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| Does your brain represent you? |
| Yes |
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50% |
[ 10 ] |
| No |
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30% |
[ 6 ] |
| Inconclusive/Undecided |
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20% |
[ 4 ] |
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| Total Votes : 20 |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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 Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2008 8:34 pm Post subject: |
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Not a single "no" vote.
What if you were an attorney assigned to argue the "no" position and convince a jury or a panel of moderators or judges to agree? How would that argument go...? |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2008 9:23 pm Post subject: |
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OK, I voted "No" as women tend to be represented by their bodies and not by their brains.  |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2008 9:26 pm Post subject: |
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Hmm.
"Brains" not a part of "the body." In any case, what part of their bodies, exactly? Please do be specific, Big_Bird. |
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Big_Bird
Joined: 31 Jan 2003
Location: Sometimes here sometimes there...
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| Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2008 9:42 pm Post subject: |
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 Cheeky! |
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Manner of Speaking
Joined: 09 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2008 10:49 pm Post subject: |
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Gopher,
By 'represent' do you mean 'constitute', as in the question "Does your brain constitute you?" |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2008 11:10 pm Post subject: |
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All of the above. "Represent" is merely one of many verbs I could have chosen to articulate this question, which deals with consciousness and the brain/mind/soul's relationship(s) to it.
Think of it as a malleable, open-ended question... |
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Manner of Speaking
Joined: 09 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2008 11:25 pm Post subject: |
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| If, then, the question is, "Does the brain constitute you?" my answer would be yes. Somewhat reluctantly I must admit I don't see any evidence for a soul, and the word "mind" to me seems to encompass the more abstract/cognitive aspects of the brain. |
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flakfizer
Joined: 12 Nov 2004
Location: scaling the Cliffs of Insanity with a frayed rope.
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| Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2008 11:33 pm Post subject: |
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Well, according to popular movies, the brain does represent us. In "Dark City" the aliens wanted to see what made humans human and they kept mixing around everyone's brain content (well, memories and presumably some other stuff). And at the end:
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You wanted to know what it was about us that made us human. Well, you're not going to find it...
[Murdoch points at his head]
John Murdoch: ...in here. You were looking in the wrong place. |
And then from Phenomenon:
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The study of a living,
active brain would tell us volumes.
You could be our
greatest teacher, George.
I can be your biographer,
in a sense.
I can present you to the world.
But that's not me.
That's just my brain.
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Mon Mar 24, 2008 11:59 pm Post subject: |
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But that's not me.
That's just my brain. |
Ever seen the film Phenomenon, with John Travolta? |
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Fishead soup
Joined: 24 Jun 2007
Location: Korea
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| Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 12:07 am Post subject: |
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| Existence is elsewhere. What we experience here is an illusion. |
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flakfizer
Joined: 12 Nov 2004
Location: scaling the Cliffs of Insanity with a frayed rope.
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| Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 2:46 am Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
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But that's not me.
That's just my brain. |
Ever seen the film Phenomenon, with John Travolta? |
I just quoted it. Maybe my post was unclear. I quoted from two movies. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 7:34 am Post subject: |
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| Must have missed the middle line in that post... |
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Rteacher
Joined: 23 May 2005
Location: Western MA, USA
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| Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 8:13 am Post subject: |
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Thank God for Vedic spiritual science!
Every living being is really an eternal, infinitessimal particle of the Complete Whole Person.
Consciousness is the symptom of the living being - the jiva or individual soul - which floats on prana (various subtle life-airs) in the region of the heart.
The soul is the real living force, while the material body only appears to be alive (for a pre-determined number of breaths) due to its presence.
Prana works as an interface between the gross and subtle body, enabling all the pychophysical functions which appear to "animate" an embodied person.
Consciousness spreads throughout the body through blood, which also moves because of prana.
http://www.veda.harekrsna.cz/encyclopedia/prana.htm
The body-mind-soul/living being connection can be roughly understood by this computer analogy:
The gross material body (including the brain) is like hardware; the subtle material body (mind, intelligence and false ego) is like software; and you, the living being, are their user.
While living in the material world, you have to communicate through the gross and subtle body, thus resembling a paralyzed person using a computer for his contact with the external world (like Stephen Hawking).
http://www.veda.harekrsna.cz/bhaktiyoga/science.htm
When the brain is damaged or altered, the personality may be expressed differently, but doesn't essentially change.
In our spiritually perfectional stage, we'll no longer require such a "bodily computer". We'll be living in a transcendental, non-material world in our own original spiritual bodily forms. |
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stillnotking
Joined: 18 Dec 2007
Location: Oregon, USA
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| Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 9:38 am Post subject: |
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| Rteacher wrote: |
| When the brain is damaged or altered, the personality may be expressed differently, but doesn't essentially change. |
This is simply false. No one who's studied neurology could argue this. As just one case history, I'd refer you to the case of Phineas Gage, who was pierced through the frontal lobes by an iron tamping rod while working on a railroad in 1848.
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| His contractors, who regarded him as the most efficient and capable foreman in their employ previous to his injury, considered the change in his mind so marked that they could not give him his place again. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint of advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinent, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. In this regard, his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was �no longer Gage.� |
There are numerous modern examples too, of course. Fundamental changes in personality from brain injuries, tumors, prolonged drug abuse, etc. are downright common.
Edit: I actually saw this happen to a guy I knew in high school. He graduated about two years before me and had been a decent student and a really nice guy. He went to work selling furniture and was engaged to be married. Then he fell while rock-climbing, hit his head, and was in a coma for about a month. When he woke up he had numerous cognitive and emotional problems -- he was not the same person at all. It was genuinely creepy to talk to him after that. He was unemployed, homeless, and broke within a year, and as far as I know is still cadging change on the streets of my home town in West Virginia.
Last edited by stillnotking on Tue Mar 25, 2008 10:42 am; edited 1 time in total |
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stillnotking
Joined: 18 Dec 2007
Location: Oregon, USA
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| Posted: Tue Mar 25, 2008 10:24 am Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
Not a single "no" vote.
What if you were an attorney assigned to argue the "no" position and convince a jury or a panel of moderators or judges to agree? How would that argument go...? |
I would argue that our first-person experience of consciousness cannot be captured by third-person information. I would bring up Frank Jackson's Mary the Colour Scientist thought experiment, and Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" I would argue that consciousness has an irreducible character, that it is impossible to have a "fragment of consciousness" or for a conscious entity to be composed of unconscious matter.
I believe none of these things, and my argument would probably be undermined by the fact that I knew it to be utterly specious, but I could construct a very plausible line of BS. |
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