Identity (Identity)

by dhw, Sunday, February 07, 2010, 14:59 (5402 days ago) @ dhw

An article in The Guardian last week described how doctors in Belgium have communicated with a man believed to have been in a vegetative state for seven years, since suffering a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. Using a hi-tech scanner, they were able to ask him questions and monitor his brain activity. In order to answer yes, he had to imagine playing tennis, and to answer no he was told to think of wandering through his house. "We were astonished when we saw the results of the patient's scan and that he was able to correctly answer the questions that were asked by simply changing his thoughts," said Dr Adrian Owen, assistant director of the Medical Research Council's cognition and brain sciences unit at Cambridge University.-One's imagination can hardly take in the horror of lying in a bed for seven years, aware of what's going on, trapped inside your own head, unable to show people that you are still there. I think I'd rather be dead.-However, such discoveries once more highlight the question of what constitutes consciousness and identity. Here is a man whose brain is so badly damaged that he cannot move or actively communicate anything. And yet he has memory, he can respond to questions, and at will he can summon up specific images which spark off chemical reactions that can be monitored. It may be argued that the relevant sections of the brain must have remained undamaged, but what is this "will"? And what constitutes the identity of the person that directs the will that directs the mind to form such images, if the will, memory and mind exist only as material cells?