[ExI] Uploading and selfhood

Michael Miller ain_ani at yahoo.com
Fri Mar 28 15:40:10 UTC 2008



Apologies if this has already been covered, but I've been thinking
for a little while about uploading and the attendent reduction of
selfhood to brain processes. The following review (from New Scientist)
makes some points which I think present the most compelling case
against the viability of uploading. That is, that the self (and
specifically, thoughts) are not something located in or identical with
the brain - they are a facet of an entire entity, dependent just as
much on the whole body and the social processes of which we are a part.
Robert Pepperell puts it well in his book the Posthuman Condition when
he says "Consciousness is the function of an organsm, not an organ".

I wonder, how do the proponents of uploading argue against these ideas?

Mike



--



RAYMOND TALLIShas thought long, deeply and in a practical way about life, death andconsciousness: he is a recently retired professor of geriatric medicinespecialising in clinical neuroscience. He is also a philosopher andauthor of published fiction and poetry. His writings on the mind andbody display an intellectual breadth and distinctive style bordering onthat of a polymath.

                    	        	    	                                                In his latest book, The Kingdom of Infinite Space,Tallis has decided to explore the head. Not the brain, but the head;this is not another book about consciousness, and only the finalchapter deals with it explicitly. Neuroscience and brain scans areconspicuously absent. Its subject is the head as a whole, and the waythat heads relate to selves.


                    	        	    	                                                In
fact, Tallis is exasperated by brain worship and the excessive claim
that consciousness emerges exclusively from the firing of neurons.
"Selves require bodies as well as brains, material environments as well
as bodies, and societies as well as material environments," Tallis says
in a fighting foreword. "That is why, despite the hype, we won't find
in the brain an explanation of ourselves."


                    	        	    	                                                The
book gets the reader to think afresh about everyday experiences such as
staring in the mirror, vision, breathing, speaking, hearing, face
recognition, laughter, tickling, yawning, sweating, eating, spitting,
smoking, vomiting, sleeping, ageing, sex and death. The pages burst
with an entertaining mixture of intriguing facts and thought-provoking
observations.


                    	        	    	                                                On
eating, for example, Tallis disagrees with writers such as Richard
Dawkins, who treat hunger as nothing more than a biological drive. We
must eat to survive, but there is a social dimension to stuffing our
faces that Darwinians tend to minimise. The contrast between the raw
and the cooked is the difference between nature and culture, as
structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss pointed out. Cultural
culinary codes can be elaborate and confusing to outsiders.


                    	        	    	                                                On
blushing, Tallis wonders why we do it, since it clearly draws attention
to our vulnerability. He describes an attempted scientific study of the
blush in young females. The aim was to prompt blushes under controlled
conditions by exposing the subjects to suggestive material. The
experiment failed totally, yet when the researcher thanked the women
for participating, they apologised for their uncooperative cheeks and
blushed scarlet.


                    	        	    	                                                Andon thinking, Tallis muses: "Earwax is in my head. Mucus is in my head.My brain is in my head. But are my thoughts in my head?" There followsan accessible disquisition, influenced by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle,on whether thought and meaning are the kinds of things that occupyspace. "When, as I did from time to time, I applied a stethoscope to apatient's skull, I sometimes heard the bruit of the angioma I waslistening for but never even the slightest rumour of the thoughts thatI knew were ceaselessly passing through his mind," Tallis writes.


                    	        	    	        				    				    	        	    	                                                While
reading the book, one cannot help wishing that the digressions and
detours were shorter. Without them, Tallis would not be Tallis, but the
book would nevertheless have benefited from sympathetic, firm editing.
It will not do to plead, as he does, that all worthwhile journeys
involve frequently getting lost.


                    	        	    	                                                Does The Kingdom of Infinite Spaceshed new light on the question of how physical processes in the braingive rise to subjective experience (the infamous "hard problem" ofconsciousness which neuroanatomist David Bainbridge recently dismissedas a "deceitful spectre" in Beyond the Zonules of Zinn)?Not really. But it enjoyably persuaded me that we need to attend moreto our heads than to our brains if we are to explain our selves toourselves.




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