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Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

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Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#111

Post by TaupeRanger »

developer92 wrote: post #40
JKCalhoun wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A colleague went on once about Star Trek transporters: what if they worked by "scanning" a person, sent that data over the airwaves, then, made a perfect copy of somewhere else (sourcing new molecules from wherever) — would this copy believe they were the original? He went on: suppose you kill the original — did you "transport" the person? Star Trek creeps me out a little now.

I'm off the opinion that transporting is pointless from a selfish point of view: your duplicate will get to Jupiter or wherever, and think they're you, but your consciousness will stop so you will never get to experience it. I don't know what experiment you could do to prove this either way.

Assuming there is nothing like a "soul" which persists only in relation to the current cells in your brain, you aren't even the same person you were 2 seconds ago. It's literally no different for the transporter. The "you" of 2 seconds ago is no longer conscious either. Since consciousness is so mysterious, I think admitting our ignorance on the issue is probably the most reasonable approach atm.

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#112

Post by lambda_obrien »

ImprobableTruth wrote: post #96
keiferski wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I linked to an article about embodied cognition. It’s a serious topic studied by scientists and philosophers.

Have you read your article? Embodied cognition comes in different forms. The 'basic' idea is simply that the body plays some role in cognition. The view that's closest to traditional cognition - and generally regarded as uncontroversial - is that the body has a strong influence on the mind. A lot of (most?) computationalists would accept this idea with no issue. It's the idea that our mind is actually distributed, th…

If our body is not a part of our mind, then where does the mind exist? Are we just loops of code controlling a mechanism? I'm curious why you casually toss away the possibility that our bodies and self are one inseparable thing when no scientist has yet been able to even get close to separating the two via any means. Our brains work through physical means with electrical and chemical impulses, so why think that the mind itself doesn't extend away from the brain?

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#114

Post by Razengan »

keiferski wrote: post #103
mcv wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't just raise questions about the self, but also lots of legal questions. Imagine you would transplant a brain in a different body. Who is that person now legally? Technically, only a single organ got transplanted, and everything else is still the body donor. But of course the person has the memories and presumably the sense of self of the brain donor. But the finger prints, iris scan and DNA of the body dono…

Yep. Our whole legal system is built on the idea of one mind implanted in one body from birth. Things quickly start getting complicated when that breaks down.

To really cook your goose imagine if we could not only freely modify and "jump" between bodies, but also edit our memories. Kinda like Total Recall turned up to 110, where you can implant fake experiences, remove bad memories, take on an entirely new persona, or clone yourself and have a relationship with your clone. What really makes you "you" then?

There's a great little anime called Kaiba which explores exactly that: https://myanimelist.net/anime/3701/Kaiba

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#115

Post by auntienomen »

yellow_lead wrote: post #6

Aside from the moral aspects, it's also interesting to think about the results. Would a new brain have difficulty operating a different body? Would one's senses translate similarly? Would the person's idea of where their limbs are in space be all messed up?

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Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#116

Post by georgyo »

Razengan wrote: post #114
keiferski wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Our whole legal system is built on the idea of one mind implanted in one body from birth. Things quickly start getting complicated when that breaks down.

To really cook your goose imagine if we could not only freely modify and "jump" between bodies, but also edit our memories. Kinda like Total Recall turned up to 110, where you can implant fake experiences, remove bad memories, take on an entirely new persona, or clone yourself and have a relationship with your clone. What really makes you "you" then? There's a great little anime called Kaiba which explores exactly th…

Altered Carbon sorta plays with this concept a lot. But it's set in a world were it is common place, and people have already detached identity from body.

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#117

Post by Razengan »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #3
userbinator wrote: post #2

Ethical and moral considerations aside, this also has some interesting philsophical implications: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

I find there to be nothing interesting about it. This, like so many other “philosophical quæstions” is a futile quibble of semantics that answers nothing. The simple answer to this problem, and many other problems, is that the exercise of giving clouds of atoms in vicinity to one another “identities” is not one based in salient thought. — there is no such thing. All Theseus' Ship shows is that, indeed, this theory is…

Someone pooh-poohing something while claiming to provide a "simple answer to many problems" is ironic at best, and insufferably arrogant at worse.

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#118

Post by eternalny1 »

mcv wrote: post #102
keiferski wrote: post #52

The fact that this is uncontroversial to a lot of people mostly just shows how intellect-focused our society has become. Plenty of other value systems treat the Self as the entire body, not merely the head. Perhaps if we did too, we might not have so many issues with obesity and drug abuse. Dualism has consequences. I once read someone describe academics as “floating heads with bodies attached.” I think that could ap…

It doesn't just raise questions about the self, but also lots of legal questions. Imagine you would transplant a brain in a different body. Who is that person now legally? Technically, only a single organ got transplanted, and everything else is still the body donor. But of course the person has the memories and presumably the sense of self of the brain donor. But the finger prints, iris scan and DNA of the body dono…

> Of course we don't even know whether this sense of self is really purely attached to the brain. That brain is still connected to the rest of your body, and who knows what the body chemistry of the body donor will do to the new brain?

Imagine just one aspect of this. A thyroid disorder.

If the donor body was hyperthyroid, the head transplant would result in someone with the symptoms of hyperthyroidism. Angry, irritable, racing pulse, etc. If they had hypothyroidism, they would be depressed, lethargic, etc.

And that's just one organ in the body. It could radically alter the "person" who they are presuming lives only in the head.

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#119

Post by macintux »

JProthero wrote: post #11
yellow_lead wrote: post #6

Aside from the moral aspects, it's also interesting to think about the results. Would a new brain have difficulty operating a different body? Would one's senses translate similarly? Would the person's idea of where their limbs are in space be all messed up?

Perhaps the results of hand transplantation procedures, which have already been carried out successfully [1], could provide some insight into this question. The functionality that hand transplant recipients obtain from the transplant apparently varies, but the results can be quite impressive. The Wikipedia article notes one recipient was able to use his transplanted hand to drink from a bottle of water a week after t…

That's a worrisome timeframe, though, if it scales linearly. Hopefully it's parallelizable.

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#120

Post by Razengan »

georgyo wrote: post #116
Razengan wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To really cook your goose imagine if we could not only freely modify and "jump" between bodies, but also edit our memories. Kinda like Total Recall turned up to 110, where you can implant fake experiences, remove bad memories, take on an entirely new persona, or clone yourself and have a relationship with your clone. What really makes you "you" then? There's a great little anime called Kaiba which explores exactly th…

Altered Carbon sorta plays with this concept a lot. But it's set in a world were it is common place, and people have already detached identity from body.

It's commonplace in the Kaiba universe too, with "designer bodies", memory brokers and a black market of custom sex slaves etc.
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