NEW YORK, U.S., August 18, 2016 (RNS by Charles Camosy): It has already been successful in other animals: Physicians have severed the spinal cords of one white mouse and one black mouse, switched their heads and produced living mice. Similar surgeries have been successful with dogs and monkeys. And now there is serious talk of doing a head transplant on a human being.
Valery Spiridonov has a rare genetic disease in which his motor neurons are destroyed and the muscles of his body are wasting away. He wants to be the first person to undergo a head transplant. Physicians would wait until the body of a brain-dead human being consented to a full-body donation for this purpose. They would then cool Spiridonov’s brain in order to lessen neural damage, sever both spinal cords, attach Spiridonov’s spinal cord to the donor spinal cord and use a drug to fuse the spinal cords. But even if the surgery were successful, it would be a mistake to describe this procedure as a brain transplant for Spiridonov. Here’s why.
First, we are not our brains. The “move to the head” is a cultural product of the Western Enlightenment, focused on rationality and calculation as the primary aspect of what makes us human. Neuroscientists and philosophers of mind, for instance, have not been able to locate human consciousness and self-awareness in the brain.
Thomas Nagel and Alva Noe have demonstrated that a fully functioning, healthy brain is an inadequate explanation for fundamental aspects of human existence, including self-awareness. Nagel concludes that the materialist account of consciousness fails, and Noe claims that human consciousness must be understood as an “embodied” function of the entire human organism, holistically considered.
The question then, the article goes on to discuss, is “who” inhabits the body with the brain transplant: the person who provided the brain, or the person who provided the body?
More of this interesting article at “source” above.