In Chapter 5 of the book THE
ETERNAL RETURN, titled Déjà vu and the Mysterious Flashes, the late American author Donald E Carr in trying to
explain the concept of Individual Memory in the eternal return, he poses the
following scenario to his imagined recalcitrant and stubborn antagonist Marvin
DEC: Your real objection, I take it, is the
common one, not to say vulgar one, of the whole-hog
materialistic. You insist
that memory must pounding or making holes in a piece of funny putty. Let’s take
a look in space-time at a hypothetical experiment by some neurologists the
future. This a very important experiment and takes a very long time and exacts
an enormous amount of skill. We shall call it the “Experiment of the Cut-Down
Brain”
Now, what the experimenters do is to carefully
and gradually cut a human being into pieces. However, the subject does not know
he is being cut into pieces because the surgical neurologists, as they remove
arms, legs, finally the whole torso, leaving only the head, cleverly substitute
an artificial sensory and sympathetic nervous system (which may be a big black
box full of wires) so that the brain still imagines it is still receiving
sensations from the trunk, the stomach, the arms and legs and even thinks that
it is moving its hands, that it is digesting and evacuating, etc. on the next
step, gradually, oh very gradually, perhaps over a period of centuries, the
eyes are cut out, along with the nose, the mouth, the ears, but immensely
ingenious artificial substitutes are implanted, so that the subject imagines,
he sees, tastes, smells, hears, talks, experiences, closes his eyes to sleep,
dreams, scratches his head, etc. the cutting process continues now into the
brain. Yet because of substitution by artificial neurons, synapses, glia cells
etc., which need not be in the subject’s brain at all but can be in the black
box, the subject still maintains some degree of consciousness. As we cut down
perhaps the last cubic inch of original brain, there is still consciousness.
Finally, still making the immensely complicated substitutes, which now perhaps
require several millions of years to assemble properly, the last cubic inch is
removed and thrown away, and its artificial simulacrum is connected in to the
black box…. Now what would you say we have done?
Marvin: You’ve killed the poor bastard.
However Donald explains that the poor bastard has not been killed
rather he has been reproduced as a different event sequence in the space-time
continuum.
DEC: As consciousness has faded from the
original brain it crept into the artificial devices. The black box is now a
conscious entity. It possess not only memories of the original brain, but as
the great experiment has proceeded over the millennia, the black box has
acquired its own private memories. There has been no total loss of
consciousness. The amount of consciousness lost by the original brain has been
recovered by the artificial system. Like energy, consciousness has shown itself
to be indestructible…
I follow and understand the train of thought that Donald
Carr and even imagine the whole experiment of Cut-Down Brain sequence. It is a
fascinating and the book itself is very enlightening. I would have loved to
meet Carr in person, but unfortunately he passed on in 1986 some years before I
was born. Since I read this 1968 publication by him, I have been bothered by
the thoughts of a REVERSE EXPERIMENT. What would happen if the whole body cut
down to the last cubic inch of brain were to be reconstructed? The process is
assumed to take the time, cautiousness and perhaps more advanced technology.
Then,
1. Would the brain still have
consciousness?
2. Is it possible for the brain to remember
the Cut-Down experiment carried on it and the body?
3. Can the brain detect there was a time break
or gap between then and now?
4. Is
it possible to maintain the thoughts or say consciousness of the original brain
and Black Box
as separate entities?
5. And
if the two entities were let to live alongside each other subjected to the same
life events all
the time, would we be able to
tell who is who, I mean would they be different individuals or an
individual in two forms? Would
their thoughts be the same always?
I will be glad to get answers to these
disturbing questions. I invite anyone out there with thoughts on them to
contact me via email kithinjikinotikk@gmail.com or
use any other platform to settle them.
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