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Even though you use your brain to do a lot of thinking, you probably don't think about your brain that often.
It's an incredibly complex, incredibly precious organ. It's also incredibly squishy, as you can see in an amazing teaching video that demonstrates a freshly removed brain straight from autopsy.
As the neuroanatomist handles the vulnerable blob with the utmost care, it's awe-inspiring to realise that each one of us has a squishy brain just like it - and it contains all our memories and thoughts.
[...] And that's actually one of the purposes of the video - apart from being a teaching material, the university wanted "to stress the vulnerability of the brain to highlight the importance of wearing helmets, seat belts, and taking care of this very precious tissue."
https://www.sciencealert.com/what-human-brain-really-looks-like-video-incredible
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @03:40AM (1 child)
Perhaps.
My interpretation is that it does, in fact, contain all the memories, personality, skills, etc of a person. That does not rule out some conscious observer who inhabits the experience of that person yet is independent of it and not destroyed when the brain disappears. However, when inhabiting an experience as a person from birth to death, the observer is generally unable to recall observations of other people it's already observed.
How could we design an experiment to distinguish your monad from my monad? Well, I suppose we should begin by designing an experiment to prove the existence of monads. At least something like that seems like a compelling possibility when faced with the inability to imagine that one's existence is as constrained in time as it is in space. If constrained in space, why shouldn't it be constrained in time? Perhaps only because the time dimension is the only one we experience linearly and at a constant rate?
At the very least, I find Occam's razor unsatisfying in this case. I gather that I am not remotely close to being alone in that.
(I assume that's what you were talking about...?)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @04:00AM
Not the AC but humans have another big bunch of neurons elsewhere:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gut-second-brain/ [scientificamerican.com]
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/healthy_aging/healthy_body/the-brain-gut-connection [hopkinsmedicine.org]
So it's unlikely that the brain contains all our memories. Even from a different perspective from the original AC.