Brain trauma. Alzheimer's disease. Chemobrain. The evidence for our minds being completely dependant on our brains is incontrovertible, and yet we shy away for it, almost instinctively, towards some form of mind-body dualism, to the belief that we are in some sense separate entities from our bodies.
Mental reductionism, turns out, is somewhat counterintuitive. Let's imagine a world where it would be even more so. People in that world have bodies pretty much like ours, that get sick, grow old, and die. With one important difference: their brains, instead of being located within their bodies, they are all sealed inside a mountain! In people's heads grow antennae-like appendages which relay sense data to their remote brains, and receive motor commands in return.
Those remote brains are all pretty well tended for -maybe by some automated mechanism outside the control, or even knowledge, of the population- and kept safe from trauma, degenerative diseases, and the like. When a person reaches a certain age, his brain is scheduled for destruction, which comes swiftly and suddenly, without allowing any hint of senility to manifest itself.
In such a world, people would not possess clear evidence for minds having a physical basis. Drugs wouldn't work. No trauma-induced loss of consciousness, either. At most, injuries to the antennae could sever the connection between brains and bodies, but when those injuries finally heal, the patient would speak about being fully conscious throughout, but trapped in a silent darkness, unable to move. No Phineas Gage in that world.
How could a reductionist theory of the mind be developed, in that state of affairs? I see it very difficult. Imagine that, for the first time in millennia, a brain inside the mountain starts suffering damage. How would the owner of that brain cope with that? How could he even begin to conceptualize the experience of his decaying mental faculties, without any previous cases to draw on?
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