Actually, the evidence seems to favor that the brain uses the same part of the brain both for perceiving/controlling the external world, and for perceiving imagined things/motions. Imagine picking up a tool, and the same areas of brains become active in a pattern very close to actually picking it up. Imagine an object, and your visual cortex acts much like it was seeing that object, if faintly.
And as fair as I understand it, it’s neither screen nor projector; that assumes there’s something outside watching.
My point is perhaps too nuanced, but… the memory of hammer is not activated BY the visual cortex. That trigger is something else, then it sees hammer. The movie is not the director.
I am familiar with your point and for economy and simple evolutionary adaptation it makes sense that the same neurons would light for both.
NO. That is a western simplification. The personality is made complete with the senses from the body.
The brain (primitive usually) releases chemicals into the blood stream and the body then signals a change (heart rate change, arousal, whatever) then we become aware of the change - After it happened.
The personality is LARGELY contained in the brain. But not entirely.
The mind is what the brain does. The personality, or mind, is a process of electrochemical reactions taking place inside the brain.
I agree that saying the surgeon is touching your personality is not exactly right. However, as a shorthand for saying that the personality is due to the physical brain, it’s an OK statement.
I think a personality is more like a property or a disposition than it is like an object. But the brain is definitely an object, not a property or disposition. Ergo QED etc.
Yea I disagree. I am not touching the game until the controller is in my hand and I am shooting Covenant Brutes. The physical media is not the game. I could hand off my copy of Halo to someone who has never played it and they could hand it back to me knowing very little about the experience of the game.
When I am dead, you can touch my brain, but not my personality. If you came across my corpse and never knew me in life, you would never have had any experience of my personality. In fact as you read this, you are touching my personality more intimately than you ever could with a scalpel and a drill. A surgeon could remove a brain tumor and never know if I prefer red or green, how I feel about my daughter, or whether I like electronica or opera.
I just finished watching, “There Will Be Blood.”, I watched it on DVD, but I could just as easily have downloaded it from BitTorrent. It would have been the same movie, had the same personality regardless of which method I used to view it.
Also dismissing it as semantics is a facile argument. This is a debate about a semantic argument.
I still think it depends. Why can’t we say that when we touch your brain – postmortem – we are touching a dead personality? Assuming that personalities are static might be baseless.
Perhaps the personality as the brain has some merit, if only in pointing out that the personality isn’t some unchanging entity independent of the brain. The personality can be said in this way to have different “states” of existence. Alive, dead, etc.
Yes. Not in everyday conversation, but in the terms of intellectual discussion it matters very much. If my wife said, “Can you fix the light?”, I’d know that she meant change the lightbulb. But if those are the sorts of imprecise methods by which we should conduct discussions on a message board such as this, then it really has no usefulness in discussing anything requiring actual nuance. I mean, after all, what’s the difference between matter and energy? Energy is released during chemical processes, so matter and energy are the same thing right? Who cares if I don’t draw a distinction?
Actually a disc doesn’t contain anything anyone would recognize as a “computer program.”
Only an appropriate device which can read impressions on the physical disc (which can be interpreted in machine language) which then passes that information into a larger system which eventually can reinterpret it and display it in a manner recognizable to humans really actualizes that disc as a computer program.
I’d hold that while our personalities are obviously coming from something within in our skull, what humans define as personality is nothing at all like what you actually find inside a brain.
Humans can’t (meaningfully) read a DVD or a compact disc, we just don’t have that natural capability. We do have the capability of building an optical drive which can use a laser to read from such a disc.
A computer program on a disc is only an idea, the impressions on that disc don’t have to mean anything or be anything at all. We could create those exact same impressions on a disc which no machine can read–and then would the disc still contain a computer program? No, not likely.
Personalities only exist because of the societal nature of man. Creatures totally devoid of socializing ability don’t have personalities.
Implying that personality is something that can be “touched” is giving it more grounding in physical reality than is appropriate. It’s my contention that personalities only exist as perceived by others. From a functional standpoint there is no such thing as a personality, only electrical pulses in the brain.
So an optical drive is like one human’s perception of another, only through this perception can interpretation happen. Without the ability of the optical drive to “understand” what is on the disk, then the disk isn’t anything we could recognize as a “program.” (It’s really not a program anyway, it’s just a medium which can store a program.)
Hey, if the brain’s not the personality, I eagerly await some better way to say what is. If English isn’t up the task of parsing these minute differences, feel free to make up some new words for the vernacular.
The personality is touched when a surgeon pokes his finger into… the indivippocampus!
I’d modify it to “touch the living brain and you touch the personality”, with “touch” being shorthand for “influence”. I can see where this comes from - the classic “electrodes here - what do you sense?” type of experiment.
But mostly, I agree with the other thing - pedantic semantics.
I disagree, just because you can´t read or retrieve some information it doesn´t mean that information doesn´t exists. If tomorrow all the vinyl disc players in the world are sucked up by a passing black hole the records would still contain the music.
Or you´re getting into some Zen argument about trees falling in the forests or something.
The brains is the personality machine, but it doesn´t operate isolated; it´s a machine fueled by senses and chemical balances, as long as it has fuel it outputs a concience.
I´ve always thought that the brain-in-a-jar scenario would lead to some serious personality issues (besides the ones arising from finding yourself playing the part of a sapient pickle); if you remove the brain from the chemical and sensory environment provided by the body there´s no telling how it would affect the thinking processes.
You’re right, but this isn’t a relevant analogy. The personality is more like a process running on a computer, not a program sitting on a CD, on the disk, or even loaded in cache with the clock stopped. A program on disk might be roughly analogous to a cat scan of a brain showing neurons - but only very roughly. A program (or software) is static, while a process is active.
Only if I touched the naked surface of the chip that was running the program after cutting it’s case open; rather the same as opening the skull of a human.