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Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

washingtonpost.com

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

#121

Post by gibbonsrcool »

dade_ wrote: post #107

I think the patient would spend the rest of their life in physical rehabilitation. They would have to train their brain to remap every muscle movement. Coordination would be a nightmare and a major fall risk (very common way to die in a hospital). Then there is the whole digestive system, it is hard to believe it runs completely independently, and if that isn’t working right, it would be a horrible death. As fascinat…

Maybe with the right technology you could map out each nerves function for both donor and patient before the procedure and match them up. I wouldn't be surprised if brains and nerves don't work as simply as an API though.

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

#122

Post by usrusr »

keiferski wrote: post #76
Nextgrid wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That doesn’t make it actually the case To the best of our knowledge and experience with it comes to transplanting organs, it seems to be? > doing so has a lot of negative consequences for our actual embodied selves Can you elaborate? Organ transplants (and most likely other medical procedures) definitely throw wrenches into various spiritual & religious beliefs, but in the physical world (which we can observe & stu…

I think it’s definitely a complex topic and not one that can be hashed out in a HN comment. My thought is something like this: because we treat our “real selves” as just our heads/minds, we unintentionally or intentionally disregard the rest of our body. To me, this seems to be related to some specific negative things like obesity, for example. Many people don’t treat their body with the same level of respect as they…

That argument suffers considerably from a quick glance at how we treat our minds. If I take a quick survey of nutritional and intellectual fast food habits I can't pick a winner. It's bad on both sides and it doesn't even make much of a difference whether I look at society at large or no further than in the mirror.

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

#123

Post by arduanika »

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…

To take it further, imagine an even more futuristic procedure where a tumorous right brain is replaced alongside a healthy left brain. Who are you then?

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

#124

Post by grishka »

protoman3000 wrote: post #41

The article mentions Soviet jigsaw experiments on dogs, like reanimating dead dog heads [1] and grafting two dogs on to each other having one circulation [2]. How would we go about confirming this was more than propaganda? [1] https://youtu.be/VtDQc-4wGvM [2] https://youtu.be/uvZThr3POlQ

The second video mentions that the head of an older small dog grafted onto a large younger dog got rejuvenated as far as the appearance of the fur goes. It'm almost angry that apparently no further research was done back then on what they now call heterochronic parabiosis. It's only in the recent years that this point of view, that aging is a programmed self-sustaining process, controlled via signaling molecules in the blood plasma, and not wear-and-tear, started emerging.

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

#125

Post by Gupie »

tsimionescu wrote: post #95
Gupie wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unless you believe in a transcendent soul as the seat of consciousness, it must be equivalent. That is a big claim considering we have no idea what causes consciousness. It is however certain that the copy is not you. Whether the original gets destroyed on teleportation or not, the original you will not feel, see, hear etc anything that the copy does.

Sure, the two copies won't feel, see, hear anything in common. But I also don't hear the sounds I heard yesterday, or feel the sand I felt last year, or even taste the tea I tasted this morning. Regardless of what gives rise to consciousness, there is no continuity in physics, every moment is separate, even if it is caused by the previous one. If you copy me, I am not either of the copies, I am the thing that existed…

> There is no known process in physics that could give meaning to that identity.

I am arguing that we don't know enough about consciousness or about the universe to claim there is no difference between the original and the copy. So saying "there is no known process in physics" doesn't undermine my position.

Here is one possibility, perhaps a bit silly, but if we are in a simulated universe, not that I think this is likely, but if we are then each person could maybe have a unique hash. A copy then would have a different hash to the original.

Like I said I am not saying we are in a simulation. It is just an example scenario where a perfect copy would not be the same as a move.

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

#126

Post by ibigb »

The idea that one can transplant a brain and thus a human's consciousness is based on erroneous concepts. Because humans currently have only physical senses they assume, naturally, that all of reality is based on matter. The situation however is that the brain just mirrors the reality of consciousness. Therefore the brain is not the center of consciousness, but only reflects the activities of mind. Just as looking in a mirror you see a reflection of a person which is not the reality of the person but only a reflection of something that is real, so seeing the activity of the brain is only the reflection of the activity of mind.

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

#127

Post by after_care »

ibigb wrote: post #126

The idea that one can transplant a brain and thus a human's consciousness is based on erroneous concepts. Because humans currently have only physical senses they assume, naturally, that all of reality is based on matter. The situation however is that the brain just mirrors the reality of consciousness. Therefore the brain is not the center of consciousness, but only reflects the activities of mind. Just as looking in…

Are you claiming there is a non-physical source of human consciousness?

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

#128

Post by lamename »

ibigb wrote: post #126

The idea that one can transplant a brain and thus a human's consciousness is based on erroneous concepts. Because humans currently have only physical senses they assume, naturally, that all of reality is based on matter. The situation however is that the brain just mirrors the reality of consciousness. Therefore the brain is not the center of consciousness, but only reflects the activities of mind. Just as looking in…

Could you expand with evidence to justify and further explain what you mean?

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

#129

Post by pawelmurias »

Larrikin wrote: post #17
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 always imagine this will be the divide between rich and poor in the future. The more expensive technology will break the person down and send their atoms to the destination to be reconstructed, it will be slower but it will be the same person. The less expensive technology will scan the person send that data and they will be printed out from a a futuristic atomic printer in a process that kills the original. I imag…

If you are killing someone to print them elsewhere why not print more copies? Teleporting people this way seems to be a faster horses way of thinking method of travel.

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

#130

Post by ImprobableTruth »

lambda_obrien wrote: post #112
ImprobableTruth wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

If the mind extended to other parts of the body, I'd expect there to be tons of evidence for it, but there seems to be none.

Like, with the brain we know that the mind is deeply linked to it because it's just very obvious. Brain damage heavily impacts cognition, people lose memories, their personalities change, they lose the capacity to feel certain things or certain concepts - we even have some idea of damaging what area causes what.

Compare this with people losing limbs or sensory organs. Someone who loses their sight, doesn't lose their visual memory, their ability to visualize things, spatial concepts, etc. If these organs were actually part of the mind I would have at least expected some part of it to be lost.

So unless evidence for the contrary comes to light, it only seems reasonable to me to assume that no or at the very least minimal real processing occurs outside of the brain.

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