Module 3: Who Am 1? Name Consider the following situation: One day you and a goo

Question

Module 3: Who Am 1? Name Consider the following situation: One day you and a good friend of yours are crossing Hooper Avenue. You are not looking where you are going, and you are run down by a cement truck. Your friend is so shocked that he or she drops dead from a massive stroke. But as luck has it, someone from the OCC psychology department rushes both bodies over to the nearby medical center for a dramatic emergency operation. It seems that although your body was destroyed in the accident, your head was not harmed at all. Since your friend has a perfectly healthy body, it seems that we might be able to save at least one of you, by putting your brain into your friend's body. The doctor in charge said that we can do this by removing the upper 30% of your brain (the damaged part) and grafting on to the lower part of your friend's brain. This way we do not have to attach the whole brain to the spine, and we do not have to worry about matching the hormones of the two people involved. You see, your friend is the opposite sex as you. So, if you are female, the top part of your brain is now attached to the bottom part of a man's brain, which is sitting in a male body. If you are male, the situation is reversed. Thus, all portions of the brain responsible for producing hormones, (testosterone for the male body; estrogen for the female), have remained intact. The only part of the brain that was replaced was the portion responsible for consciousness, thought, memory, and, a sense of self. These are all the same that you possessed at the time of the accident. The philosophical question that we must now raise is, "Whom did we save?" You? Your friend? Or, did we create some new third person? For the time being, we will call this individual Schwartz." This name is not gender specific. And it does not bias our judgment, at the outset, in favor of any one conclusion in particular. Cancel Done

Explanation / Answer

1. In the first case scenario, it seems that we have actually created a third new person by making so many changes to the natural body. By putting the brain of an opposite sex indivdiual, there might be newer perspectives that this person will now consider. Although it is debated whether gender plays a vital role in determining the brain functioning & structural composition, it is also true that certain aspects of the brain are in fact different amidst the two sexes. This means that this individual may have a more blurred functioning of corpus callosum in the sense that they would equally have both the sides of the brain functioning.

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