Why is transhumanism a pipe dream? If your brain has a chip installed in it to reroute input around a damaged section caused by a stroke is that an indication of the possibilities of a full machine human interface? Questions like this arise out of a materialist view of the nature of the human person. That the brain is a place where memories are stored seems to be a solid scientific fact but it is questioned by Henri Bergson. He demonstrates through a close analysis of lesion induced aphasia and apraxis that things are not so simple. He distinguishes between two different sorts of memory, rote memory and the fuller sort which reaches over the whole life of the person and is alway totally present to him. Both however are focussed on the present moment the brain being an organ of action. Recognition it will be readily accepted is essential for action. This happened before and my reaction was successful then so here I go again. Yes sort of. Bergson picks this analysis apart:
On one theory, the recognition of a present perception consists in inserting it mentally in its ormer surroundings. I encounter a man for the first time : I simply perceive him. If I meet him again, I recognize him, in the sense that the concomitant circumstances of the original perception, returning to my mind, surround the actual image with a setting which is not a setting actually perceived. To recognize, then, according to this theory, is to associate with a present perception the images which were formerly given in connection with it. But, as it has been justly observed, a renewed perception cannot suggest the concomitant circumstances of the original perception unless the latter is evoked, to begin with, by the present state which resembles it.(page 185 'Matter and Memory')
It, the previous event, must be already here with you. You did not have to go back to fetch it. Isn't it the case that we recognize without having an image that we refer to. Bergson again and again demonstrates his ability to turn a single observation into a revelation. Every so often I have to read ‘Matter and Memory’ again to find new insights that I didn’t grasp before. Here he is using a homely metaphor:
there is also a close connection between a coat and the nail on which it hangs, for, if the nail is pulled out, the coat falls to the ground. Shall we say, then, that the shape of the nail gives us the shape of the coat, or in any way corresponds to it ? No more are we entitled to conclude, because the physical fact is hung on to a cerebral state, that there is any parallelism between the two series psychical and physiological. When philosophy pleads that the theory of parallelism is borne out by the results of positive science, it enters upon an unmistakably vicious circle, for, if science interprets connection, which is a fact, as signifying parallelism, which is an hypothesis (and an hypothesis to which it is difficult to attach an intelligible meaning *), it does so, consciously or unconsciously, for reasons of a philosophic order : it is because science has been accustomed by a certain type of philosophy to believe that there is no hypothesis more probable, more in accordance with the interests of scientific inquiry. (Matter and Memory- Intro.)
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