On 7/22/2011 4:16 AM, Craig Weinberg wrote:
I have already addressed this point - you can have a living person with a prosthetic limb but you can't replace a person's brain with a prosthetic and have it still be that person. The limb only works because there is enough of the body left to telegraph sensorimotive action through/around the prosthetic obstacle. On one level, the more neurons you replace, the more obstacles you introduce. If the living cells are able to talk to each other well through the prosthetic network, then functionality should be retained,
I think your theory is incoherent. If the neurons can "talk to each other" thru the "pegs" then all the neurons except the afferent neurons of perception and the efferent neurons of action could be replaced and the person would *behave* exactly the same, including reporting that they felt the same. They would be a philosophical zombie. They would not *exhibit* dementia, catatonia, or any other symptom.
Brent
but the experience of the functionality I would expect to be truncated increasingly. The living neurons will likely be able to compensate for quite a bit of this loss, as it is likely massively fault tolerant and redundant, but if you keep replacing the live cells with pegs, eventually I think you're going to get decompensation, dementia, and catatonia or some zombie like state which will likely be recognizable to other human beings.
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