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HS 005: What Makes You You?
What is the Essence of You? ...... Musky
Where are you right now? Are you the all the meat sitting down listening to this episode? Are you behind your eyes? Just the jelly in your skull? If I took your head and put it on another body, would you still be you? John, James, Kat and special guest Greg explore different ideas of personal identity. Are we our bodies? Our brains? Our memories? If our memories got wiped tomorrow, would we still be us moving forward? How many sentences are going to end in a question mark?
What if John and James got hooked up to a machine. This machine left all the cells in their original bodies and only the information of John and James gets transferred? Memories, personality, and dreams get transferred from one person to another. Is James John or is James still James? Does your head hurt yet?
Teleportation Goes Horribly Wrong
Let's go to the future! Teleportation is a thing now. This is how it works: you walk in a room, you hit a button, the the room destroys the original version of you while a "new" you is constructed wherever you're going. You don't feel a thing. You blink and you're at your destination while your day continues. However, none of the original atoms that made you are moved to the new location. Is this a perfect system or are you dying and getting reborn every time you teleport? Let's make this situation more complex. Imagine you go in the room, hit the button, but nothing happens. You walk out to the front desk and tell them that there's a problem. They check the tape and inform you that you made it to your destination! That version of you is going through their day just like you would. Here's the kicker: they inform you that the original copy MUST be destroyed due to the teleportation policy. You proceed to understandably freak out. This thought experiment hones in on the core of what personal identity is for someone. You are what you control. But are you really in control?
Free Will?
Do we have free will? To answer this as a scientist, we need evidence. People have been hooked up to electroencephalograms (EEGs) to measure their brain activity while they do various things. The example given in the episode was that participants got hooked up to an EEG and were asked to press a button. You would expect the brain to "light up" in the following order: (1) make decision to hit button, (2) motor strip tells your muscles to hit button, (3) button gets pushed. However, what really happened was that the motor strip lit up before they decided to hit the button. This has huge implications against free will. If we are our experience, and we don't even control that... who are we?
Are we Asking the Right Question?
It's human nature to want to categorize things. I'm me, you're you, that's a chair, we good. Perhaps that way of thinking is faulty. Maybe there is not a "me". Biologically, I'm just a pile of cells constantly replacing itself with new cells. When we talk about "us" we're really talking about a snapshot in time. You and yourself ten years ago have virtually no cells in common. Yet, when you look at an old picture, you say it's you. You KNOW it's you. So maybe it's what you know in your gut. Or maybe we are all not as separate as we might think.
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What is the Essence of You? ...... Musky
Where are you right now? Are you the all the meat sitting down listening to this episode? Are you behind your eyes? Just the jelly in your skull? If I took your head and put it on another body, would you still be you? John, James, Kat and special guest Greg explore different ideas of personal identity. Are we our bodies? Our brains? Our memories? If our memories got wiped tomorrow, would we still be us moving forward? How many sentences are going to end in a question mark?
What if John and James got hooked up to a machine. This machine left all the cells in their original bodies and only the information of John and James gets transferred? Memories, personality, and dreams get transferred from one person to another. Is James John or is James still James? Does your head hurt yet?
Teleportation Goes Horribly Wrong
Let's go to the future! Teleportation is a thing now. This is how it works: you walk in a room, you hit a button, the the room destroys the original version of you while a "new" you is constructed wherever you're going. You don't feel a thing. You blink and you're at your destination while your day continues. However, none of the original atoms that made you are moved to the new location. Is this a perfect system or are you dying and getting reborn every time you teleport? Let's make this situation more complex. Imagine you go in the room, hit the button, but nothing happens. You walk out to the front desk and tell them that there's a problem. They check the tape and inform you that you made it to your destination! That version of you is going through their day just like you would. Here's the kicker: they inform you that the original copy MUST be destroyed due to the teleportation policy. You proceed to understandably freak out. This thought experiment hones in on the core of what personal identity is for someone. You are what you control. But are you really in control?
Free Will?
Do we have free will? To answer this as a scientist, we need evidence. People have been hooked up to electroencephalograms (EEGs) to measure their brain activity while they do various things. The example given in the episode was that participants got hooked up to an EEG and were asked to press a button. You would expect the brain to "light up" in the following order: (1) make decision to hit button, (2) motor strip tells your muscles to hit button, (3) button gets pushed. However, what really happened was that the motor strip lit up before they decided to hit the button. This has huge implications against free will. If we are our experience, and we don't even control that... who are we?
Are we Asking the Right Question?
It's human nature to want to categorize things. I'm me, you're you, that's a chair, we good. Perhaps that way of thinking is faulty. Maybe there is not a "me". Biologically, I'm just a pile of cells constantly replacing itself with new cells. When we talk about "us" we're really talking about a snapshot in time. You and yourself ten years ago have virtually no cells in common. Yet, when you look at an old picture, you say it's you. You KNOW it's you. So maybe it's what you know in your gut. Or maybe we are all not as separate as we might think.