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.
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