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Addendum Issue 043
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Addendum Issue# 43 - 7th May 2002
URL: http://www.adden.tr.cx/
Author : Steak, gaffa tape holds the world together
=================== William, Mary and the brain ============================
One of my favorite authors passed away in the year 1990 in a disturbing
pattern that seems to be taking the greatest authors of the face of this
planet in akin to Douglass Adams tragic demise, his name was Roald Darl,
you will probably be aware of some of his better known childrens stories such
as The BFG, the twits, matilda, the magic finger and other well written novels.
But if you want the real Roald, then I recommend some of his various older
short stories, my favorite of which is a story, the name of which escapes me at
this present point in time, ahh yes, phoenix informs me the story is entitled
"William and Mary" that's right.
In this storey William is about to die and he is visited by a friend of
his who strangely enough is in very high sprits, this friend informs him of
an experiment which he wants to perform on William where after his death his
brain would be removed and put in a tub and kept alive via a machine pumping
blood and oxygen around in such a way to keep him conscious after his eminent
demise. There were a few other details like the fact he would only have one eye
and other lovely little factors that make this story much more interesting than
it sounds but I will leave it up to you to discover them if you ever get
round to reading it
After reading this story I could not help but dwell on the concept matter a
little bit more deeply, after all it is an intriguing situation for yourself
to be in, everything that you are, your thoughts, your ideas, your memories,
essentially you, are kept alive forever in a tank. And being the natural
human that I am, I am trying to come to terms with the realization that I am
just a little animal in this universe and in the great scheme of things it
really doesnt matter if I die or not, I was naturally intrigued
Would it be possible, could it happen? could I get rid of this fragile, brittle,
in my opinion rather ugly body after my death and instead use a much more
reliable machine? I don't propose giving up my body now, I need it to function
in my life, but after death it sounds compelling to say the least. I would, of
course be paralyzed, deaf, dumb, blind etc but this may not be as bad as it seems,
I mean life, in a tank with my consciousness preserved forever and having those
shortcomings sounds better than disappearing into the oblivion does it not?
besides, their would be nothing to distract me from my thoughts, I could have
extremely long thoughts that stretched on for months and months without ever
being interrupted, with out forgetting bits because you were distracted by a TV,
or some sound or someone needing to speak with me. I don't really want to do that
now, but when I die, who knows.
After thinking this I went on to ask myself would you sleep in a state like this,
to answer this question I had to work out why we slept, if it was a mental thing
then if we were just a brain we would still need to sleep, however if it was a
physical thing and it was just our bodies getting tired of moving and breathing
then we would not need to sleep as we would have no body to get tired or fatigued.
So later than night when I began to get more tired than normal I tried to note down
what I felt when I got tired,
I felt the following:
A heavy feeling in the eyes
A exhausted feeling in the back
Legs feeling heavy and, well, tired
same thing with the arms
slight tingling in the shoulders.
But nothing in the actual head, or more precisely the brain.
So I concluded that it was a physical thing and not a mental thing, however still not
convinced I sought out a second opinion, my psychology teacher
I asked her the question and after a strange look and a complement for thinking so
deep (I felt quite good about this) she told me that it was a mental thing and our
brains needed to recharge, so I was wrong. However if it is a mental thing then
there has to be little sensation in the actual brain or else we (or more
precisely I) would feel it. So I asked myself would we notice the feeling and
if not and we actually went to sleep would we notice the sleep?
I went back to my psychology teacher and asked her weather or not we would
notice, she became a little annoyed at my persistence and told me that she
does not really know, because she has never personally had the experience of
just being a brain in a tub. However she thought that we would notice because
we notice waking up.
So armed with this new information I tried to take note of me waking up, it
consisted of the following things
Disorientation and Tiredness
I feel that we would experience the disorientation however to study the tiredness
I would have to go over something I have already discussed in this file then
come back to this point and explain it again, and then go off and start and
start explaining tiredness again and I would go round and round in circles,
after a while I would digress into a temporal causality loop resulting in my
lock up for 70 or so years, like the USS Bozeman in that episode of star trek
so I will try to counter act that system and I will in effect side step the
issue.
So lets take a hypothetical situation, I have passed on, donated my body to
medical science and am now a conscious brain floating in jar, thinking and
doing not much else
(mental thing scenario) I need to sleep so what happens, do I notice going to
sleep? or do I simply just suddenly find myself a little disorientated upon
waking up....who knows what would happen, it's strange to think about.
I guess this is another one of those addendums I just can't answer
But it's fun to think about, I guess.
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Addendum Issue# 43 - 7th May 2002
(C) Steak May 2002
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