by alecto » May 2nd, 2007, 2:35 pm
The reason this is all so terribly hard to figure out is that we really have very little idea about what part of the "personality" we see when we look at someone is actually the person. If you take a bad habit out of someone, we tend to believe that what is left over is still the same person, just changed. Usually, we think likewise about removing a brain tumor (though that also changes the "personality" sometimes. But how much can you take out before doing so terminates the old person entirely. If a person is left over, is that person a kind of "Frankenstein construct" of the leftovers? What might that mean? While we're at it, some of the "multiple personality" cases really look like two minds in one body, not just a single person with compartmentalized memory subsets. How does that work? Can one die and go to Heaven while the other lives on in the body? It's a stange business, and it's what we get into when we start talking about large-scale brain surgery.
Sentio ergo est.
