20101218

The woman who cannot experience fear

via BBC News - Home on 12/17/10

A woman who is unable to feel fear may help scientists find treatments for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and create the brutal unstoppable army of really angry ladies :P

Seriously though, by removing a part of one's brain, he/she is unable to experience fear. By extending this pattern to other emotions, one can argue that the very soul of a human being is partitioned in a number of distinct "hardware" (would flesh and blood be more appropriate maybe?) components. Each component is dedicated to a certain function (e.g. risk management, graphics processing, audio processing, social processor, reasoning unit, anxiety control, arithmetic unit, e.t.c..).

This hardware component paradigm is very familiar to us (by "us", I mean people familiar with the general principles of simple machine design; btw, most of us are familiar with these concepts [by the latter "us", I mean everyone]). But I digress.

So, one could choose to believe that since people have been thusly built, someone must have designed them. But I digress.

Finally, a rather intriguing (and, IMHO very awesome) argument would be that essentially we are a conglomeration (a swarm, if you will) of organisms that chose to cooperate in order to survive through the hardships of the world that surrounded them and after millions of years have evolved to the specialized organs that constitute our bodies. This isn't anything new or radical, as it can be deduced intuitively by the fact that life began from a single cell organism.

The point is that, since even the most tightly woven to the human "soul" emotions are being controlled by different parts of the brain, the personality and thoughts of each human must conversely be defined by the signals exchanged between the "organisms" in the human's brain. Ergo, a single soul might not exist. What it does exist is a collection of hardware components that accept certain input (e.g. images) and produce certain output (e.g. fear).

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