week 11 discussion posts #1-3

Slightly altered for the purposes of this blog

Phew! 10-12hr working days for two weeks.. has left me very far behind in tute discussions! Apologies for my ridiculously late replies.

Responding to Miroula's reponse to Ariella (;P), where she's mentioned "Perhaps being a paraplegic would lead the person to learn life lessons or become the kind of person they wouldnt have been able to become if they were able to walk."

I agree with Miroula on this. I've observed from news reports, or from reading about other people's lives/experiences, that when one part of the is damaged or is dysfunctional, another part of the brain seems to light up and become much more stronger or 'focused'.

Take for instance, the blind painter who is able to distinguish between colours simply by touching the dried pigment on the canvas (true story - Mum recently read about this dude in a Korean newspaper). His lack of eyesight appears to have heightened his sense of touch. It's as though the brain is provided with a certain amount of "skill", and depending on its influences, varying portions of "skill" are divided amongst the different functions.

To compare to something more basic, it's almost like those racing games, where you can choose to have a car with high speed but little grip, or good braking but slow acceleration.

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In response to Alex's question "Will such a machine operate as a human brain does? Will it feel emotion, love, etc?" -

Call me stubborn but I think human emotion is possibly way too complex and unpredictable for us to break it down and "computerize" it, so to speak. Not only that, but it would make life so.. mechanic. We spend enough time with our portable/desktop electronic gadgets as it is, I think that having to converse to a "human robot" would be really, really depressing.

It's a bit ironic hey, that humans are constantly breaking new ground, discovering lots of things about the world and everything around them, yet the hardest thing to crack is ourselves.. :)

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So Ariella wrote:

Justin wrote:
"If it is possible to effectively transplant our minds into another body, does that mean that our soul or spirit is also transplanted or even existed in the first place? I think this is what some people might have difficulty accepting. Or perhaps I've oversimplified the issue."

I don't think you have oversimplified the issue at all - I think it is just another way of asking the question that someone else asked this week of where the soul is located physically in our body. If we say the soul is a mental thing, then can it be transplanted like (potentially, but not now) the brain? My inclination (from the concept of emergence) would be to say no, that it can't... or that maybe part of your soul could be, but that there would be bits missing. But then, is your soul even your soul anymore if you were to start removing bits of it? Is the soul a whole, or is it too a sum of parts?

(I realise these questions are getting slightly off topic, sorry).




In response to Ariella's questions/reply to Justin's post, maybe the problem is that we are trying think of the soul and/or the spirit as being located somewhere physically within ourselves. Perhaps it's something more intangible, almost like a ghost, or one of those 'feelings' that you just have, the sense of a presence, that you just can't place a finger on.

I would also like to think that the soul and the spirit are things which cannot be transferred from one body to another.. and if the soul IS a sum of parts, then this sum is inseparable.. that is to say, there are so many things that make up the soul, it is impossible to try and "remove" something from it. I would be more inclined to believe that the soul is able to change, in the same way that a personality can change.