The brain IS the personality

[Voyager]

[QUOTE=mswas]
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.

[/quote]

It’s called getting old, my friend. My father and father-in-law are both in their '90s. My father in law is still pretty sharp - he is still composing and selling his music - but his latency is increased. Mine has also from when I was 20. I have a hard time considering this as a personality change, without a very fluid definition of personality.

Personality as a function of the brain isn’t challenged. The contention is synonymizing the flesh with the non-physical aspect.

Subset of the brain, remember. But if we can map personality changes due to experiences to changes in the physical brain, the match is still there.

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.

Say your personality is a function P that st that
R = P(S)
where S is a set of stimuli and R is your responses to those stimuli. Now say in life you have experienced a subset Si of S, and respond with a subset of all possible responses Ri, a subset of R Now consider a new experience with stimuli Sj, where the intersection of Sj and Si is small. Does your new set of responses Rj constitute a personality change? I’d think that this would be represented instead by P’, a modified mapping function. The question is how big (P - P’) has to be before we call it a personality change.

[Anomalous_Reading]

[QUOTE=Voyager]
Say your personality is a function P that st that
R = P(S)
where S is a set of stimuli and R is your responses to those stimuli. Now say in life you have experienced a subset Si of S, and respond with a subset of all possible responses Ri, a subset of R Now consider a new experience with stimuli Sj, where the intersection of Sj and Si is small. Does your new set of responses Rj constitute a personality change? I’d think that this would be represented instead by P’, a modified mapping function. The question is how big (P - P’) has to be before we call it a personality change.
[/QUOTE]
So now the question is how big the delta has to be…

how much is enough? That’s a judgment call. But a change is a change, no?

[FoieGrasIsEvil]

If a surgeon is “touching your brain” chances are it might affect your personality. Or maybe not.
We don’t understand this complex organ quite enough.

If that same surgeon decided to randomly jab into your brain with a scalpel, then assuredly your personality will change.

Phineas Gage.

[Siam_Sam]

[QUOTE=cmyk]
Also, no matter how your personality changes over time, whether it’s seconds or days, you still perceive yourself as you.
[/QUOTE]

Pardon me if I’ve missed it in all of this, but how about cases of multiple-personality disorders? When they lock you away, only one name is on the court order.

[hotflungwok]

[QUOTE=mswas]
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.
[/QUOTE]

Imagine a food you’ve never heard of at all. You have no opinion on it. That food suddenly and unexpectedly falls off the tree it grows on and into your mouth, and you taste it for the first time. You immediately have an opinion on it, you like or it hate it right then. Completely independent of outside sources, you like or hate this food. Why?

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.

But that’s still not it. The sauce is a physical thing. You can open the jar and touch 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.

So if you’re not doing anything, you don’t have a personality?

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.

So these non-physical attributes like taste or distaste are not coded in the brain?

[Voyager]

[QUOTE=Anomalous Reading]
So now the question is how big the delta has to be…

how much is enough? That’s a judgment call. But a change is a change, no?
[/QUOTE]

This morning I’m sitting at home, waiting to go to the dentist to look at a sensitivity in a tooth. When I woke up it was fine, the first touch of coffee made it hurt again. How much did my personality change at that instant? (I’m spending a good bit of my thoughts on it.) When it gets fixed, does my personality change again? There is going to be noise, but I think you could consider these small fluctuations as part of someone’s personality. I’d say a change has to be reasonably permanent and out of the variation expected from this noise. Where the exact line is, I don’t know.

[mswas]

[QUOTE=Voyager]
It’s called getting old, my friend. My father and father-in-law are both in their '90s. My father in law is still pretty sharp - he is still composing and selling his music - but his latency is increased. Mine has also from when I was 20. I have a hard time considering this as a personality change, without a very fluid definition of personality.
[/quote]

I guess I do have a very fluid definition of personality, or at least in a colloidal sense. People have different degrees of sol and gel state. Some have very fluid personalities and others are very solid. Your Father getting old is a bad analogy, as the idea you presented was more sudden and dramatic. The increase in latency being a sudden and dramatic change. Getting old BTW does change your personality significantly. Certainly it resembles the old personality as there is a continuity of narrative, but imagine if you went from 25-70 in an instant. Do you not think that would be a fundamental change that would alter your personality dramatically?

Subset of the brain, remember. But if we can map personality changes due to experiences to changes in the physical brain, the match is still there.

But just to be clear. Tell me if you agree with this statement. “The personality is the brain is not precise enough to be functionally useful as a statement.”

Say your personality is a function P that st that
R = P(S)
where S is a set of stimuli and R is your responses to those stimuli. Now say in life you have experienced a subset Si of S, and respond with a subset of all possible responses Ri, a subset of R Now consider a new experience with stimuli Sj, where the intersection of Sj and Si is small. Does your new set of responses Rj constitute a personality change? I’d think that this would be represented instead by P’, a modified mapping function. The question is how big (P - P’) has to be before we call it a personality change.

Rj is a function of degrees. Say anything less than a 15 degree change is within the normal parameter, like suddenly a lazy person gets a job they like and busts ass, they still like corny movies and such, they are still more or less the same person, but they are a bit less morose and more dynamic, but recognizable as the same person, or vice versa, a person loses their beloved job and becomes morose and sits around moping and drinking for a while collecting unemployment. Ultimately they are the same person, their personality has changed within the 15 degree normal parameter. Now, let’s say that a person changes more than 45 degrees. That is dramatic, and constitutes a major life path. Lets say that a 45 degree change is a divorce and an abandonment of the previous life, they move to a new city start a different career or whatever. Now, we get to the real dramatic differences in the 90 degree change, where the person can no longer relate to their old friends, they do not do the same things and you cannot reasonably predict their behavior based on what you thought you knew about them. So, in the case of the person whose brain is separated from their body but still functionally connected, with increased latency, it would depend upon the functional level of noticeable difference to them.

[mswas]

[QUOTE=hotflungwok]
Imagine a food you’ve never heard of at all. You have no opinion on it. That food suddenly and unexpectedly falls off the tree it grows on and into your mouth, and you taste it for the first time. You immediately have an opinion on it, you like or it hate it right then. Completely independent of outside sources, you like or hate this food. Why?
[/quote]

Well, all food is made up of the same elements. Conceivably I have a relationship to most of the elements on the periodic table, at least most of the elements that make up generally what we consider to be ‘food’. I suppose it would have to do with my relationship to its chemical composition and the training of my palate throughout life.

But that’s still not it. The sauce is a physical thing. You can open the jar and touch the sauce.

Yes, but the container doesn’t suddenly become its contents merely because one cannot touch its contents with one’s fingers.

So if you’re not doing anything, you don’t have a personality?

The only way to not be doing anything is to be brain dead. No, a person who is brain dead has no personality. Lying asleep in bed is doing something, and one can see a person’s personality in the way they sleep.

So these non-physical attributes like taste or distaste are not coded in the brain?

They are, but as a reaction to stimuli. Some of it is probably genetically determined but other parts of it are determined by the cultivation of relationships to the outside world. Personality relies on the narrative context that a person inhabits within their social sphere.

[cmyk]

[QUOTE=Siam Sam]
Pardon me if I’ve missed it in all of this, but how about cases of multiple-personality disorders? When they lock you away, only one name is on the court order.
[/QUOTE]

“Hang on… lemme get rgb… he’s the side of my personality that answers these questions…”

blank stare

Okay, rgb here. First of all, I believe Dissociative Identity Disorder is still a controversial topic in dealing with its actual diagnosis or even existence. That said, if it is indeed real, then no matter whose personality is up front, that’s the one that feels aware. I’m not sure what point it is you’re trying to make, but that doesn’t change the reality that our consciousness is a self-aware pattern that rises out of our physical, mechanical, bodies. There is no border that defines our personality, therefore, how can you say our brains is where our “I” starts and stops. Originates? Sure. But is no more the actual personality than a musician playing a guitar is the song.

blank stare

cmyk: “What just happened? My head hurts.”

[Anomalous_Reading]

[QUOTE=Voyager]
This morning I’m sitting at home, waiting to go to the dentist to look at a sensitivity in a tooth. When I woke up it was fine, the first touch of coffee made it hurt again. How much did my personality change at that instant? (I’m spending a good bit of my thoughts on it.) When it gets fixed, does my personality change again? There is going to be noise, but I think you could consider these small fluctuations as part of someone’s personality. I’d say a change has to be reasonably permanent and out of the variation expected from this noise. Where the exact line is, I don’t know.
[/QUOTE]
Ouch. Hope all goes well for you (or went well).

Ok, and this is a point I was making with the missus last night as I tried to sort this out… I’m 34. If I were to meet myself at half my current age… we’d be vastly different. He was a theist. Naive. Quiet. Deferential. A veritable shadow… few noticed me and I seldom spoke. VERY introverted.

Now? I’m none of those things - except for the times I think it makes sense.

Are there a few parts of me that haven’t changed? Sure. The parts that haven’t been exposed as maladaptive. I’m still honest. I still make a lot of effort to understand human relationships. If, over these 17 years since that former me, I was put into situations where those things would have been revealed as maladaptive in my situation… I would have changed those, too.

That I have the same face (kinda), the same personal narrative (just longer), and a few things haven’t changed… does not at all imply I have the same personality.

It’s my opinion, that like the soul, free will, consciousness and a few other things… the idea of an immutable innermost self… is an illusion. One we need. But it’s still an illusion. I am most definitely mutable. When it comes to personality and whether we are the same person… we look at what doesn’t change, imo. Not what has.

I’m very different than even 2 or 3 years ago.

A dental pain… is a small blip in the narrative. It may hurt like hell, but it’s not on the scale of the larger life events so far invoked in explaining larger changes.

In short: We’re humans. We didn’t survive for this long by not being able to adapt, sometimes… even to extremes.

[Anomalous_Reading]

[QUOTE=Siam Sam]
Pardon me if I’ve missed it in all of this, but how about cases of multiple-personality disorders? When they lock you away, only one name is on the court order.
[/QUOTE]
A name =/= a personality

And in MPD, whether proven or not, in my experience - they each had the experience that they were in control. And that personality perceived itself as it’s self. Sometimes it might have been a co-consciousness thing, sometimes not. Either way… the point you are trying to turn back remained true.

It would need to be a pretty deep - and amnesiac break for it to be what you describe… but… there were times I saw that too.

[Voyager]

[QUOTE=mswas]
I guess I do have a very fluid definition of personality, or at least in a colloidal sense. People have different degrees of sol and gel state. Some have very fluid personalities and others are very solid. Your Father getting old is a bad analogy, as the idea you presented was more sudden and dramatic. The increase in latency being a sudden and dramatic change. Getting old BTW does change your personality significantly. Certainly it resembles the old personality as there is a continuity of narrative, but imagine if you went from 25-70 in an instant. Do you not think that would be a fundamental change that would alter your personality dramatically?

[/quote]

One type of stimulus comes from inside, from your memories. (Or I can admit that I neglected to add state to my model.) Someone going from 20 to 90 and not having all those memories would indeed appear very different, but would they actually be different?

But just to be clear. Tell me if you agree with this statement. “The personality is the brain is not precise enough to be functionally useful as a statement.”

I agree. The personality is definitely not equivalent to the brain, utility or no.

Rj is a function of degrees. Say anything less than a 15 degree change is within the normal parameter, like suddenly a lazy person gets a job they like and busts ass, they still like corny movies and such, they are still more or less the same person, but they are a bit less morose and more dynamic, but recognizable as the same person, or vice versa, a person loses their beloved job and becomes morose and sits around moping and drinking for a while collecting unemployment. Ultimately they are the same person, their personality has changed within the 15 degree normal parameter. Now, let’s say that a person changes more than 45 degrees. That is dramatic, and constitutes a major life path. Lets say that a 45 degree change is a divorce and an abandonment of the previous life, they move to a new city start a different career or whatever. Now, we get to the real dramatic differences in the 90 degree change, where the person can no longer relate to their old friends, they do not do the same things and you cannot reasonably predict their behavior based on what you thought you knew about them. So, in the case of the person whose brain is separated from their body but still functionally connected, with increased latency, it would depend upon the functional level of noticeable difference to them.

In both of those cases a persons stimuli is dramatically changed. It’s like the classic case of someone getting married and dumping his or her friends. I’d guess that someone married would seem to have gone through a major personality change to his friends, but did he really? I don’t think so.

I’m not denying that traumatic events can’t cause personality change - I’m asking if these can be somehow mapped to change in the brain. I really do not think that someone whose brain has been removed, but who senses only very minor increases in latency, would suffer a big change. Now, I’m assuming no one told the guy. If someone did, all bets are off.

[Siam_Sam]

The brain is the only organ that can think about itself. All of the other organs are acting out of reflex or orders from the brain. If you were somehow able to put the brain in a vat and keep it alive and aware, the person it came from would still be alive and aware and thinking its thoughts. I vote for the brain is the personality.

[hotflungwok]

[QUOTE=mswas]
Well, all food is made up of the same elements. Conceivably I have a relationship to most of the elements on the periodic table, at least most of the elements that make up generally what we consider to be ‘food’. I suppose it would have to do with my relationship to its chemical composition and the training of my palate throughout life.
[/QUOTE]

Do babies, who have never tasted anything but mother’s milk, have food preferences? If you’ve ever been near a kid ‘starting on solids’ then you know the answer to this. Tastes are somewhat hard wired into us. There are some ways around it, but our tastes are determined by our brain. Our brain tells us what we like and don’t like. There are some outside things that can influence this over time or with association, but tastes are generally predetermined by our brain. Outside influences can influence our tastes somewhat, but do not determine them.

Yes, but the container doesn’t suddenly become its contents merely because one cannot touch its contents with one’s fingers.

But if the thing cannot be physically touched, by strict definition, then the container can be touched as if it was the thing. When you pick up a game disk, you can be said to be touching the game. In fact, in that case, I think that would be the default use of the definition.

The only way to not be doing anything is to be brain dead. No, a person who is brain dead has no personality. Lying asleep in bed is doing something, and one can see a person’s personality in the way they sleep.

Of course a person who is brain dead has no personality, their brain is dead. If the thing that contains the personality is gone, then so is the personality.

They are, but as a reaction to stimuli. Some of it is probably genetically determined but other parts of it are determined by the cultivation of relationships to the outside world. Personality relies on the narrative context that a person inhabits within their social sphere.

I would argue that they are genetically or physically determined, but they can only be influenced by outside sources.

Again, imagine a food you have never tasted or heard of. Right now, you have a taste preference for this food, for or against. Without any interaction with it at all, some aspect of personality exists for this purpose. Just because it hasn’t been used doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It’s probably a baseline ‘X is good, Y is bad’ kind of thing that gets applied to everything, but it’s there. Personality can exist without interaction.

[Oy]

You folks are using a rather looser definition of the word personality than I would. I think of my personality as my me-ness. It may change somewhat over time, but it’s still the same personality, just as my physical appearance changes but I remain myself.

The brain is not just a container for the personality. Things that are contained have existence of their own; destroy the container and you still have that which was contained. But things you do to the brain affect the personality, and if you kill the brain, the personality dies. This is not like a software disk, because the disk has just a copy of the program. It exists elsewhere. (An interesting question, that: Where is a program?) Admittedly, there are a few parts of the brain that seem not to be related to personality, but on the whole it’s safe to say that anything that affects the brain affects the personality. And, as the scientists have shown, alterations to the personality alter the brain as well. That seems to me to be an effective equivalence.

[Oy]

That being said, I would never say that by touching the brain I was touching the personality. I think that what we refer to as personality is often in fact the impression that a person makes on others by their words and actions, and that resides in every person who has ever sensed that person. It is not the same as the actual personality, which is the collective thoughts, memories, and feelings of an individual. We think of this as abstract and non-physical, whereas of course it is physically the brain and the electric impulses in the brain.

[Anomalous_Reading]

How about this…

Over the course of a few years all of the atoms of the brain end up replaced. Are you still you? Sure… are you the physical container? Or a pattern contained within?

Can you touch a pattern? Like that?

[Der_Trihs]

[QUOTE=Anomalous Reading]
How about this…

Over the course of a few years all of the atoms of the brain end up replaced. Are you still you? Sure… are you the physical container? Or a pattern contained within?

Can you touch a pattern? Like that?
[/QUOTE]
Certainly. What else is a river, but a moving pattern of mostly water ? It just exchanges atoms much faster, and has a simpler pattern; there’s no such thing as “riverium”.

[mswas]

[QUOTE=hotflungwok]
Do babies, who have never tasted anything but mother’s milk, have food preferences? If you’ve ever been near a kid ‘starting on solids’ then you know the answer to this. Tastes are somewhat hard wired into us. There are some ways around it, but our tastes are determined by our brain. Our brain tells us what we like and don’t like. There are some outside things that can influence this over time or with association, but tastes are generally predetermined by our brain. Outside influences can influence our tastes somewhat, but do not determine them.
[/quote]

I don’t know about that. I’d think that tastes were determined more by the endocrine system than the nervous system, as the food we eat has more to do with the chemical composition of our bodies than it does the signals being fired along the neurons. Though, that’s an interesting track to go down. I’ll give a lot more thought to how taste is developed from now on. Thanks.

But if the thing cannot be physically touched, by strict definition, then the container can be touched as if it was the thing. When you pick up a game disk, you can be said to be touching the game. In fact, in that case, I think that would be the default use of the definition.

I think that this would be a case for Pochacco’s Metonymy. I think you are still using Metonymy in this case. Yes, we would use the term that way in a colloquial shortform, but it seems to be an imprecise blurring of categories for a more in depth analysis of the situation.

I would argue that they are genetically or physically determined, but they can only be influenced by outside sources.

Again, imagine a food you have never tasted or heard of. Right now, you have a taste preference for this food, for or against. Without any interaction with it at all, some aspect of personality exists for this purpose. Just because it hasn’t been used doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It’s probably a baseline ‘X is good, Y is bad’ kind of thing that gets applied to everything, but it’s there. Personality can exist without interaction.

I don’t know. Sounds like a ‘If a tree falls in the forest and kills a mime, does anyone care?’ kind of question at this point.

For me taste is often as much contextual as anything else. I like Rum and Reggaeton more in Puerto Rico than I do anywhere else for instance.

[Anomalous_Reading]

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
Certainly. What else is a river, but a moving pattern of mostly water ? It just exchanges atoms much faster, and has a simpler pattern; there’s no such thing as “riverium”.
[/QUOTE]
My point, perhaps, is too nuanced, but I don’t think your analogy scans.

A river is a collection of water molecules. Their arrangement, their relationship to each other, their “pattern” really doesn’t matter. So long as they flow downhill they will remain inside the banks and travelling to the sea. There isn’t a high degree of interdependence.

The brain is indeed a collection of neurons. My point is that my personality, along with being informed and transformed by my somatic experience, is not so much the neurons as it is the pattern of the neurons.

If you touch a neuron in the middle of my neck, with the arguments being made, I think people would say that it is not “me” whereas a few inches higher “is.” It is part of me. Part of my personality. But what makes me me isn’t that I have neurons. It’s the pattern in which they are arranged.

Your metaphor works on a collection of water equals river; collection of neurons equals brain level. The personality is different. What if I and some dullard have the same number of neurons? I don’t see us touching the pattern. I see us touching something that contains most of the pattern… (the brain).

Again, the personality is shaped and modified by what is outside - an easy example… testosterone. It modifies my personality… I don’t think I am unique in that. I’ve seen too many young guys spinning out their tires to think otherwise.