X-Message-Number: 5676
Date: 28 Jan 96 09:07:44 EST
From: Mike Darwin <>
Subject: Of ckickens, spinal cords and brains

Robin Helweg-Larsen writes:

>One image I haven't seen used yet is the headless chicken.  Of course, 
>they really *do* run around, albeit chaotically.  Not just does the heart 
>keep pumping, but the legs take rapid steps in excellent alternating 
>rhythm, and the wings flap, and so on.  Where does the memory reside for 
>the muscles to know what to do?  

>Sure, the memory may only be reflex, or genetically programmed, or 
>whatever.  But it is still memory, and until you can identify where every 
>memory is located, you can't be sure what else is riding in the 
>compartment labelled "leg reflexes", hiding under a seat because it's 
>found a way of avoiding paying its fare.


You have a funny way of defining "memory."  The phenomenon you describe is 
not confined to chickens.  In fact, human infants, immediately after birth 
can walk.  If you support them and move their upper-body forward they will 
take lovely steps; steps which you will not seem them haltingly take again 
until they began to walk as toddlers. Where the information for this is 
stored in humans I have not seem precisely defined, but would bet it is 
mostly in the cord.  Similarly, cats with completely transected spinal 
cords can "walk" if their bodies are supported and placed on a treadmill.  
The walking in both newborns and cord-injured cats is crude, meaning that 
the refinement of motion is missing because the fine-motor activity is 
moderated or fine-tuned by the cerebellum which is, of course, disconnected 
in cord-severed animals and immature and "uneducated" in newborns.

Men with transected cords can still get an erection and ejaculate, 
althought they cannot feel either.  The subroutine for erection and 
ejaculation is a spinal cord program and can generally be elicited in the 
paraplegic by tacticle stimulation of the penis.  Ejaculate is usually 
sterile due to a wide variety of problems, not the least of which is loss 
of thermoregulation of the testes and the paralyzed portion of the body in 
general.  

So Robin, what's you point?  It is given that many determinants of behavior 
and perhaps even personality are distributed over the whole body?  Robert 
Louis Stevenson,  Robert Heinlein and Fredrick Chopin probably would not 
have done what they did had they had better immune systems.  Two writing 
careers were launched and one musical one was augmented (?) and cut short 
by TB.  The idea of cryonics was come up with by a man (Ettinger) 
recovering from a brutal and mutilating war wound that still leaves him 
with a slight limp.  Are you arguing that better immune systems, the 
eradication of TB or the end of brutal and mutilating war injuries should 
not be achieved because the "identities" of these people or future people 
would be different?  

Many of the greatest writers and poets have been dyspetic (probably from 
"defective" gut nervous systems) or immune-mediated effects.  Perhaps a 
majority of highly creative people have suffered from major depression and 
manic depression.  In the case of the latter the list looks like a 
veritable who's who in music, poetry and literature: Tennyson, Melville, 
Coleridge, Poe, Schumann, Dickinson (monopoloar), the Jameses, Lory Byron, 
Shelley, Millay, Van Gogh, Semmelweiss, Samuel Johnson, Mary Shelley 
Tchaikvosky, Plath, Hemingway, Houseman.. I could fill pages.  If we 
include those with first-degree relatives with major mood disorder we get 
just about everybody: Clemens, Bronte, Zola, Emerson, Whitman...

Many of these lives ended in madness, misery and suicide.

Most highly creative people I know today take one or more of the following:

Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft, Xanax, Buspar, Lithium, Deseryl, amitrip...

Not infrequently these drugs result in profound transformations of people's 
personalities, they alter things we commonly consider critical to identity 
beyond my ability to descibe adequately here (see LISTENING TO PROZAC by 
Kraemer).

Simple things like repair a cleft palate or reconstructing the face of a 
child born with massive craniofacial defect can result in profound changes 
in personality and sense of identity, resulting in whole new patterns of 
behavior and new life directions for these people.

When we get into the effects of subtle and gross brain injury we enter yet 
another level of the looking glass world of identity.

Self-circuit.  So what.  Of course some wiring exists that determines and 
produces consciousness.  But Bob had better do a much better job of 
equating that with identity than he had done here.  There is a large 
red-eared slider turtle staring at me as I write this, a cat watches with 
me one sleepy eye.  Self-circuits.  I wouldn't doubt they have 'em too.  
And I'm not sure they are that different than mine.  When we get to men, 
well the problem becomes even thornier.  Ettinger hasn't produced any 
evidence of consciousness-circuits being unique from one man to the next.  
Maybe they are, but that, identity does not make either.

So, ALL OF YOU, what exactly is your point?  You argue about whole body vs. 
neuro, often vituperatively (I gotta confess though, try as I might, I have 
unbridled admiration for the magnificent skewering done by Garret Smyth 
showing the absurdity of the positions taken by several posters).  You ALL 
still beg the question.  You have, NONE OF YOU addressed the issue of 
intenstines and identity, kidneys and identity, spinal cords and identity. 
Penises or tatoos and identity. Specific memories and identity. The only 
point you can make is that in one sense whole body is conservative since 
you are taking all there is with you.  Fine.  That's a good point. But it 
comes at a price.  And it does not adress the issues of people paying 
prices like having their guts removed or transplanted, or their hearts, or 
their livers or lungs.  Are these people still the SAME people?  More to 
the point, if your heart was failing and you needed one would you accept a 
transplant?  Would you accept a xenograft from a pig?  Indeed, are you 
still you if your heart is already mostly dead meat by the time you need a 
transplant anyway?

You poor bastards.  Most of you have never seen how the average cryoinicist 
dies, let alone the average person.  Many of the patients I handle have 
pretty well fried major parts of themselves -- including their brains -- by 
the time their heart stops.  Often this is due IMHO to foolishness (by my 
criteria) in not knowing when to fold  'em.  Letting parasites eat your 
brains out isn't very conducive to survival. Gentlemen, forgive me if, by 
contrast, I see your concerns as in the same class of not merely how many 
angles can dance on the head of a pin, but (to quote Steve Harris) how many 
angels can dance on the head of a pin 200 years from now.

So folks, stop wasting your time and everybody else's unless you can answer 
the big questions.  In the meantime, WBs and can go WB and neuros can go 
neuro.  There are "arguments" on both sides of the issue. But damn few 
definitive answers.

I must admit, however, it *is* amusing to watch you make asses out of 
yourselves.  Hopefully that is an idendity critical freature you may choose 
to "delete" upon your revival if it isn't done for you as part of your 
re-entry therapy :)

Me: I've already been there, done that. Made an ass out of myself over the 
neuro-WB issue, that is.

Mike Darwin

PS: Garret, again my compliements on style and substance.  Do you still 
have any friends? ;)

MD


Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=5676