Assuming there is such a thing as a baseline personality for each individual, can the very existence of nerve damage, in and of itself, with no qualifying factors added, cause a change in the same?
I suppose that any compromise to the integrity of a thing is likely enough to alter in some way the essential nature of what it is, how it works--a loose spark plug in a car engine, a lamp cord that has a short, a book from which a page is missing. It would be, of course, a matter of degree, and the deficit may fall anywhere between insignificant and catastrophic.
Consider, for instance, the case of a missing tile on the space shuttle. Consider a rocket engine part that malfunctions at 10,000 feet in the air.
Then again, consider the missing page. Lets say that it is missing from ones copy of War And Peace. Such a thing might be a frustrating discovery, and yet not something likely to cause a complete collapse, a critical error in the integrity of a 2000 page plot and theme.
Where has MS happened to strike? Where has the damage occurred? In a hunk of gray matter that wasn't doing much of anything anyway, or in that other hunk that just happens to move your legs, wiggle your fingers, maintain your left eye?
Is there a place in the brain that maintains and monitors personality, some sort of neuro-electrical gaggle and gear-work of tissue and nerve, synapse and conduction that conveys who we are, not only to ourselves, but to the world at large?
Is this where the soul is too? Shall we say that the soul is nothing more than a conspiracy of anatomical tissue and blood, molecules and neurons, the trickery of electronic activity? People mistake lights in the sky for UFOs all the time, and yet these are found, again and again, to be nothing other than weather balloons or flocks of birds.
In short then, is personality a matter of spirit, or of flesh?
(more to come in part III)
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