Um, no, it’s possible for your personality to exist without sensory input. You’re still in there when you are in a sense deprivation tank. You’re still in there when you lose senses. The event that caused the loss might affect your personality, but the loss itself does not. You are still you without intereaction with the outside world.
Hmm, is that a ‘tree falls in the forest’ kind of thing?
What? No, you are not touching the game when you are touching the controller while playing the game. You are interacting with the game through a secondary agent (the computer + controller). Experience of the game has nothing to do with simply touching the game.
Again, experience of something has nothing to do with touching it. You’re redefing ‘touching’ to mean something non-physical. According to the definition we’ve been using by default in this thread so far, I am not touching your personality, it is more accurate to say that I am interacting with it, through a secondary agent (the computer + internet). When Der Trihs said that you could touch a person’s personality by touching their brain, he was very obviously referring to the physical touch, and not the interactive touch.
But the argument hinges on the changing meaning of the words used. I used touching to mean physically contacting, you used touching to mean non-physically interacting. If you don’t define the words ahead of time, and change what definition you’re using later, than the argument is just about semantics, and doesn’t have any deeper meaning.
Would they really though? I believe there exist several examples of early writing that are essentially impossible to translate because we have no context from which to determine the meaning of the symbols. If we never find such a context, can the texts be said to mean anything? What if we find what seems to be a perfect Mystery Language-to-English dictionary and years later it turns out to be wrong?
To look at it from another direction, the digits of Pi contain all of human knowledge - past, present, and future - if only we can find the right decoder…
I suppose the brain is different in that it is both the store of data and the decoder, each constantly and recursively updating themselves and each other. Like others, I’m of the view that personality is an emergent property analogous to a program running on a computer. You could argue that you are touching a program when you touch the chip it’s running on, but only by stretching the definitions of those words from how they’re normally used.
But Der Trihs has already clarified what he meant by the statement. What’s the debate?
But that’s because we make a somewhat artificial distinction between software and hardware. Or, to put it another way, we don’t generally make a distinction between software as abstract data, and software as something that’s actually instantiated as a pattern of electrons in a computer. Those electrons are just as physical as anything we can see, after all.
We tend to look at personality or software as something ethereal, instead of something physical. And we tend to look at the brain as a container for mind, and not as what a human mind looks like to the naked eyes. I wonder if we’d be so reluctant to view the mind as physical if we’d evolved with electromagnetic sensors like some fish, and could feel the brain humming away directly by touch or proximity ?
Since a process involves disk and memory accesses too, the case of the computer would be good enough. However, the machine is running several processes. In fact they can be mixed together in the pipeline - so you would be touching several processes at once, and the processes you’d be touching would be changing over time.
There are plenty of physical things, like processes and personalities, which you can’t touch. That doesn’t make them either nonphysical or supernatural.
BTW, I wouldn’t touch that processor if I were you. Those things get hot.
You are right that there is no real difference between software and hardware, but you miss that the mind is dynamic, while the brain is static. You can touch a program - on paper, on CD, or even stored in memory. But that is static also.
The mind is definitely physical depending on the physical brain, but not all physical things can be touched. You can touch your TV, but not the program it is showing. You can touch a radio, but not “All Things Considered.” They’re both clearly physical nonetheless.
I didn’t say it would be a good idea - and I doubt fried skin would mesh well with semiconducters anyway. 
The brain isn’t static, it’s constantly changing. Just because the changes are too small to see, or don’t produce emanations the naked eye can see, doesn’t mean the brain is static.
I can see that being argued either way; more importantly, I was talking about the brain & personality specifically.
True, but at a much slower rate than the neurons are firing. Processors change too, in the sense there is all sorts of things going on which will eventually lead to defects.
But is there a fundamental difference between the personality and a process? You wouldn’t be saying that there is something spookily unique about the personality, would you? 
Not “spookily”. It’s just that in the case of the brain and the personality, everything is concentrated in one unit, the brain. Data, interpreters, decision makers, all those systems; as opposed to a TV program like the example you used, where everything is spread out.
Sure, personality resides in the brain and only in the brain, but there are chunks of the brain that have nothing to do with personality - the autonomic systems, for instance. A lot of them are basically the same as our ancestors had - and I mean ancestors millions of years ago. Touch those parts, and you are not touching the personality, even by your definition of touch. So the brain does more than house the personality, it is also the control for our body.
Seems like it gets down to that level eventually, anyway. Words are just words.
Nah, a word is a milli-picture.
Bit of a nitpick, but the brain’s not really static either. The brain’s cellular structure is constantly changing in response to sensory input, so there’s a more dynamic relationship between the hardware and software than there is with the computer analogy.
It may be a tree forest thing, but my point remains…
Even when just a person in a sensory deprivation tank, you can feel the knot in your stomach as you realize what’s happening - and as you sense the edges of thought creep away. Emotions tend to rely on a feeling back from the body. A body in a sensory deprivation tank isn’t a perfect synonym for a brain divorced of it’s body.
I am me. My brain is a very large part of my personality and how I respond - even helping to dictate how I feel (by releasing chemicals to the body), but without a connection to my body… I’d get lost. We need our feelings.
They’re fundamental.
I think is more of a brain body simbiosis, changes in the body can lead to changes in personality; my GF kindly reminds me of that about once a month. 
If we had the technology to remove a person’s brain and place it in a machine that kept it alive, would it still be that person, without their body?
Hard to say. There’s some evidence that interaction with an environment is essential to full-blooded consciousness. Perception, for example, seems to rely alot on movement and interaction.
Of course at this point we like to imagine a brain being artificially stimulatedin a way exactly like it would have been stimulated by a natural environment. But even if this is possible, it’s not a slam dunk IMO. For it invites the following question: Why don’t we just put 9/10 of a brain in a vat, stimulating it in a way identicl to how it would be if it were part of a complete brain in a natural environment? And if that’s okay, how about half a brain? A tenth of a brain? A single neuron?
Somewhere along that line, we clearly no longer have a conscious subject. (The whole brain-portion/machine system may somehow be a conscious subject, but the point is the brain-portion itself is not.) This in turn leads us to wonder whether the whole brain really constituted a conscious subject. It was, after all, excised from a body. Perhaps its the brain plus at least part of its body that makes for full blooded consciousness. Heck, perhaps its the whole body plus some part of its environment that makes for consciousness. Who knows?
-FrL-
Hmmm, if someone would put… let´s say [ominous]YOUR BRAIN[/ominous] in a jar, all by itself, I think it´s safe to bet that you´d retain your consciousness; it may fade with time abscent any sort of input (or output for that matter) to assert it. On the other hand, if we would grow a human brain inside a fishbowl, I think the safe bet is that it would never develop a consciousness of its own; after all what is consciousness if not self awareness of ones existance, and if there´s no perception of an existance how could it ever awake?
Or could it? :dubious:
Well it would depend on which bits of the brain did what, and which bits you removed. If you removed the bit of the brain-in-the-jar that handled emotions, then you would be changing that personality. But if you removed the part of the brain-in-the-jar that controlled heartbeat or stomach secretions, then I don’t think the personality would change. This is something I think science will eventually be able to figure out, as we are well on the way to mapping the brain.
I think this is the ‘tree in a forest part of the argument’. If the brain doesn’t make a sound, it is conscious? How much does consciousness matter in that case? What about a person in a coma?