Successful replication of a mature human brain – one that we would accept as a replacement for our own, or for the brain of someone we love – must preserve almost all the connections within it. Connections embody the psychological properties that make human individuals who they are: memories, learned abilities, habits, associations, talents, and emotional responses.
In an organ such as the liver, it doesn’t matter that two particular cells are adjacent, because the liver is not a communications network. In the brain, the physical arrangement of individual cells matters very much. All our psychological attributes – the differences between the minds of an Einstein and a Hitler – are instantiated in that physical relationship. Continue reading “Human Replication Technology, Update 2010: Replicating the Brain”
All that’s needed to make a case for radical reform of the idea of self is a thought-experiment with a clear and compelling outcome. However, the world is full of people who pay no attention to thought-experiments, however revealing they may be in exposing inconsistencies in everyday ideas, because thought-experiments aren’t ‘real’. These are people from Missouri, as the saying goes, who demand to be shown. And I have nothing to show, yet.