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Head Transplants and the Non-Existence of the Soul (Patreon)

Published:
2022-04-03 15:00:04
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Once again, making an extremely in-depth video on something no one has ever asked for. 

ALSO: Check your patreon feeds! Along with this, I'm uploading the milestone goal of documenting the whole production of this video. It's pretty neat! 

Files

Head Transplants and the Non-Existence of the Soul

What then gives us so great a propension to ascribe an identity to these successive perceptions? | Get Nebula and CuriosityStream for less than $15 a year at https://curiositystream.com/jacobgeller Nebula Companion Video: https://nebula.app/videos/jacob-geller-how-a-head-transplant-video-comes-together/ Support me: https://www.patreon.com/JacobGeller Follow me at: https://twitter.com/yacobg42 Merch: https://store.nebula.app/collections/jacob-geller Monkey art by Gabi Harris: https://instagram.com/gabiharris.art Mr. Humble & Dr. Butcher (2021, Brandy Schillace) Eclipsed podcast: https://www.campsidemedia.com/shows/eclipsed Opening: 0:00-8:20 CW for Animal Medical Testing: 8:20-13:30 Wolfenstein Spoilers: 13:30-18:07 Middle of Essay: 18:07-26:15 SOMA Spoilers and CW for Mentions of Suicide: 26:15- 34:25 End of Essay: 34:25-39:49 Visual Media Used: Frankenstein (1931), Young Frankenstein (1974), SOMA, Wolfenstein: The New Order, Wolfenstein: The New Colossus Music Used (Chronologically): Deathshead (Wolfenstein: The New Order), Rivers Run Red, Never Forgotten (Cristoffer Moe Ditlevsen), Rain of Brass Petals (Silent Hill 3), Prelude in C Major (BWV 846), Má Vlast- The Moldau (Smetana), The Kreisau Circle (Wolfenstein: The New Order & The New Colossus), Sunset for Humanity (Wolfenstein: The New Order), Fallow Deer (Martin Klem), Old Time Circus, House of Mirrors (Luella Gren), Invention No. 4 in D Minor (BWV 775), Bitter Swirl (Line Neesgaard), Main Theme (Soma), Der Mond (Wolfenstein: The New Order), Alone (Soma) Description Credit: Treatise on Human Nature by David Hume Thumbnail Credit: https://twitter.com/HotCyder Additional Music provided by Epidemic Sound

Comments

Jet Wolfe

Coming back to this video at the tail end of 2023. I would love to know how the game Signalis, with its AI made from human personalities and minds, would factor into this. Also as someone whose body rejects all their organs all the time (lupus) I definitely feel a disconnect inside me. As a kid I feared reincarnation because if I couldn't remember my past lives then what did it matter if the me was reborn? What did my sins the past life do to affect me today and the influence on the actions of my future self by me now really matter?

Sydney Cottrell

Oh, I can already tell this is going to be fascinating

Lumber

Oooooh, an episode to have with tea

Dang Nguyen

*screams very loudly in I Had To Read John Perry’s “Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality” For Undergrad*

AV

When I saw this come in I had to immediately quit what i was doing and go grab my crochet for crochet and head transplant time!! I have so many thoughts on a lot of this, but first. Everything I know about Wolfenstein is from you talking about it, so I was really not expecting the surprise head transplant being a thing. Similarly, I have never played Soma but it has come up in a lot of other videos I've watched and it' skind of been in the back of my mind as a thing I should play one day. The problem with spoilers is I love being unspoiled, but in reality the spoilers are what move me to play or watch something more often than not. I think this finally pushed me toward I will actually commit to playing Soma. On the subject of the soul and the brain and copies of yourself.... I have thought about this a lot, to be honest. I really do fear death, more than almost anything else I am likely to ever have to deal with in my life. I'm getting more at peace with it as I get older but I've read too much fantasy and scifi to not dream of some sort of escape from death. Ironically I deal with this even though I was raised Christian, so you would think I would just return to the faith I was raised with if I wanted so badly to believe I could be immortal. But let's be honest, heaven sounds boring. But for me the upsetting part about this thought exercise is not that there is not a pure, individual 'self'. Do you remember that would you kill or fuck your doppelganger meme? Weirdly I figured out many years ago that the answer is I would probably juts leave my doppelganger alone to pursue their own individual existence but I don't think I would have much to say to them, so this idea that I could, hypothetically, be copy and pasted across multiple existences is not very troubling. I am a completely different person than I was as a teen, I have no doubt that even if a copy of me was made now, the two of us would be quite different before too long. But honestly, even we were not, it would not be terrible. And if I were the doppelganger...? Well, if I knew the life that I live now was fully taken care of and I would not be abandoning my responsibilities or the people whom I love who rely on me, I think I could in fact just go on, start a new life, form new relationships, and be just fine. Honestly I think it's quite an interesting idea. I guess maybe this is why I do not find the idea of our consciousness needing to persist as troubling in a lot of ways. I think it's a good question, I honestly do not have the answer. You could argue that I die every time I go to sleep and a new me lives ever time I wake. But also I don't know why the 'persistence' of consciousness is what we consider that which holds us together. I also don't necessarily believe it is the soul either, I guess because I don't even know that I believe in souls. But I find a lot of comfort in the fact that regardless of what I know or understand, it still is. I do like to understand how things work and I really do wonder about all of this. But regardless of whether or not I understand the universe, it continues on. People have been sleeping, getting knocked out, going into and coming out of comas, getting amnesia, and dying all throughout human history. To some degree or another it Works, whether or not I Can Explain It. I don't feel like I am dying when I close my eyes nor like a new person when I wake up, and if it functionally doesn't change how I experience my reality then what does it matter if in reality, I am dying each night? Maybe what we should take away from that is not that unconsciousness is terrifying, but that death is not as scary as we thought. Of course, people's identities being translated across hardware is not something that humans have been doing throughout all of human history. But I do believe we'll get there eventually. I have accepted it will not safe 'me' but I still think it's quite exciting... Anyway this was a really interesting and great to watch. Thank you.

Alexander Mahterian

And here I am the day after picking up another of David Eagleman's books

Paul Looney

Watched this with two hours left in my shift, gonna enjoy the pit it left in my stomach until close!

Harpyshrieks

I am so unbelievably excited for this video.

Robert Secundus

This is a wonderful video. I'm commenting to share a very minor point about the pope moment-- I'm not trying to um akshully you, just clarifying because I think you'll think this very weird stuff is very interesting-- Catholic teaching at the time you refer to and now *would* hold that monkey's have "souls," just not *eternal* souls. The soul, the anima, is the animating principle of life, and so all living things are ensouled. It's just that the souls of plants and animals-- moving and sensing souls-- are thought to no longer exist when the body is no longer animate. Only sapient souls, thinking souls, are thought to persist after death. The ensoulment of animals and plants is an obscure point of Catholic theology, but it's fairly consistent from the Middle Ages to the present, once the Catholic church accepted, essentially, a version of Aristotelian metaphysics for its own metaphysics. Look to the Summa Theologiae Prima Pars Q 75 Article 3 (all available in translation online) if this sort of weird corner of Catholic nonsense interests you! There's also a lot of theological arguments out there on on twins and ensoulment that weirdly parallel the questions raised in the copy+paste soul section of the video; if you accept that ensoulment occurs at conception, then how would you account for identical twins? the idea of two souls existing in the same matter is, philosophically, pretty nonsensical; so is another soul created later on? Is an idea of delayed ensoulment required to account for how we know twins develop? Or does the existence of twins render the entire concept of ensoulment nonsensical? Anyway. Fantastic video as always!

Amy Notdorft

Watched this with my partner who has alexithymia (in his case a general absence of most emotions or lack of awareness of them) and am now having to explain to him the general attachment of people to the persistence of their consciousness... He is totally baffled by why we would be concerned about having our brain scans result in a separate entity that is simultaneously us or not us. Or why we would find it upsetting if the person who wakes up each day is someone new. He doesn't understand why anyone would think it would be cut + paste or why it would matter. Explaining it is making me realize how little a grasp I have on my own fears of non-existence and my attachment to a persistent/cohesive definition of consciousness... so yeah! Great video!

Nik Garvoille

The cut+paste vs copy+paste gave me chills, Jacob. I love these essays that deep dive into psychology and souls…ripe material contrasted with video games. Just beautiful work.

Shimikaze

Wow. What an Amazing piece (again). For me it was always kind of... natural to be never the same Person as 5 Minutes ago, constantly shifting and changing. You could call that death, sure, but i dont see that as something that disturbs me. "Real" death would mean that something is lost, while this "little" death, sleep or unconsciousness is just transformation. Therefore i'm not really scared of a copy of myself. Sure, the basis would be "me" but at the very moment were either "i" or "myself" open my eyes we would be separate entities. Like birth, but only with a little bit of a headstart (or handycap, given it would have my shitty self up to that point as a template ;-) ). Way more horrifiing to me is the thought of torturing another beeing, ape or not, in such a way. And yes, this has to be Torture. I simply can not imagine an Anesthesia that could mitigate the pain of having every single receptor at the same time cut off. I guess since i don't really believe in a Soul (i do believe in a individual existence, but thats not the same) i am not able to really understand the fundamental dread somebody who does so has to feel about a copy of said Soul. But i can very much emphasize with it due to the fact that you seem to experience that thought as an escalation of the forementioned torture. PS: Sorry for the countless edits, i'm struggling with the Paragraphs a little bit ;-)

Jason Montgomery

Saw your tweet about this getting age restricted, so I’m a patron now. Hope you don’t get impacted too badly by it.

Skarry, Earth Human

I volunteer to have my head transplanted. Due to existence being physical pain I've often said I'd like to be a head in a jar.

Ralf Greymuzzle

Thank you for the panic attack. No, really. I did have one and I am grateful. ... Sleep sucks anyway. ;)