[ExI] head transplant again

BillK pharos at gmail.com
Tue Feb 2 21:31:26 UTC 2016


On 2 February 2016 at 13:54, Mike Dougherty  wrote:
> Suppose you change from sneakers to boots, are you still the same
> "you" ?  If you are measuring your identity by terrain-capability,
> then perhaps you have.  In that case you 'become' a different person
> while wearing an exoskeleton (or, similarly, while driving a car);
> while wearing oven mitts (capable of holding hot items without
> burning); while using a calculator to do math (vs. bare-brained);
> after eating a large pasta or turkey dinner; etc.
>
> This identity question seems to polarize into answers where "you" (or
> "I") am some ineffable soul-force that exists outside the machinery or
> every piece of hardware and software that you may access is hashed
> into the pronoun.
<snip>


What you are describing would apply to putting a human brain in a robot body.
Changing between robot bodies would be like driving a different car.
No problem really, and the 'you' resident in the brain wouldn't change
much.

But human bodies are not like robot bodies. They contain a
ridiculously complex system of glands and hormones in a feedback
system between parts of the body and the brain. The brain will be
changed by the flood of new hormones and different body responses.
Crazy things can happen when the hormone system screws up.
I doubt that it will be as simple as putting a new suit on.

BillK



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