not to receive sensory input but to generate behavior, including the activity of the sense organs (that, for the most part, actively seek out and gather information rather than passively receiving it, and the sensory quality of the experiences has much more to do with the sort of activity through which the information is gathered than with where in the brain it goes, or which particular chemicals are involved). It is, after all, how you behave, not what you experience, that determines whether or not you survive and reproduce.
To a large extent one may think of the brain as a large collection of oscillatory circuits that interact in order to produce very complex patterns of nervous output which both maintain the body’s basic physiological operations, and give rise to complex behaviors (patterns of muscular movement). Sensory input perturbs the oscillatory patterns within the brain, leading to changes in the patterns of efferent nervous output, and thus changes in the behavior of the organism. Natural selection has made sure that these changes in behavior trend to be such as to promote the survival and/or reproduction of the organism.
In the case of animals with very complex nervous systems, such as humans, the enormous complexity of the patterns of activity involved, and their great sensitivity to subtle details of sensory information, makes this big picture very difficult to see, and it is only fairly recently that neuroscientists have begun to understand it. (If you want to get a handle on the neuroscience behind this, try googling “default network brain”. You will need to go well beyond Wikipedia, though. Try also looking for the work of scientists such as Rodolfo Llinas, Rafael Yuste, and Marcus Raichle.) However, you can fairly easily see it in creatures with very simple nervous systems, such as jellyfish. The main function of the jellyfish nervous system is to generate the steady, rhythmic swimming motion through which they move about. Sensory input, such as touches, or detection of chemicals in the water on one side or the other can perturb the oscillatory pattern in the nervous system, and lead to a change in direction of swimming, away from danger, towards food, or whatever.
As to the OP’s question, the real answer is that it is almost certainly impossible to bring a person back to life at all after they have been cryogenically frozen (and businesses that offer to do so are scams). However, in the unlikely event that it could be done, it seems likely that the original set of complex oscillations would not be re-established in the brain. (This is quite different from the cases of sleep or anesthesia, where the activity does not, in fact, cease.) Even in the unlikely event that some sort of set of oscillatory patterns could be re-established at a level suitable for sustaining human life (a lot of what the brain does is about maintaining basic physiological functions, after all) there is little reason to think that you would be able to re-establish all the same ones that would re-create the personality of the person originally frozen.
NJTT, great response. If a person was of normal intelligence but was severely maladjusted, and we had the technology to wash his brain clean. Would he be able to rebuild his brain in a reasonable amount of time? Similar to how an infant does?
I was thinking about my own question, a full sized, fully developed human with no programming in his brain would not be suitable for nurturing and all th eother things we do with infants, He would likley come back more screwed up than before.