News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood?.

Re:Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood? by shabble on Sunday June 28, 2015 @08:46AM (#9793304)
Another thing I've been pondering occasionally is what this and other discoveries might mean if cryonic neuropreservation (head/brain only) storage & reversal is ever practical, or if full head transplants become a viable surgery.

Just how much of actual personness is stored in places other than just the brain? Surely the hormonal (endocrine?) systems of the body, as well as things like the microbiome are going to play important roles, although I have no clue if they're necessary.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood? by mjklin on Sunday June 28, 2015 @11:43AM (#9793902)
In Principles of Psychology, William James speculated that any kind of non-corporeal afterlife would necessarily be non-emotional, since our emotions are felt in our bodies rather than our brains.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood? by uberlux on Sunday June 28, 2015 @01:28PM (#9794246)
If we ever managed to emulate our consciousness on other hardware, wouldn't we be also able to emulate bodily sensations and emotions?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood? by shabble on Sunday June 28, 2015 @03:50PM (#9794799)
As an ignorant layperson, I kind of assume we could. A virtual machine thinks it has a network card and a hard disk and whatever, but it's just being given what it expects to see.

The problem I was imagining is that right now we're not recording that data in the way that we're, e.g. scanning the brain's neuron connections. So even if we could rebuild/emulated Frozen Jim's Brain, there may be permanent loss of essential information that was distributed around his lymph system or population of gut bacteria such that 'the same person' cannot be reconstructed.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood? by kennu on Sunday June 28, 2015 @02:48PM (#9794567)
I guess it depends if your emotional configuration is still stored somewhere, or if it was lost when cryo-preserving your head only.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood? by mentat on Monday June 29, 2015 @05:04AM (#9797057)
That seems like a rather limited view of location in the opposite. We feel emotion in all of us including our brains.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood? by kristiandupont on Sunday June 28, 2015 @02:20PM (#9794435)
Antonio Damasio's Somatic Marker hypothesis goes into this and completely changed the way I observed my own mood and emotional state. His book Descartes' Error is a good read if you want to look into it.
[ Parent | on HN ]