Brains and Animalism; Duplicating the Universe

[C C]

Brains and animalism

http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2015/...alism.html

EXCERPT: Animalists hold that we are animals. It is widely accepted by animalists that if a brain were removed from a body, and the body kept alive, the person would stay with the bulk of the body rather than go with the brain. I wonder how much of the intuition is based on irrelevant questions of physical bulk. Imagine aliens who are giant brains with tiny support organs—lungs, heart, legs, etc.—dwarfed by the brain. I think we might have the intuition that if the brain were disconnected from the support organs, the animal would go with the brain. In the case of beings that dwarf their brains, it feels natural to talk of a certain operation as a brain transplant. But in the case of beings that are almost all brain, the analogous operation would probably be referred to as a support-system transplant. Yet surely we should say exactly the same thing metaphysically about us and the aliens, assuming that the functional roles of the brains and the other organs are sufficiently similar. This isn't a positive argument that we'd go with our brains. It's just an argument to defuse the intuition that we wouldn't....

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Duplicating the Universe

http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/201...verse.html

EXCERPT: I've been thinking about two forms of duplication. One is duplication of the entire universe from beginning to end, as envisioned in Nietzsche's eternal return (cf. Poincare's recurrence theorem on a grand scale). The other is duplication within an eternal (or very long) individual life (goldfish-pool immortality). In both cases, I find myself torn among four different evaluative perspectives. For color, imagine a god watching our universe from Big Bang to heat death. At the end, this god says, "In total, that was good. Replay!" Or imagine an immortal life in which you loop repeatedly (without remembering) through the same pleasures over and over. Consider four ways of thinking about the value of duplication...

[elte]

This makes me think of how mammals have similarities in basic brain function.  It's one reason why dogs are ostentatiously the most common pet and snakes are not a very common one.

[Magical Realist]

We might have a rough general principle: The animal when cut in two tends to go with the functionally more important part. Thus, perhaps, when the human animal is cut into a brain and a rest-of-body, it goes with the brain, as the brain is functionally more important in the brainier animals.

I don't accept that premise, that the brain is more functionally important than the rest of the body even in a brainy being. Let's see the brain last without a heart to pump blood into it, or lungs to oxygenate that blood, or hands and legs to fetch food and a mouth to eat it. The idea of an alien with a huge brain and a tiny body doesn't make sense. A large brain would require even more blood, more oxygen, and more food, making the body even more important. The only creature we know of that has a large brain and a tiny body is a fetus, and we all know how IT gets it's life support. No..the body is always more functionally important than the brain, as millions of years of evolution should have shown us by now. But who says our soul or essence lies in functionality? I think it is tied to to energy. And the brain is the nexus of bodily energy.