From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Date: Mon Jul 12 1999 - 11:27:16 MDT
> If the heart consists of 60-65% brain, what are the implications
> for head-only cryonic suspension?
Head-only cryonic suspension has always been dubious (beyond the
level that cryonics itself is) even without this. This particular
"thinking with the heart" story is almost certainly a meaningless
extrapolation from a small discovery motivated by mysticism, but
that doesn't mean all such notions are nonsense.
The idea that "brains think, hearts just pump" is a black-and
white dichotomy of function characteristic of designed systems,
not evolved systems. Evolved systems don't work like that; every
part interferes with every other part, everything has multiple
functions and side effects, and everything works together for
hard-to-see reasons, because that's just how it evolved.
The properly skeptical viewpoint is that we cannot yet rule out
the possibility that some interesting part of who we are exists
below the neck. We have made a few observations: amputees can
still speak and reason, so we can say with some confidence that
it is very unlikely that some part of language and reason is
perfomed in the limbs. Heart transplant patients wake up thinking
that they are the same people with similar thoughts. But their
personalities certainly do change--as do all of ours every day--
and we have few ways to measure that or know how to find reasons
for it.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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