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Illegal Beings: Human Clones
Where and what is consciousness?
SC ( 10/28/2004, 12:55:15 )Consciousness is more than the sum of its parts, and if we can't define what consciousness is, and locate where it resides, we can't duplicate it or be sure we haven't created it where we didn't expect once we've created almost all of its constituent parts. There have been experiments done which suggest that consciousness doesn't reside entirely in the brain, which I have mentioned in earlier postings, but the source was a TV show (a Daily Planet feature called "Gut Feelings"), so it's not easy to look up. I'll try to explain with a more familiar but poorer example: in the movie "The Sixth Day," Arnold Schwarzenegger's character is cloned by having his memories downloaded into a "blank" body that has been grown in a tank. When the second Arnie character appears, he looks exactly like the first, even though the Arnie we know could never have been grown in a tank. His physique is the product of years of effort in which his brain gave his body certain instructions and built up muscle and neural pathways designed to do certain jobs. His body is a product of his personality, his consciousness, and influences he was subjected to during his life. The physical record of that life doesn't reside entirely in the character's brain; much of it resides in his muscles and the connections between them and the brain that told them how to grow.In a case I know, a guy who became paralyzed in a car accident lost the use of his legs, but his personality changed as well. He became much more cheerful, more extroverted, and according to one of his relatives, even more intelligent, perhaps because of the effort he's had to make to recover, or because he took antidepressants for a while. He's working hard to regain the use of his legs, and maybe someday he will, but he's never going to be the same guy he was before the accident. Someone whose brain had somehow been preserved and then was connected to a new body, assuming that such a body could be grown, would go through changes at least as dramatic as someone recovering from paralysis. He might have the same parts as he did before, but the interconnections between those parts wouldn't be the same. If the hypothetical brainless body were to be of any use, it would either be initially useless or have to be artificially stimulated and exercised as it grew, giving it a different "history" than what the brain remembered. Once the two were reconnected, the body would probably influence the brain just as much as the reverse.
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