Brain transplant and soul

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The mind accompanies the head. The sense of personhood follows the mind.

The soul fills the whole body, so that’s a weebit more complex, but wherever the mind, there lies the soul.

I’d wait until a brain or head transplant was shown possible before philosophizing about it. It may never be possible – soul requires a living body, not just the head – in which case, you guys are just wearing out your synapses on this question.

ICXC NIKA.
 
Good Evening RealisticCatholic: I don’t recall that I offered it as a Catholic position, but you can certainly view it through that aperture if you like. Moreover, I have not suggested that there is no sort of individualization, but rather offered the idea that individual experience might be part of a nested hierarchy that is truly only one thing expressed as many rather than many that stand alone at their core. And while at a certain level there is a you and a me, it is the same with a vine and its branches (as Jesus might have pointed out), or a tree and its leaves, or an ocean and water. They are each only one thing really, just multifarious in their manifestations. And since the world is demonstrably fractal in it’s nature from smallest to largest and from beginning to end, it stands to reason that the consciousness that attends it is probably the same. It’s simply a view I offer. The Catholic Church can have its own. I have heard that view most of my life, but have seen a world that appears to be otherwise. There are more like me. As for Pantheism, most Vedic sects hold their gods to be revered or worshiped nonetheless. I do not. The real deal doesn’t need flowery words, praise, grovelling and bowing. It can take whatever you throw at it and takes you as you are. Whether that experiences is heavenish or hellish is pretty much up to us I think, but we don’t create it independently of one another.

All the best!
 
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A fairly long time ago someone posted a similar question and this is the answer I gave then and now.
First.- In antiquity the soul was believed to be seated in the heart and not the brain. When you think about it from a scientific view point the very first organ that is fully differentiated is the heart.
Second.- Some cases of “back after death” have shown that after all cognitive functions cease “brain dead” hours after the person was declared dead when they come back to life and report events that they “saw” which demonstrate that these “memories” could not be coming from the brain since it was dead. No neuronal activity - no memory recording.
It is a fact that science has demonstrated that the brain does have a function of memory storage, long term, short term. But the picture we get seem to be more nuanced as we know that the souls retain all the memories of what they did and there is no brain.
Your hypothetical therefore is quite a bite philosophically speaking. The person might wake with some memories from the brain of the head donor and perhaps the soul of heart donor, or he/she might wake up with a severe case of split personality having both souls in the same body and one now having to remember the memories of the head.
Anyhow apparently a wannabe frankenstein wants to do exactly this, transplant a head to another body in Russia.
 
Yes, the publicity is coming from Russia, and I for one will wait to see if they do it before worrying about the philosophy.

Science can’t even transplant an arm or a leg, or repair broken spinal cords, yet they are claiming they can mount a head on another body?

There’s less here than meets the eye.

And while antiquity assigned the soul to the heart rather than brain, in the last century we’ve seen hearts transplanted while the person’s soul/mind remained essentially the same.

ICXC NIKA
 
I was speaking strictly hypothetical. God forbid someone actually do this. Prayers for the Russian lol
 
I think it was more the early 60’s when the movie "The Head’’ came out. It was creepy. The scientists took the head off the body of a doctor in order to preserve his brain. They wanted to do a head transplant and were trying to come up with a dead body they could use.
 
Per Leviticus, the prohibition against eating blood specifically states that consumption of blood is forbidden because the blood contains the soul of the animal.
Anima enim omnis carnis in sanguine est : unde dixi filiis Israel : Sanguinem universae carnis non comedetis, quia anima carnis in sanguine est : et quicumque comederit illum, interibit.
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As far as ethics and the Church are concerned, it is not ethical for someone who is in need of a head transplant to carry out the process due to the fact that one must obtain someone else’s body in order to continue to live. Even if an entire body could be grown out of a person’s own DNA, we must treat that body as an additional individual which has rights separate to the originating host. At the end of the day a sacrifice of life has to be made in order for a certain individual to “live” and this scenario should be treated no differently in theory than abortion.
 
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