Try it when your spouse gets pregnant. 
But I think I mentioned that the brain gets inputs from other parts of our body. In fact a real artificial personality (and oxymoron?) would require that. Though we do get inputs, our personality doesn’t reside in other parts of our bodies - though it sure feels like it some times.
I say yes. Now, consider the case where the brain is removed from the body, but in its place is a transmitter/receiver which takes sensory inputs from the body, sends them to the brain, and then controls the body based on the signal the brain sends back. In other words, cut the nerve bundles from the rest of the body, and replace them with wireless xmitters/receivers. Now would that configuration still be a person?
I think what I´m aiming for is that, even though the personality manifests itself in, or through, the brain, it is a product of not only the brain internal processes but it is also a result of the sensory and chemical environment of the body it resides in. We know for a fact that hormonal changes, affect an individuals personality, so it can be argued that the average hormonal/chemical makeup of the body is in part responsible for the personality of everyone.
If I talk, as you are touching my lips, are you touching my words?
If you touch a guitar as it is played by the musician, are you touching music?
If you are touching a bowling ball, poised before the player throws it, are you touching potential energy?
There are countless examples of the abstract patterns arising from the physical. This doesn’t mean the abstract holds any physical volume. A shadow has shape yet it is not a physical thing, but a projection. however it still has meaning, definition, and practical importance in this very physical world. It is merely a pattern made manifest by other physical properties/systems at work. While our brains are matter, and manifest volume, our personality must be an abstract manifestation of it, and not the thing itself. Personality holds no volume, it is not something that can be broken down any further than the whole. It is a sum that is greater than its parts. It is a projection of the brain, our bodies (of which our brain is a part) and actions being the screen onto which our personalities are displayed.
Der Trihs is wrong. You are not touching the personality when you perform brain surgery.
The Mind-Body problem is one of the central themes of philosophy. To simply state that the brain = personality is to close the book on this, essentially most important question of philosophy.
I think it’s easy to determine the flaw in the oversimplification here.
- There are parts of the brain that do not govern personality
- You cannot simply extract the brain from the body and environment.
Regarding number 2. If we were to simply extract someone’s brain from their body, the trauma of the experience would fundamentally change the personality. So by the very act of manipulating the brain on such a dramatic level, you would essentially eradicate the old personality. Part of my personality is the interaction of others with it. Whether or not I like coffee, whether or not I like red. What my smile looks like is part of my personality.
I disagree with the notion that the medium is synonymous with the information on that medium. When you are touching a video game, you are touching a DVD or some other digital media disc format. You ARE NOT touching the game. We say you are holding the game, but to get at the game’s ‘personality’, one needs a decoding device like a PC or a console, with input devices like a mouse, gamepad, or keyboard. These inputs are just as essential the ‘personality’ of the game as the physical media. In fact with a piece of software the hardware is interchangeable. I could play Half-Life on this computer or on another computer and play the same game. I could even port my save games over from one to the other. I don’t even need the physical media. I can load it from a DVD and then transfer it across the network. So clearly you are not ‘touching the game’, when you are holding the physical media, as the physical media is superfluous to the game itself. This of course is not so with a human being, but it’s a bit simplistic to act as though the question is simply answered and of course the personality resides entirely in the brain. The personality is as much action in the form of mannerisms, as it is the actual information that resides in the brain.
I kind of see it more as inputs. To reuse the computer analogy, there are lots of things affected by the environmental temperature, and some defects only show up at certain temperatures. We had a case where the altitude of the location of a computer mattered. But whether this is personality or input to personality is just semantics at this point, not worth arguing about.
I think pretty much everyone but DT has bought into this already. But even if the brain is not equivalent to the personality, that doesn’t mean the dualistic solution is true.
So, your personality would fundamentally change if you were in solitary confinement?
How would you answer my scenario about the brain being removed from the body, but still in contact with it?
When you touch a painting with your fingers, you are not touching its meaning. You are touching paint. It is your minds processing of its shapes and patterns that make a painting art, or gives it meaning.
There is another meaning of touch, and that has to do with the reach of one’s mind. If we can see out onto the most distant quasar, might that mean our personality is as big?
All of our senses inform our personality, they are not themselves our personality.
If you start examining all the pieces that make up our nervous system, you’ll never find an “I” there. Whatever our mechanics are, there’s no denying there’s a ghost in the machine.
Well I see it more in terms of a Venn diagram. There is some heavy overlap between the brain and personality but both things have an area of domain that are not shared. IE, parts of your brain don’t govern personality, and parts of your personality do not reside in the brain.
Yes, this is clearly true.
That’s a tough one. It would depend on whether or not the person recognizes the mediation. Is the person aware of the increased latency on the connections between thought and action? If the person is unaware of the difference, then i/o functions are essentially unchanged and the personality would remain intact. If the person is aware of the change in i/o then yes it would change the person’s personality on a very fundamental level.
I’ll give one example. Say a person is extraordinarily quick to react. Their physical intelligence is an important part of who they are. They were always good at basketball, a martial artist, good at Yoga, a savvy dancer a decent painter etc… Now, they break their neck at C4, but through some miracle they are actually saved, they can still move, and are lucky that they can. However, the trauma has weakened the signal. They can no longer control their body with the same level of precision as before, due to a greater signal lag. Are they the same person? Well, yes. Is their personality the same? No, definitely not.
Fascinating thread. I wish i had started it!
We all agree that tumors and brain damage can alter a person’s personality. There is a ton of evidence on the subject.
The problem is two-fold:
How detailed a picture of the brain, of the brain’s chemical and electrical activity will we manage to achieve in decades and centuries from now? Today, we have pretty crappy electrodes and our super-slow MRIs are like the first cameras where you had to stand still for seconds while being photographed, . If we get close to individual neuron precision, we’ll have access to a lot of data on personality to work with. Will we ever have enough to understand how to safely manipulate parts of the personality?
If so, would we have to tools to do it? Microsurgery at that level would require magic by today’s standards while neurostimulant management via “smart” nano pills that could be engineered to to only activate in certain places and at certain times seems more likely.
Of course, there are military/criminal/medical applications: tiny time-released poison/drug capsules. Perhaps even genetically “signed” to a gene or individual genome. I wager we’ll see these in decades.
Back to the topic. The personality can be modified right now, but the failure rate is horrible {especially with ice picks} and the knowledge on how it works amost nonexistent. Eventually, though, there is a reasonable probability that we will be able to change our personality at whim, or even create copies. It depends on whether the tools can be made and the decrypting and decoding of the language of brains.
Until that becomes possible, the brain cannot be said to be the personality.
Also, no matter how your personality changes over time, whether it’s seconds or days, you still perceive yourself as you.
This seems like a very weak definition of personality, then. Under this definition, our personalities are constantly changing. The scenario you described happens to everyone as they get older. When people go through puberty they change also. I think it is far more interesting to consider personality as some sort of more fundamental set of basic reactions to stimuli - changing a bit from small changes in the environment, but fundamentally the same. A major personality change comes from the ice pick or drugs. And most of the changes I mention can be linked to changes in brain chemistry. A dualist would predict no such changes, since the personality is set from something outside the brain - and the body.
Yes, probably, what’s your point?
Is it? Whether or not you like coffee or red or what your smile looks like are independent of things outside of you. Outside things may be able to influence them on some level, but they do not determine them.
Again, we’re talking about touching a non-physical thing. If you want to argue semantics, strictly speaking you cannot touch a non-physical thing. The argument here is that the personality resides in the brain, and since the brain can be touched, it can be said that the personality can be touched. With a game, the bits of the game cannot be physically touched, but since the media it resides on can be, it can be said that the game can be touched.
I disagree, the expression of the personality is separate from the personality. A person need not express their personality in order to have one.
This is the real argument. Where is the part of the personality that does not reside in the brain? Not the expression of it, but the personality itself? Where is the part you refer to?
Huh? Until we have absolute technological control over the brain we can’t touch the personality? Why? We know where it is, why do we need to have that level of manipulation over it before we can be said to touch it?
I disagree that it’s a weak definition of personality. How would you define personality then?
The reason I disagree is that your scenario is a paradigm shifting event. Yes, normal everyday stuff does change our personality, but by percentages of a degree. Such a disconnection between brain and body would be a paradigm shifting event, a black swan in the individual’s personal life. Tim Leary wrote about this sort of thing. It was actually the basis for much of his research. He felt that LSD could be used to re-imprint a person with essentially a new personality, or at least an altered one. Generally he considered it as the individual only being able to re-imprint at crisis points otherwise. What you are describing would be such a crisis point. However, it need not be a neurological crisis. A social crisis could do the same. Say you were on a business trip when war broke out and your entire neighborhood were bombed out while you were away. You survived, but your family, your home, everything that was generally familiar to you in your life was snatched away while you were negotiating a contract with a new client. Suddenly even the negotiation you participated in become devoid of purpose. You would at that moment re-imprint with a new personality, or at least a significantly altered one. Something constant inside of you would break, your emotional connections that were once so strong no longer serving any function. Your attachment to your wife and family suddenly becomes legacy software, attaching you to a life that no longer exists.
I don’t think that’s a weak definition of personality, only one that recognizes it as being dynamic. A traumatic event being enough to alter your personality in a real and permanent way.
I don’t consider those things as outside. The coffee is outside, but my affection or lack of it as the case may be are attributes that make up my personality. Personality depends upon it’s relationship to the external and internal factors that make up a whole life.
You are right, you cannot touch a non-physical thing. I agree with that. I understand your point, I simply don’t agree with it. Not that it matters much, if you use it that way, at this point I will understand why and how you are using it and we can communicate. I would not use it that way. Just as if I took a jar of spaghetti sauce, I wouldn’t consider it to be touching the sauce, but touching the jar that contained the sauce.
I disagree. The expression of the personality is the only thing that makes it relevant. Now, you need not be in a social situation to have a personality. You have one if you are alone in the woods, but you are still expressing it through every action you take. It is what guides what you do, everywhere from your gait, to how you might react to a snake on the path. I have come across a rattle snake in my path, and while it caused my wife to jump, I wasn’t that concerned as I knew that was long as the snake had a wide open exit it would flee from us.
Well, I think the personality is as much the expression of it as it is the container. That is the crux of where we disagree I think. It is as much its non-physical attributes, affection for coffee, the color red, distaste for the St. Louis Rams, or whatever, as it is the physical mechanism that drives it.
The weakness referred to the contention that minor changes - such as latency in receiving nerve impulses - would be a personality change. Major traumatic events I can see.
But not totally. We understand someone else’s personality by their reaction to certain stimuli. If you put them in a totally different situation, the same personality might act in what seems like new ways. Solitary confinement is one example, but another is putting a person into a war zone. In some cases the personality might be at least temporarily changed, like in PTSD. In others the person will revert back to normal civilian reactions upon return to civilian life. Were there two personality changes, or none?
More importantly, are changes to the brain triggered by these experiences? if so, the equivalence of the personality and a subset of the brain isn’t even challenged.
I don’t know exactly how to define personality, but the interesting question is if suspected personality changes are permanent, or just a response to a new environment, and how many are associated with changes to the brain.
What is more traumatic than a sudden diminishment of latency? Think about it? Every time you wanted to move, you had to wait another couple of milliseconds for your limbs to respond. Can you not imagine that it would be maddening after a life of lightning reflexes? One must give a lot of thought to what constitutes identity to make sense of it. If one’s identity is wrapped up in their reflexes, then losing that would be a big deal. Imagine if it suddenly took you twice as long to resolve problems that you tackle every day in your life? That means you can only accomplish half of what you previously were able to accomplish.
Well it depends. Oftentimes people are not the same person when they come back from a war. My Uncle for instance was the kind of guy who would drive up to the neighboring town to pick fights before Nam. After Nam he was one of the most quiet and soft-spoken people you could ever meet.
Personality as a function of the brain isn’t challenged. The contention is synonymizing the flesh with the non-physical aspect.
Well even if they are just a response to a new environment, and that interaction with the new environment is part of the individual’s formative experience, impacting the rest of their life, then what does the word, ‘just’, mean? Too often in semantic debates people dismiss concepts with the word, ‘just’. I don’t think that one can say, ‘just a response to a new environment.’, because the response to the environment is a very important aspect of the personality. The response to the environment impacts the brain, which makes new neuronal connections as it responds to new situations.
Your middle allowances for personality change at the hands of introduced chemicals seems to stand in contrast to your beginning statements. And the beginning statements sound a lot like the general conception of a soul…
Am I following along correctly?
I know argument by analogy isn’t always the best, but I tend to think of this in these terms:
Sometimes new events install new applications on the hard drive (new skills - chopping wood, fixing car)
Sometimes new events patch the OS (fundamentally shifting how a person feels or processes information - death of a loved one, birth of a child, loss of a job… not everyone reverts)
An OS change would be the personality in my analogy…