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From: bjm@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Bruce McAdam)
Subject: Exact Duplicate?, also Dennet (was Re: Brain and Body aspects of same thing.
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Keywords: Brain, Body, Mind, Dennet, Duplicate, consciousness
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Date: Mon, 15 Jan 1996 14:19:38 GMT
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In article <4d76oi$54j@copland.udel.edu>, greggt@copland.udel.edu (Thomas R. Gregg) writes:
[Article has been rearranged a bit]
> I would argue that the mind is somehow inextricably connected with the
> brain, so that if you removed someone's brain, you would also remove that
> person's identity, leaving their body a shell.  The new brain would come
> with a different consciousness and the new brain-body combination would be
> a different "person."  Further, I think that consciousness is not 
> distributed over the whole brain, but is a property of some brain area, 
> just as hearing and sight are properties of particular brain areas.  So 
> there is some brain area that you could transplant between people to make 
> them change identities, much as people change identities in fairy tales.

See Daniel Dennet's "Conciousness Explained" for an extremely good argument
against this view.  It also has arguments against the view that "hearing and sight
are properties of particular brain areas".
 
> If doctors were to replace a person's brain with an exact duplicate, would
> the person notice any difference?  This is quite a poser. 

How can it be an "exact duplicate" if someone can notice a difference?

> >and evolutionarily, when did the "brain" come about?

There is no need for a clear division between No Brain and Brain, I would
think it better to have degrees of braininess.  A central system is required for
organised macroscopic movement and this developed into the brain.

-- 
   ___          ___     Bruce J. McAdam
__/__ \__    __/__ \___ Computer Science Undergraduate
_____|_| \__/_____| |__ The University of Edinburgh
  \____| |_____| |_/    bjm@dcs.ed.ac.uk
     \___/  \___/       http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~bjm/
