The World, the Flesh and the Devil

Answers

• Q16TRANSCENDENCE

  Would replacing bodily organs with artificial substitutes preserve the identity of the person?

  Yes. the mind survives replacement. Proposes replacing the body organ by organ with mechanisms until the person is a brain in a cylinder linked to artificial senses, and treats this as the same mind continuing.

  Sooner or later some eminent physiologist will have his neck broken in a super-civilized accident or find his body cells worn beyond capacity for repair. He will then be forced to decide whether to abandon his body or his life. After all it is brain that counts, and to have a brain suffused by fresh and correctly prescribed blood is to be alive — to think. The experiment is not impossible; it has already been performed on a dog and that is three-quarters of the way towards achieving it with a human subject. But only a Brahmin philosopher would care to exist as an isolated brain, perpetually centred on its own meditations. Permanently to break off all communications with the world is as good as to be dead. However, the channels of communication are ready to hand. Already we know the essential electrical nature of nerve impulses ; it is a matter of delicate surgery to attach nerves permanently to apparatus which will either send messages to the nerves or receive them. And the brain thus connected up continues an existence, purely mental and with very different delights from those of the body, but even now perhaps preferable to complete extinction.

  OCR corrected

  First published 1929 (Wikipedia, marxists.org, Internet Archive 1969 edition listing). No public-domain scan opened.