"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> writes:
> So I got to thinking: What if Calvin is right, and our cortex has lots of
> small areas that are independently active and compete with each other to
> produce the overall thought? What if we could cut out a square inch of
> cortex (containing many complete active-areas) and implant it in another
> brain? That would leave the donor almost unchanged... but the recipient
> would have access to some of the thoughts and memories, and maybe even
> patterns of thought, of the donor, if the thoughts were strong enough to
> spread through the rest of the brain and become conscious.
The loss of a square inch of cortex may not always be immediately
noticeable to the person losing it, but I wouldn't recommend
it. Calvin's ideas are not very accepted by the mainstream, and given
my limited understanding of them it is not obvious that the transplant
would work since the patterns are highly dependent on having the right
subcortical afferents - without their context they are meaningless.
While I agree with a fluid identity concept and that we might get the
ability to pattern developing brains, I don't think it is doable
within the near future.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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