Okay, so “Darn Good Questions” is about to get philosophical. (As if cow tipping wasn’t deep enough…) I don’t think you’ll be able to Google this one and find a simple answer.
Here at Wheaton College, we have something called the Forum Wall. It is basically a bulletin board in the student’s center where people can post things for public comment or discussion. Usually, it consists of cynical rants by underclassmen who think they have discovered some crucial flaw that no one else has ever noticed in Wheaton’s policies/culture/theology/dating scene/fill-in-the-blank… Most things that end up there are pretty dumb. Every post inevitably receives two comments. The first is, “Is this biblical?” The second is a random swear word. I read the wall for entertainment purposes, not because I expect to find anything all that stimulating or insightful.
However, the other day, someone posted a small slip of paper with an intriguing question that I have thought about often. It simply said:
“If your memories were switched with that of another, would you be you or him and in which body?”
The issue behind the question is typically called “the mind-body problem” which, in simple terms, asks how the physical and non-physical aspects of human beings interact. Can you be split up into body and soul? If so, which one is the real you? Are you your thoughts? Your body? Some intangible substance like a spirit? Can you separate these things from each other? Do you even have a separate soul? If your thoughts happen in your brain via physical, chemical process, how does that relate to your “mind” or “spirit”? There are lots of implications and interesting side-questions to this, such as, if they could simulate the processing power of a human mind in a computer, and therefore download my memories, etc. into the computer, does my soul now possess the computer? And so on…
Time magazine usually has something about this in an article about brain research about once a year. If you’ve read any amount of science fiction, you’ve run into this. Probably you had a lesson on this if you took a Philosophy 101 class. I find it fascinating.
So what do you think? Some of you have studied philosophy and theology, so you may have better thoughts than me. Others of you just like to ponder stuff. So, let’s here your opinions. I’ll save my thoughts for after some other people have responded.
