Thoughts on thoughts

[dhampyresa]

A story I am currently experiencing posits that scanning a person's brain is enough -- modulo computer code -- to upload them into the cloud.

But is it really?

I'm not talking about a soul or the golem's divine breath of life or anything on a metaphysical level. I'm talking on a purely physical level: is the brain the only part of us that thinks?

If my spinal chord can wrench my hand away from a hot stove, is that not thinking? No, seriously. What counts as thinking?

I think (hardy har har) this is not the line of questionning the story wants me to go down, but it's where I am, and I'm really curious what everyone else thinks?


I trying out the construction "story experiencing" as an alternative to "media consumption", because I hate the passivity and destruction implied by consumption. Would also welcome opinions on this.

Comments

[flamingsword]

Our intestinal biomes regulate a lot of our appetites and moods, and are not our moods and wants considered thoughts? I think you can create an engram of a person's thoughts in any given moment, but like: A.) the brain is not the whole of where those thoughts are coming from, and 2.) the amount of electrical discharge it would take to ping and record such an engram would literally destroy a lot of the delicate pieces of bioelectric hardware that is the human brain There's no way for it to not? You'd literally have to do it at the moment of death or it would be some weird form of murder/suicide.

[dhampyresa]

It does happen at the moment of death/the process does kill the "original" in the story (it's the animated TV show Pantheon, btw, very good so far but I've not finished it yet).

[eller]

Heh, good question! I don't really think the brain is enough to "upload" a personality, though. The rest of the body matters. A lot. Like... A lot of "thinking" is done by the gastrointestinal system, even. And don't forget about hormones... So, uh, I'm having difficulties with the whole concept of separating consciousness from physical body. I'm at, it's an interesting concept in a story, but not in a "oh, yeah, if technology evolves a bit, we'll do that" way.

[dhampyresa]

I'm really curious what you mean by "A lot of "thinking" is done by the gastrointestinal system, even."? flamingsword mentionned it too, but I think I was taking "appetites" in their comment as more literal than intended.

[eller]

It's mostly the microbiome that does stuff, but also the enteric nervous system... In mysterious ways... But, apparently, it really influences cognition.
For example, look at this: https://www.nature.com/articles/518S13a
Unfortunately, the real pathways of how exactly this works are... not all that well understood (yet). We're really at the level of "uh, something is happening there". XD

[mildred_of_midgard]

This. This is what I was referring to in my comment with "microbiome."

I wish I weren't so pressed for time rn, it's a topic of great interest to me, and I'd love to go into more depth!

[mildred_of_midgard]

Here via network.

While I can't wholeheartedly recommend Neal Stephenson's Fall, he does address this issue in that book. His premise is that you could get part of the personhood by scanning the brain, but the total consciousness is fed into by the body, the microbiome, etc.

[dhampyresa]

Hello!

Thank you for the (not quite) rec.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Quick quote from the novel:

Between the scientists from the Waterhouse/Forthrast camp and those who worked for El, there was vociferous agreement that the word “brain” needed to be banned from learned discourse, or put in scare quotes. They had to move beyond the practice of chopping off the heads of the deceased and throwing away the rest. Henceforward every client would be scanned in toto, heads to toes, and efforts would be made to collect data about their microbiome and any other non-neurological phenomena that would be overlooked by an ion-beam scanning system that only cared about neurons.

[luzula]

I think being a body physically interacting with the world shapes us too much for the "disembodied brain" thing to work!

[dhampyresa]

What if you could interact with VR. Would that work as a substitute, do you think?

[mildred_of_midgard]

This is what neuroscientist Antonio Damasio had to say about it in Descartes' Error (a book I *can* recommend, even if it's somewhat dated):

There is a philosophical thought experiment known as “brain in a vat,” which consists of imagining a brain removed from its body, maintained alive in a nutrient bath, and stimulated via its now dangling nerves in precisely the same way it would be stimulated were it inside the skull. Some people believe such a brain would have normal mental experiences. Now, leaving aside the suspension of disbelief required for imagining such a thing (and for imagining all Gedanken experiments), I believe that this brain would not have a normal mind. The absence of stimuli going out into the body-as-playing-field, capable of contributing to the renewal and modification of body states, would result in suspending the triggering and modulation of body states that, when represented back to the brain, constitute what I see as the bedrock of the sense of being alive. It might be argued that if it were possible to mimic, at the level of the dangling nerves, realistic configurations of inputs as if they were coming from the body, then the disembodied brain would have a normal mind. Well, that would be a nice and interesting experiment “to do” and I suspect the brain might indeed have some mind under those conditions. But what that more elaborate experiment would have done is create a body surrogate and thus confirm that “body-type inputs” are required for a normally minded brain after all. And what it would be unlikely to do is make the “body inputs” match in realistic fashion the variety of configurations which body states assume when those states are triggered by a brain engaged in making evaluations.

[luzula]

I see Mildred replied for me! : ) Which is good, because I have not read as much about the subject.