[MURG] Re: Same person or not with repair of brain damage?

[James Swayze]

>Message: 1
>Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2004 04:03:43 -0400 (EDT)
>From: Ed Minchau <spider_boris at yahoo.com>
>Subject: Re: [MURG] fixing defects (was off-topic posts)
>To: murg at minduploading.org
>Reply-To: murg at minduploading.org
>  
>
>Well, I think that whether or not the uploaded mind is
>still the same person or not is probably the key
>philosophical question behind uploading.  After all,
>if the uploaded mind is NOT the same person, then why
>bother at all?
>
>Ed
>  
>
As far as Joseph Graham's problem goes I wish he would come clean with 
us about the real cause of his mental disability, a car accident causing 
closed cranial trama. Joseph is in a way a mild case of a modern day 
Phineas Gage.

I have argued before, with Christians, that God would be cruel indeed to 
lock people in hell for bad behavior because it might not be their fault 
in every case. Phineas Gage being an example of profound personality 
change post traumatic physical brain injury to the frontal lobe, that 
outside observers could judge as going from good to evil or at the very 
least highly disagreeable. Let it be said I'm not comparing Joseph's 
actions to evil. He's just a bit stubborn or mildly disagreeable to some.

I wish their was something that mind uploading could one day do for 
helping him return function more towards normalization and better. But 
we can only speculate about these issues of repair possibilities. He 
needs to understand we are only a few people with a common, almost hobby 
interest at this point, in the possibilities of extreme furture tech and 
have no money or connections with the government or legal forces to aid 
in some crusade against nano bogeymen that aren't even provable. I wish 
you well Joseph but we are powerless for now and for the foreseeable 
future to aid you.

Part of me wants to believe that such damage could one day be reversed 
and that something of the once-self would remain enough to revive that 
once-self so to speak and return a person to the who they were before 
such an injury.

I think of myself and though my injury was spinal and not brain relaed 
the effects of the consequences have certainly effected my development 
and course of my life and so changed me to someone different than I 
would have been. I don't think getting to walk again suddenly would 
change that all back instantly.

But I wonder about procedures that affect the brain so dramatically such 
as those done for epileptic sufferers. Does severing their corpus 
callosum make them a different person? If a chunk of brain at 
coordinants x,y,z is excised a change will surely occur. Would replacing 
that same chunk back where it belongs reverse that change? How about 
replacing it with chip circuitry?

It's a conundrum.

James

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