like the brain is literally encased in the body so how can it be separate? like if you go around licking lamp posts you’re going to pick up some germ that’s gonna make you feel like crap and you get insomnia or fever and your brain will definitely be impacted. and so you’ll have short temper and that’ll get you into trouble.
Descartes, and Protestantism.
Who thinks that?
Even little kids know that if you get too hungry or tired you aren’t going to be able to do a complex task.
I have a tumor in my thalamus. I’ve also survived a TBI with subarachnoid hemorrhage, and I have bone spurs compressing my spinal cord. I get random spells where I get super dizzy, dripping sweat, my heart rate skyrockets, my vision starts going dark around the edges, and I feel like I need to sit down before I fall down.
I’m struggling to find work from home because driving with presyncope is dangerous. My inlaws think it’s just an excuse to be lazy and siphon money off my partner.
“It’s all in your head.”
There is a noun for “hand”! OMG, no one thinks hands are part of our bodies!?
I once read that the Romans didn’t really understand what the brain was for, and believed that thoughts and emotions emanated from the heart. They certainly saw enough warfare and bloodshed to know that a massive head wound/ brain injury was fatal, but didn’t really understand its purpose.
well like most of the wellness programs i’ve seen. they only admit to like general “you’ll feel better” but otherwise it’s like they demonize it when someone’s brain doesn’t let them do some thing and somehow they’re just supposed to power through that.
I’m a bit confused about your point here. It doesn’t seem to address the question and in general I’m not sure what you’re trying to say
like that other person said “it’s all in your head”. Yeah? Ok let’s take from the other direction. the head believes it’s under attack somehow or like anxiety and then people are somehow supposed to be like it “can’t” affect the rest of the body? like “get a grip on urself”. How??
Maybe I get it. I’m going to try to make an example and I’ll hope you can tell me how I misunderstood. An example might be someone with high anxiety having panic attacks but the people around them are the really empathetic and as time goes on they get irritated (since they aren’t too empathetic) so the end result is them saying things like “its all in your head” or “get a grip on yourself”. In this fake example I’m guessing both groups would get triggered quickly from person they just met that has attributes from the old group. It was tough to frame this in a way that seemed realistic to me but wasn’t really harsh on one group, sorry if I’ve missed the mark there or completely misunderstood.
In that situation, I think everyone still (usually) thinks that if the person with anxiety got a cold their body would still affect their mind and they would get grumpier and more worried. They probably wouldn’t show much care and if they were throwing around quick phrases about it being in your head then they would keep saying it, but I don’t think it would be because of some logic that the body is independent of the mind.
Am I close to understanding, or just really misunderstanding something here?
no but that’s my point, like… i THOUGHT people weren’t actually going around thinking that the mind is separate from the body like the brain isn’t totally connected to everything. Like people were just using the phrase cuz it makes sense. but i realized the “Pull Yourself Up from The Bootstraps” people really actually think that it is just mind over matter. Or even bring up free will and suddenly everyone’s like “noooo my mind is unaffected by the conditions of the body” and so on.
Okay, I think I understand now.
That’s understandable in that situation but as someone that wasn’t in that situation I was just really slow to understand what you meant.
And it’s not like the mind doesn’t have power over the body (at the very least good / bad spirits make pain easier / harder to deal with) but yeah… some of the sayings people throw out are just shitty. And it does get more insidious. I’m only guessing at your situation but know of people with cancer where people would say things like “I don’t think they have the mental strength to survive this”.
It sounds like a difficult situation to be in. Are you still in it, or have you at least found a way to avoid the frustration and confusion of their comments?
I put it like this: if you replaced any other part, or even all your other parts with machines, you’d still be (what you think of as) you… because your brain would still be in there.
There is, however, no replacing the brain. If your brain goes, you go with it. You are your brain.
Are you talking about consciousness? As this is separate from the mind. It would disappear from being encased within the body without a mind just as it would without a heart being that the body without these elements is not capable of reaching consciousness because it’s not capable of sustained living.
Note: it has not been scientifically proven yet that the consciousness resides in an exact spot in the brain hence they speak of consciousness and mind as separate.
Note also that there have been people who lived their entire life missing about 80% of their brain (or more https://www.sciencealert.com/a-man-who-lives-without-90-of-his-brain-is-challenging-our-understanding-of-consciousness ) without even realizing it
One case where the brain was only a crust within the scull bone and still had an operating consciousness.
But if we cut the bridge between the two brain hemispheres that allows them to communicate with eachother - the corpus callosum - it still feels subjectively like “you” remain unchanged. Yet there are ways to communicate with each hemisphere independently, as shown in the so-called split-brain experiments. The findings show that the two hemispheres often give different answers to the same questions. They also show that if you tell the left hemisphere to perform an action and then ask the right hemisphere why it did it, the right side will invent an excuse. So the question is - which hemisphere are you?
My answer to that is that it’s neither - there is no “you.” The sense of there being a center to consciousness is an illusion. There’s only consciousness and its contents. If we could perfectly copy your brain, that copy would also subjectively feel like you.
You could replicate material but what animates it isn’t assured simply by replication of some material
There’s also theory that consciousness is radio wave that could find or caught by hosts. So maybe you just created a host.
Another theory is that everything is conscious to exist in the dimension of space time and well it can get deeper as to say none of this exists at all. Or is a simulation. We simply decide that replication =reality of the meaning we give it.
but that’s not true tho, if you replaced my hand I’d be like “well I AM one handed now”, there won’t be a two handed me anymore so i’ll be a new me. and like if this was true, then transgender folk would have a hell of a easier time i think.
Yes it is true, very much so. You took one part of the argument and reflected it.
So how about the other part of that comment.
Do you believe you would still be you without your brain?
The real flip side of your question is: do you think you’d still be you as a “brain in a vat” without any body?
Ultimately this whole discussion boils down to challenging the definition of “you” or “I”. Biologically every “singular” person is the result of many living things working together, so the concept of “I” is an illusion. Physically, there is no “I”, but only “us”.
This makes the discussion easier. If the hand is removed, then of course “we” are different because “we” lost a piece of “us”. This would also be true if “our” brain was removed.
Nevertheless, there have been cases of brain dead people’s body adapting to the lack of central nervous system, so the body is more independently alive than we tend to give it credit.
Nevertheless, there have been cases of brain dead people’s body adapting to the lack of central nervous system
We’re they on life support, or do you have an example of it happening without any outside assistance?
so the body is more independently alive than we tend to give it credit.
Being able to biologically adapt to a different control mechanism is cool, but it’s not necessarily ‘alive’ depending on your definition. The biological mechanisms may still fire, but that doesn’t mean that you’re doing anything more than keeping a meat sack functioning while it otherwise atrophies.
You are correct, the person was on life support. But they grew and went through puberty like any other normal functioning human. (I believe the person was born brain dead, and the wealthy parents couldn’t let go so they kept the person on life support at home).
Cells are living things by definition. So it is alive, though the body functions more like a tree than a mammal at that point. But a decentralized nervous system grew around the different vital organs.
Why not? When I am asleep, I consider myself to be me but asleep.
All language breaks down under scrutiny.
Oh please. Nice words and all, but if you fall into a ditch, you don’t say “well, shit, we’re fucked!” like Gollum. You feel like a single entity in trouble. You don’t say “my dear neurons, gut bacteria and anus cells, let’s work together to get out of this mess!!”
You truly believe the semantics of the English language disproves the point? English and the way it defines “I” is greatly affected by things seperate from biological definitions (one being the spiritual concept of the “soul”)
Also, there did exist languages in other cultures that did not have the same concept of “I” as the English language. Your counter-argument is very weak.
I used an example in English because we’re discussing in English, not because of semantics or language rules. My counterargument is fine.
But you made me wonder, is there a human language on Earth in which an individual refers to themselves as “we” instead of “I” - or yo, je, ich, watashi, etc? That would be fascinating.
Or what are those other languages that have a different way of using “I”, which I’m assuming you’re referring to as the pronoun to refer to oneself?
that’s kinda a pointless question because we can’t verify?? you have a brain when ur born but obvs it’s a different kind of brain when ur old. the brain changes too so what is the “me” here? like my brain is different already from when i started writing this.
It can easily be verified. Find someone without a head and ask them. Are they the same person just without a head?
no but go and find that head and ask the same question lmao
He said “things are cool baby”
So what you’re saying is… the brain is its own thing, then.
lol no? what do you think happens when you speak to a head without a body? or a body without a head?
Ship of Theseus
Because the brain seems to think it is not a part of the body.
Source: Brain told me to type this.
who is the me the brain told that to tho lol
Meat and rocks marianette.
Body.
why does the body feed the brain with info like senses and chemicals then?
Because that’s how the human body functions?
so the brain needs the body
Its part of the body
It’s because of mind-body dualism. Most people have absorbed some amount of mysticism from the culture around them without realizing it, and a distressing amount of Western mystic traditions have some form of mind-body or spirit-body dualism.
True, and nondual traditions like tantric Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and Kashmir Shivism really have a leg up in that regard, but Descartes really cemented it as the supposed “objective” fact (lol) that it is today.
The root problem though is the felt sense of separation the mind creates but that mystical experiences can dissolve.
The self, whatever that actually is, believes it’s separate from the body. It’s one of the key reasons people believe in spirits/souls and afterlives.
lol that makes no sense, i believe in spirits and all that BECAUSE i don’t believe i or anyone else is separate from the body. like i’m all this body, including the brain, and the body is totally tied up with it’s surroundings and how they feel like. so like, maybe it’s not a “spirit” in like some supernatural being but like subconsciously my body is picking up some vibe and my brain says “spirit” because i love the idea of ghosts and then i feel better when when i wish it to pass on or something. like maybe it was or wasn’t I don’t know but i felt something and did something and then felt different. like my grandma used to always wear this shawl and she really loved it and when she passed, i swear i could feel her presence IN THE SHAWL and i spent like a few weeks wearing it while i was sort of letting go of her at the same time and now i don’t feel the presence there anymore but it doesn’t feel sad, just right. like i still have the shawl but it’s like inert. which is totally different from what it was. there’s still like a whiff of her perfume in it too but it’s still inert. It REMINDS me of her but it’s still inert. but like i think even if she wasn’t literally born with the shawl, it became a part of her and it sort of had a dying process too.
People think the blood brain barrier is a lot more absolute than it really is.
Most people don’t know the blood-brain barrier exists.
not followin ya completely… i see lots of people call themselves ‘spiritual’ thinking their consciousness is somehow distinct from the body.
its an emergent property of the connectome. you arent you without those interconnected neurons.
That’s even more complicated. Not only do some people struggle with the brain being connected to the body, there’s lots of people who think that you consciousness is disconnected from your brain.
Now it’s true that we cannot exactly trace thoughts traveling through their respective neurons, but we definitely know that that’s all that thoughts are. Tiny electric impulses rushing through the brain and creating associative ideas and concepts. And then we call them thoughts.
So yeah people get weird about it,I think they won’t stop unless we manage to map out all neurons, which I don’t think will happen anytime soon.
Something i have thought about for some time. Do we only have one consciousness? Like if you literally split your brain in half via operation suddenly you got two brain halves tha’t can not communicate with each other in any way. Do you now have 2 personalities and consciousness? If yes, why don’t you have them before? Maybe you always have two but they are just in agreement. And why stop at two? There are some interviews with siamese twins (the teacher sisters for example) and it’s so interesting to see how they talk. They finish each other sentences which is natural i guess but they also say “ehh” when the other one doesn’t know a word. It’s like a single person talking. I am not arguing they are distinctive persons. Just some random thoughts.
The findings from those split-brain experiments are fascinating - and maybe a little unsettling.
I often wonder whether the “second consciousness” is created the moment the corpus callosum is cut, or whether it was always there, just hidden by the brain’s integration. If it’s the latter, that opens up some really interesting implications. For instance, when you feel like you should do something but don’t want to - could that inner conflict actually be the two hemispheres quietly disagreeing with each other?
No i mean even if they aren’t spiritual they talk in terms of like “willpower” or “patience”. what even is that and how is it somehow virtuous to have it if it’s not virtuous to have hunger or the need to sleep?
Your real question is a bit of an emergent property. Willpower, patience, agency, etc. are concepts abused by authoritarian right-wingers to distance themselves from responsibility and project it upon those they have power over. In this process, those who are abused are forced to identify with a separated, mystical entity they call “brain” that is different from what it really is. And we only have control over 10% of it lol
yeah i definitely see that but i do see the free will thing come up everywhere tho
I was going to say something about the body being an extension of the brain (a very important one), though given some of your responses I feel like it’s more relevant that many areas of our society treats commerce as a higher priority than human ecology. Even ignoring statistics.
Because their brains decided so.
who are they then? are they the brain?
You’re getting into some fun philosophical concepts with this. Look up the mind body problem and you might find some interesting reads. :)
yeah lol i actually looked at the wikipedia article but like i don’t really get the probelm?? to me there obviously isn’t a disconnect and i didn’t realize other people ACTUALLY think there is? like i realized it makes a lot more sense now why some people think like “you can just WILLPOWER your way through” whatever. Like they ACTUALLY believe it’s a thing??
That’s what my brain says.
I think quite a few people don’t treat it like an organ(if that what’s it actually is). Like mind over matter can work for anyone no matter what is wrong with the fucked up brain
but how is the mind different from the whole??
Most people think souls exist even after somebody gets brain damage in a car crash and turns into a monster.
Basically, lower your standards because the average human will never reach the bar as it stands.
Well, you’re whole is your asshole if you’re a dude. If you’re a lady, your whole is your vagina.
I blame Plato
