by david_draco
3 subcomments
- > What does it mean that that I feel my anxiety in my gut? And that I clearly feel when I’m speaking from my head or my heart (or both)? [...] What does it mean that that I feel my anxiety in my gut? And that I clearly feel when I’m speaking from my head or my heart (or both)?
An unjustified logical jump here seems to be that where you feel your thoughts and feelings are coming from is where the responsible neurons are. The assignment of the feeling of origin may be a separate mechanism.
by red75prime
1 subcomments
- > I find it more plausible that the feeling of speaking from the gut is akin to allowing that center of intelligence coordinate the rest of our body.
The author thinks that mentally poking the bodymap created by the brain can cause changes in the actual processing. I wouldn't believe this without proofs other than introspection(1). Technically, the vagus nerve can carry enough information to produce speech (the gut should be articulate, of course), but it certainly nowhere near the corpus callosum or the spinal cord. I doubt that it can allow to "coordinate the rest of our body".
(1) As far as know conscious manipulation of the heart rate is achieved by changing respiratory patterns, not thru direct control of the signals that the brain sends there.
by CephalopodMD
4 subcomments
- > In several cases, memories of the old heart’s host seem to become accessible to the recipient ^2.
That does not seem at all to be what citation 2 is saying.
- The assumption that neuron activity == consciousness is incorrect.
A lot of neurons in our brain are doing visual processing. How much of it is conscious?
Writing this comment, I have very little insight into how I am able to create this sentence and then read it. Makes me wonder what's the point of being conscious anyway.
- By the same logic, you could ask "what part of a computer 'is' the computer? The CPU? The hard drive? The RAM? The TPM? The power supply? The sum of all peripherals? Etc"
You could ask all kinds of philosophical questions about this, but at the end of the day, there are parts that are easily replaceable and parts that are harder if you want to preserve the identity of a particular machine.
E.g. while RAM, CPU, GPU, power supply etc are all essential for running a PC, you can also swap them out without many problems. In contrast, the data on the hard drives or the TPM might be hard or impossible to restore.
In the same way, I'd still see the brain as the center of the self, because so much cognitive information is stored there.
- What really called my attention is the personality change after transplants. I am not super sure about how good the science is.
Also. We are very neuro-centric, but the system also had all type of hormones and other chemical messages affecting it.
by seniortaco
0 subcomment
- From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that the body would explore all possible ways to increase intelligence, with neurons located anywhere in the body and with chemical in addition to electric signals. It's not like a car or something that was designed with specific functions for specific components.
- >but it is also possible to live in more harmonious relation between the head, heart, and gut — all the intelligence centers.
Aren't those the supposed locations of the "chakras"?
- More related stuff.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365412617_Polyatomi...
by Schlagbohrer
1 subcomments
- Any discussion of embodied intelligence or the realization of how much of our nervous system is outside of our brain makes thinking about genital mutilation (such as non consensual infant circumcision) even more horrifying. How many nerves are lost when intersex children or infant boys are mutilated?
- Anyone here into Systemic Constellations and have a theory of how they work?
- See Michael Levin.
- Interesting article, Douglas Hofstadter's book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop takes it a step further and says that parts of our consciousness/soul lives outside of ourselves and in the minds and brains of others. Since one can generally guess how person you know would respond in a given situation, such as how a spouse might be able to know exactly what their spouse would say/do, and in that sense our "souls" are distributed. It's a bit more nuanced than that, but I think that gets the point across of how parts of ourselves live in others.
- "[i]f you look closely at our nervous system, you’ll see that there are neuronal clusters distributed throughout the body. Human computation is better understood as distributed than centralized."
- A very powerful meditation practice is called self-inquiry. One version of it is after you calm your mind down (say with breath meditation) you look for where u think u r. Wherever that is, ask yourself if that’s where u r, what is looking at it? Keep going, don’t intellectualize it, and keep looking.
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