4 ms·
As someone who has had a neurological illness that impacts my memory, I can assure you that it is neuronal. All of this 'resumption' of being/existence means i
by Aqueous 13y ago
As someone who has had a neurological illness that impacts my memory, I can assure you that it is neuronal.
All of this 'resumption' of being/existence means is that the same structures that were in place before the intervention persist through the duration of the surgery. Which is exactly the point of interventions like this - to make sure that the brain can resume its normal activity.
If your brain is identical to itself after as it was to before then you will have continuity of subjective experience.
The obvious proof of this is that you go to sleep every night. That is a loss of consciousness, during which you are dormant. In some sense, you don't fully exist when you are asleep. Nonetheless when you wake up in the morning your brain constructs you as you yet again, mostly the same as you were the night before.
Your brain simply remembers how to be you. Your brain remembers how to be perceived by itself as itself. This includes your outward personality but also your inward subjective experience. That is why we have this sensation of continuity from one moment to the next.
But as someone who has had that continuity broken I can assure you that I wish there was some other thing that kept it going, not related to neurons. However, in my experience, it seems like there isn't.
- msandford 13y agoYeah agreed. The brain is a phenomena that requires neurons to exist, but simply having neurons doesn't make a brain. It's structural like you've said. The arrangement (and connection) of the neurons is what makes one brain different from another much more so than anything else. As long as you preserve that structure, you're preserving the "person" as they identify themselves so to speak. What makes the me that wakes up every single morning after having slept the same me that went to bed every night? From a consciousness perspective, it's the memories. That's the only thing I can really track that make me, me. Boot my brain up sans memories and I'm not really me. With memories I am. At least as far as I can tell.
- SnacksOnAPlane 13y agoBut if you could pause your brain and make a perfect duplicate, with the same neuronal connections, and then "wake up" both you and your neuronal clone, would you experience yourself as two different entities? And if you only woke up the clone, would it be you who was experiencing the clone's life? Or a different entity?
- tempestn 13y agoBased on the grandparent's logic (which I support), they would both be equally "you", assuming it was a perfect duplicate. From that point forward, the two people would have different experiences, and so would become different people, just as you have different life experience now than you did a week or a year ago, and so think and behave somewhat differently. That said, I bet they would also have a pretty fascinating relationship: like a twins bond, except much more so. Given their shared brain structure and largely shared life experience (shared to a degree that no two separate people could), their thought patterns would obviously remain very similar. It would probably feel very much like they could read each other's minds.