The above viewpoint is considered absurd, because it advocates "soul reincarnation" and "immortal soul", so it is not accepted by people who have been influenced by modern science, and people denounce this theory as "superstition". However, the ancient "theory of mind and body" is slowly recovering today, and it is stepping into the hall of science angrily.
The history of science tells us that science and superstition (in the form of witchcraft) are twin brothers. Once any kind of science deviates from the right path, it becomes "superstition", so the science we advocate is destroying old superstitions on the one hand and creating new ones on the other. Think carefully about the things around us, listen to the comments, explanations and suggestions of people around us, and look at the practices of people around us. You will find that we are actually shrouded in the fog of modern science and modern superstition (whose label is also science). It is wrong to think that the more prosperous science is, the less superstitious witchcraft will be! In the future, there will be no science without superstition and no superstition without science. Some things that used to be called superstitions now seem to have scientific elements, and what is called science today is often mixed with superstitions. Therefore, science may overflow from the palace of light and take root in the wilderness, becoming witchcraft and superstition, and witchcraft and superstition living in the wilderness may also stride into the palace of science and win gold medals. Today's life science and information science are waving to the soul wandering in the wilderness, welcoming it into the hall of science in a cordial and friendly way. A group of scholars are studying the soul in the laboratory, but they modestly call their research object "information" rather than "soul". This kind of information science, which has been paid more and more attention, is approaching the real "soul" that dominates our human body step by step in an attempt to strip the soul from the body.
Life scientists pay attention to three things: matter, energy and information. Matter constitutes our real body, energy drives the body to become a living thing, and life information manipulates the matter and energy of the body to serve its own reproduction, transmission and dissemination. Therefore, life information is the soul of our body. At the cellular level, DNA molecules manipulate the whole cell, soul is the genetic information in DNA molecules, and cell structure is the residence of DNA soul. Cell, the most mysterious automaton in nature, is just a machine that enables the soul carried by DNA to be copied and transmitted. As far as we know now, information (soul) must have a real object to carry. This kind of material object that can carry information is called information carrier, without which information (soul) cannot exist independently. In other words, the soul cannot exist independently from the body, so it is impossible to separate the human soul from the human body like the legendary invisible "ghost". Life is a comprehensive expression of the organic combination of matter, information and energy, and soul and body are inseparable. However, soul and body can be completely divided in a limited way rather than completely.
Cells are automatic machines for DNA replication, transmission and dissemination. Most structures of cells are used to read and execute DNA instructions, which is a physical part of cell life. The information carried by DNA molecules is the soul of cells, and DNA molecules themselves are physical components, so we can't take information from DNA molecules independently. However, through natural and artificial practice, it is completely feasible to strip DNA molecules from cells and then transfer them to another cell (body). Therefore, the essence of this human technology, which we call genetic engineering (transgenic engineering), is a cell-level soul transfer technology.
Human organ transplantation is much older than DNA transplantation. Modern medicine has successfully transplanted many tissues and organs. For example, today we have high-tech organ transplantation such as kidney transplantation and heart transplantation, and today we also have relatively simple tissue transplantation such as bone marrow transplantation and blood transfusion. A few people rely on this technology to prolong their lives, but calmly speaking, human transplantation is still in a very rough initial stage. Our technology is still a bit clumsy, and there are still many problems to be solved urgently in organ transplantation. However, with the passage of time, human beings will certainly become more and more proficient in this transplantation technology, and the scale of its transplantation may also become larger and larger. For example, it is possible to carry out complete limb transplantation and body transplantation in the future, and the only problems are key issues such as organs, limbs, supply channels of the body, immune rejection and so on. But we know that this problem may be solved by cloning technology in the future. It seems that large-scale transplantation, such as transplanting corpses and limbs, will not be a big problem in the future. The biggest body transplant we can imagine is to find a living place for the brain and let the soul have a living place, but this is not so much a body transplant as a brain transplant. Transplanting the brain is to transfer the soul, which is not essentially different from transgenic.
In genetic engineering, what we take from cells is not the whole cell, but DNA, which is only a tiny part of the cell. Although we haven't completely separated the soul from the body, we have separated the soul from most of the body. Brain transplantation is completely possible in theory. Once it is successful, we will realize the separation of human soul and body. In other words, it is entirely possible for a person's soul to leave most of the body and then "wander" in another body to some extent. The body is only the residence of the soul.
The human soul is manifested in spirit, consciousness, memory, thinking, emotion and so on. More and more evidence shows that these advanced gadgets that make people call themselves people are a functional state of the brain, especially the brain. In other words, the process of information storage and operation in the brain appears as a soul in appearance. At present, our understanding of our soul and body is very superficial, so as far as today's understanding is concerned, we must at least ensure the existence of a brain or a complete organ, but to maintain the human soul, we may not need such a huge organ as the brain, just as we do not need a complete nucleus to maintain the complete genetic information of cells. When we take away a person's soul, we may just take away a body part smaller than the brain or the brain. Therefore, the brain transplantation we can imagine today may be as rough as nuclear transplantation, and not as simple and ingenious as DNA transplantation, that is, genetic engineering.
For our science today, it is unthinkable to divide the human soul into smaller parts than the brain or brain parts. The key reason is that we know almost nothing about how consciousness, memory, thinking and other things that constitute the soul exist in the brain and how they work in the brain, although the literature of neuroscience is piling up in front of us and changing with each passing day. The brain and the brain are probably the most stubborn fortresses facing natural science. Some people (the great physicist Bohr is one of them) pessimistically think that we may never discover the secrets of the brain and the brain, because we are studying our brain with our own brain, and we can't surpass ourselves, so we will never discover the secrets of the brain. We may be able to thoroughly understand the secret of E.coli, because we stand on a higher level than E.coli, but E.coli will never fully understand its own operating mechanism, and it will never know and understand human life unless it transcends itself and evolves into an intelligent bacterium, but at that time, this intelligent bacterium is no longer E.coli. This pessimistic view hangs over us like a fog, confusing us, confusing us and leaving us in a daze.
Of all biological species, human beings are the most curious and exploratory, always trying to find something puzzling. This feature is not unique to human beings. In fact, all life exists, but human beings are more prominent. We don't know whether human beings can finally conquer the stubborn fortress of brain, but human curiosity and exploration spirit will never shrink back in front of this fortress.
Although the brain stands in front of us like a huge Himalayan mountain, we still try our best to clear some fog and catch a glimpse of some points on this mountain. An encouraging discovery in 1960s is that the transmission of neural signals is an electrochemical process. This discovery tells us that the nerve signal transmitted in the nerve fiber is a kind of pulse signal, and this pulse signal either exists in the nerve fiber or does not exist in the nerve fiber, and the size of the pulse signal transmitted in the nerve fiber is constant. This discovery is called "all-or-nothing theorem" by physiologists. The transmission speed of nerve signal in nerve fiber is much slower than that of electric signal in conductor (the fastest transmission speed is about 100m/s), so the nerve transmission is not a complete electric signal. Nerve cells generate membrane potential difference through the flow of sodium and potassium ions inside and outside the cell membrane. The essence of nerve signal is membrane potential conduction, so nerve signal has both electrical and chemical components. When a nerve signal is transmitted from one nerve cell (neuron) to another nerve cell (neuron), the transmission of the nerve signal at the junction (synapse) of the two neurons is completed by chemical transmission or electrical transmission.
The above findings are extremely exciting. Optimists believe that a crack in the brain, the most mysterious organ in the universe, has finally been pried open, and it may not be long before we can clearly read a series of complex circuits in the brain, thus revealing the memory, consciousness and psychological secrets of the brain. For decades, people have made unremitting efforts to interpret and explore these complex neural circuits, but people have to sigh in front of this football-sized organ-it is so complicated!
We now believe that the highest functions of the brain, such as emotion, thinking and consciousness, are highly related to the brain. The brain consists of the surface cortex (gray matter, a bit like lead gray, hence the name) and the inner white matter (white). Gray matter is the accumulation of cell body parts of nerve cells, while white matter is the accumulation of nerve fibers emitted by nerve cells. There are many folds in the gray matter on the surface of the brain. The depressions of these folds are called grooves, and the protrusions are called gyrus. It is a remarkable feature of the human brain to have many complex sulcus gyrus. The lower the animal, the smoother the surface of the brain and the less sulcus there are. Numerous gullies mean that you can have more surface area in a limited volume. The surface area of human cerebral cortex is about 2500 square centimeters, which is about five times the cover area of the book you are reading. The thickest part of the cerebral cortex is about 4.5 mm, and the thinnest part is only about 1.5 mm, with an average thickness of 2 ~ 3 mm, which is equivalent to the thickness of 50 pages. More and more evidence shows that the most complex advanced functions of human beings are closely related to this small gray matter area. Stimulating the cerebral cortex (gray matter) with microelectrodes, it is found that the functions of different areas on the surface of gray matter are different, and the sensory area (afferent) and motor area (efferent) are basically separated. The somatosensory area and somatic motor area are located in the posterior central gyrus and anterior central gyrus before and after the central sulcus, respectively. Fingers, lips and tongue occupy the largest area in these two areas, and are the most frequently used organs of human beings, which are particularly sensitive to senses and movements. Some important and special sensory and motor areas are independent of somatic sensory and motor areas, such as visual area, auditory area and olfactory area. All these areas are distributed in the left and right hemispheres.
An obvious difference between humans and other animals is that they have a large and developed language area, which is obviously biased towards one hemisphere, rather than being evenly distributed in two hemispheres like the above areas. For most people, the language area exists in the left hemisphere. Although the language function of the right brain exists, it is very low, and its highest level is only in the word stage, while the language function of the left brain is extremely developed. In other words, the left brain is the language brain of human beings. There are four language areas, two are sensory language area (receiving incoming information), auditory language area and visual language area, and the other two are motor language area (sending outgoing information), written language area and spoken language area. The total area of the four areas is larger than that of the somatosensory area and the body movement area, which shows the importance of language function to human life. The asymmetry of brain function is not limited to language function, and more and more evidence shows that it is asymmetric in many functions. For example, the spatial sense of the right brain is obviously stronger than that of the left brain, but it is obvious that the biggest asymmetry of the brain is the language function.
The total area of all the above areas is about half of the total area of the cerebral cortex, and the remaining half seems to be related to higher functions of the brain, such as reasoning, thinking and emotion. At present, the understanding of these areas is not very thorough, and the measurement of these areas by microelectrode technology also shows that these areas are not as clear as sensory areas and motor areas.
Now, embedded microelectrode technology can make an angry animal recover quickly, and of course it can also make a quiet animal go on the rampage. Microelectrode stimulation technology can open a long-closed memory bank and make people vividly recall a long-forgotten face or a long-forgotten past. In science fiction and movies, dictators in the future world will achieve complete control over people by implanting electrodes in their brains. These controls include emotions, desires and enthusiasm for work. There are not many reasons to predict that the future society will be like this, because the sustained development of neuroscience is likely to soon eliminate this shoddy technology of killing chickens, and the means of controlling brain emotions and desires may be more sophisticated in the future.
Another technology corresponding to microelectrode stimulation technology, brain chemical stimulation technology, is also widely used in brain research, which is a technology of instilling chemicals into cerebral cortex or internal tissues with micro needles. A more ingenious design is to combine chemical stimulation with microelectrodes and embed them in the cerebral cortex, which can give the brain the stimulation it needs very conveniently. Almost all our knowledge about the division and function of cerebral cortex today is brought to us by these two technologies.
The brain is not only a huge and complex circuit organ, but also a complex chemical organ. More and more evidence shows that emotions, desires and internal driving forces are largely caused by chemicals. Therefore, the brain is an electrochemical organ, not just a simple and complicated circuit that used to be thought.
Recent research shows that just as organisms are composed of cell units and computers are composed of electronic components, there are also basic fabric components in the cerebral cortex-cortical microcolumns. There is no clear concept about the importance and significance of this discovery.
We can't list all the discoveries of neuroscience here. Neuroscience is a very old but very young science, and it is changing with each passing day. However, all human knowledge of this most mysterious organ is only "a spot in the whole leopard." We have said that brain science or brain science is a mountain system as huge as the Himalayas, and all our discoveries so far are only equivalent to clearing up some small mysteries in the fog. For us, a thorough understanding of this organ and the Monkey King is 108,000 miles away. Maybe we can achieve it by somersaulting, but it may take a long time and a lot of effort, and it takes 81 difficulties to get it. At that time, your temples and mine were all gray, and maybe they were dead. Therefore, all our discussions here are not helpful for us to strip out a soul body smaller than the brain or the brain, because we find that we know almost nothing about the subject of the soul-consciousness, mind, emotion and so on. Therefore, the best way we can think of today is brain transplantation or brain transplantation.
Today's technology can let the spacecraft reach the moon, let the spacecraft fly away from the solar system, and let the missile hit the distant target accurately. We are also preparing to land on Mars. We can know the secrets of atoms much smaller than our brains, and we can also predict the weather basically and accurately. Moreover, we have made many computers with very powerful computing power. Today, we are creating and perfecting a huge global computer network, which is as important as our brains. All these great achievements of mankind are made by our brains. However, we are concerned about this. In the face of the greatest, most exquisite and incredible organ in the universe, we are really "tigers eat the sky, but their paws can't get off"!
Since ancient times, human beings have always had a desire to live forever. As mentioned earlier, cloning technology (organ cloning) and brain transplantation may greatly prolong our life, but they will never make us immortal, because the brain or the brain itself will age and die. Even if we can clone the brain, it won't help, because we don't know how to transfer the soul of the old brain to the new brain. Therefore, in order to get rid of the life span of the body completely and live forever like a fairy, we must finally understand the last secret of the brain and master the soul transfer of human spirit and consciousness as exquisite as DNA transfer.
Perhaps one day in the future, after we thoroughly understand the secrets of information storage and operation in the brain, we can make the soul no longer live in the body, but run in the computer system. On that day, maybe we can really teleport souls as described in science fiction; That day may be the day when we get rid of the kingdom of necessity and move towards the kingdom of freedom. ...