Like your body is a container for your consciousness or some other separable thing that is you?

I won't make fun, I promise. I ask because of something my mom said. She called me again yesterday--two days in a row, so, yeah, the shunning is way over. We were talking about menopause and aging in general, and she said, "I'm glad I still have my body."

That struck me, because I feel like I am my body and my body is me--one thing, not two. The part that thinks is in my head, looking out through my eyes, but that part is never going anywhere outside my head and it's all one "me," from the top of my head to the tips of my toes.

I know Munchymomom thinks differently because, once, while telling me about this guy who dropped dead in the parking lot after her seniors group lunch, she said, "He got outside of his body and just wasn't going to get back in!"

To me that sounds distinctly if not uniquely Mormon and just a little bit crazy, stated that particular way. I've wondered if she'd feel comfortable saying it to someone she doesn't know.

Not that I don't understand. It hasn't been that long since I gave up the thought of being able to leave my body. But I can't say I ever thought of it as an entirely separate thing.

So, how about you--are you one thing or two?

Just answer the question and feel free to elaborate, but let's try to keep it physical and not have a thing about atheism and souls and OOBEs and what have you. I'm just curious, like I said.

Throughout my entire life I've always joked that there are two of me in here. I think it's the Asperger's. But there has always felt like there were two sides of me, constantly in a battle with one another.

But I don't know that I've felt like it was spirit and mortal. I have a friend who always said that and I'd say, "No, it's just me."

It has felt more like the two halves of my brain are always arguing with each other.

This kind of mind/body dualism is pretty common. I agree with you that I feel like "me" is centered in my head. Probably because that's where my eyes, ears, mouth, and nose are. But I don't feel like I'm a separate entity from my body, more like some parts of my body are more essential than others.

We are basically a mobile eating and reproductive machine, consciousness is just a pleasant side benefit.

<<I feel like I am my body and my body is me--one thing, not two. The part that thinks is in my head, looking out through my eyes, but that part is never going anywhere outside my head and it's all one "me," from the top of my head to the tips of my toes.>>

I'm enjoying this phrase so much. I can't stop reading it over and over again. It seems like such a nice, easy, non-confrontational answer to many questions.

I feel serrate from my body, like I am driving it for lack of better word. Sometimes,I feel like Greyfort said. Two separate beings that try to get along. Sometimes I irritate myself.

Um.....no.....I don't think my mind and body are separate things. But I do know that my mind is not happy with my body not doing what it used to do.

Now I live vicariously through grandchildren... Their little bodies are moving at high speed an I like it...

I feel "one" with my body but don't always want to. When my knee goes waunky or the pinched nerve in my neck sends me a clear shot of pain I want to get a new body or get out of this one. But I guess I don't really think there's an actual chance of that happening. As I watch my parents' friends aging and their bodies falling apart, I'm not looking forward to that stage of life.

However.......I realize there's an enormous quantity of knowledge of which I am not in possession. Guess we'll just have to wait and see if it's all one or separate.

What's really annoying is followers of religion pretending they actually KNOW the answer to this question. They don't. They just FEEL they know.

I experienced a gestalt shift a few years ago when I realized that what I observe as my body is really just an object of my awareness.

I definitely no longer feel like I'm a soul inside a body anymore. That went away when I started meditating seriously. Human, Hello, Richard Foxe, and Anagrammy can probably share my feelings on that one.

What I am is no longer important to me. That I am is what I spend my free time settling into...

Do you have a favorite source or two regarding meditation - or really, the philosophy/idea/theory underlying your meditation?

I spent a few years going through all the normal nonsense like breathing meditations, jhanas, reading websites like the wanderling and all that. All the trendy "I meditate" stuff you hear hippies talking about all the time. That got frustrating because you can do and experience all these amazing things (better than any drug) and still not actually get anywhere with it.

Finally I stumbled onto Nisargadatta Maharaj "I am that." You can read it online for free. That was a game-changer. I recommend Nisargadatta as a starting point. I wish I had started there...

kolobian Wrote:
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> I definitely no longer feel like I'm a soul inside
> a body anymore. That went away when I started
> meditating seriously. Human, Hello, Richard Foxe,
> and Anagrammy can probably share my feelings on
> that one.

Nope. Not I, my friend. In fact, just the opposite.

I'm not good at meditating, but when I try, after hot yoga or something, I experience my body melting away and my soul shining through as the real me. I feel me and my soul as one, and the 'my' being a problem inherent in language. I am soul, not body.

Moments while running have occurred where I sense my body is nothing real at all, nor is the physical world about me real (just temporary atoms precisely organized), and feel myself as pure soul shining through. These are experienced as reality; and then, when over, as falling back into a dream of materiality.

If pressed, I would conclude that material is the illusion and that which is not material being reality.




kolobian Wrote:
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> What I am is no longer important to me. That I am
> is what I spend my free time settling into...


Ha! See, when begin at opposite experiences and end in the same place.

Cheers,

Human

(Upon rereading your post I fear I have misread you.)

Yeah, you did. But that's ok. We got to the same place! :)

*

Body is always changing; yet there is no difference in the "I" "me."

Example, age. But the "you" is the same.

I once heard a feminist define a man as "a penis with a life-support system attached."

Okay then if that's all men are, I reply that "women are for babies, MEN are for sex."

I've never felt like I am separate from my body, although I have often wished that certain parts of it would heal. I guess that when I use "I ", I am talking about my body as if Im separate.

And then there's that memory cell theory, which also makes sense to me. I believe it states that each cell has a memory. That makes me feel like my body and I are the same single entity.

Who really knows? I guess I'll find out when I die. Maybe.

My identity is separate from my body (the "lump"). While there is strong interaction between me and my body, I have always felt as if my body were a useful, but not always dependable, appliance. As a child, I remember looking at my hand and thinking, "That's an odd looking thing." I am still occasionally caught off guard by my reflection in a mirror or window as my internal world and self-image has so little to do with my external appearance.

I know that blood sugar levels, hormones, drugs, etc. all influence mental states. I know that neural networks in the brain can determine abilities in language, math, music or any abstract application. Consequently, I am less and less certain about the validity of using physical attributes to define personal identity. Star quarterback, ballerina, first-chair violin, tychoon - all are really just learned tricks that exploit biologic variations that one individual might or might not possess. Art, the expression of the hidden, is what takes clever facility beyond the banal to the sublime. Clever facility is often more than enough to be very, very successful, however.

What it means to be really human and define oneself apart from ones physical strengths and weaknesses depends on an element of individuality that is separable from the physical. I believe that this element can be nurtured and strengthened, or it can be ignored and supressed. It certainly is evident in greater and lesser degrees in people.

And while I consider the human female form to be perfection incarnate, I certainly have my doubts as to what purpose a physical resurrection serves.

I feel the way you do, so long as I don't think about it too much. It's possible for me to imagine myself as the controller of some kind of meat puppet -- sort of like how a car becomes an extension of my body if I drive for awhile. I've never felt like my consciousness could become separated from my body though. That doesn't seem possible. Maybe it could be like Sargon in the Star Trek episode "Return to Tomorrow" where he and two other disembodied beings were living in glowing spheres deep underground on some planet and spoke telepathically with a lot of reverb. Or maybe it would be like in the episode where Spock's brain is stolen by a race of young, intellectually challenged women who use his brain as a computer to control their physical facilities. "Brain and brain! What is brain?!"

I saw an LDS Social Services "counselor" at BYU in 1990 who told me that when I'm depressed it's a result of my body rebelling against my spirit due to sin. The important thing was to find out what that sin is and eliminate it so I could be happy again. It seemed like a witch hunt to me. I think Mormons have some strange, possibly unhealthy ideas about human existence. I could see how this view of bodies and spirits at war with each other could cause someone to become dissociated from normal human emotions and feelings.

My mom is a lot like yours, but I've never heard her say strange things about being outside oneself. I wonder where she gets it from.

that her beliefs differ from mine or a veiled form of argument. Yesterday, for example, she threw an "I'm not weird" into the conversation that seemed unrelated to whatever we were talking about. I was like, "Okay, note to self: Mom's not weird." But if I suggested she did it on purpose or even just called attention to it, she'd be all, "I'm not like that, you don't get me, you always assign motives I don't have, blah blah blah."

It's beyond established that my experience of the maternal unit is not valid.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/06/2013 10:26AM by munchybotaz.

Oh, maybe that's it. I think my mother just tries to avoid the whole subject with me. I bet she's more like your mother when she talks to my siblings.

When I was a kid I read a story (fiction, of course) about people separating their consciousness from their bodies by thinking about it really hard and turning a sharp corner to "disincorporate." Sooo many times I have wanted to be able to do this. I still consider my body and mind as being at odds. I used to really long for heaven, so I wouldn't have the mild anxiety and OCD any more, considering them problems of the flesh. Today, in any event, I have given up on the whole heaven idea-making me feel more connected to my body, and, I would add, reality. Reality DEFINITELY adds motivation to improve my attitude (and many other things) here on Earth instead of just waiting for "my reward in heaven."

I've always felt that my self was right behind my eyes. I don't know that I'd say that that was separate from my body, just that I'm very visually oriented I suppose.

Star Wars, Phineas and Ferb.. you know, those scenes where people are in robots, in the head but looking through where the eyes are. Kind of like that. So, I consider my consciousness to be residing in my body, head specifically, yet fully aware that my consciousness is totally dependent on air, food, via blood from the body to keep it working.

But as far as a 'spirit' that looks like and is the same size as my body that can hang around outside it..... No.

I always felt like I was me and then part of me was watching what I was doing. It was disconcerting. Then I became ill enough that I almost died. I had been proud of my mental accomplishments, but I had to go on chemo and pred. I learned quickly that my mind and brain were the same thing. With chemo causing interference with my neurons, I wasn't me. Fortunately I am back, but it took years after Cytoxan.

Whose the thinker of your thoughts?

If you equate your conscious self with your brain (or body), such that "you" are only your physical body and brain, then consider this thought experiment:

Your brain is entirely and ultimately a physical system, consisting of atoms, molecules, neurons of various types, along with a complex network of neuronal connections and systems. In principle, every aspect of the physical structure of your brain could be specified, which means at any moment in time it could in principle be duplicated.

Now imagine a futuristic society where your brain could connect to a machine and be precisely duplicated, thus for some moment in time creating two identical brains, each with consciousness. On your assumption both "persons" at that point would have identical psychological states, including an identical sense of self. Would each "person" view themselves as independent selves, or would there be some sort of combined selfhood?

If your answer is that in such a situation you would maintain your identity and your "twin" would retain some other identity, then it is not the case that your brain is identical with your psychological self because you would be left to account for the physical difference that facilitated the independent psychological states, which by hypothesis does not exist.

Since the brains are identical, there is something else independent of the brain that must be contributing to selfhood.

Note that this is not necessarily a religious conclusion. All it means is that the brain produces consciousness that is itself in some sense independent of the brain. This is consistent with modern neuroscience which has finally accepted the fact that mental effort can affect brain states; i.e. the causal closure of the physical, believed for so long, is false.

Greg Egan has written a number of stories exploring this idea (Henry Bemis post above), usually around the concept of "the jewel" that copies the brain.

Learning to be me, Axiomatic, The Walk

Interesting concepts to explore.

This is spot on!

Henry Bemis Wrote:
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> All it means is that the brain
> produces consciousness that is itself in some
> sense independent of the brain.


How much of "the brain produces consciousness" is a causation/correlation mistake? I'm not ready to conclude so definitively that the brain "produces" consciousness.


Once we can get computers pushing out 10 petaflops, roughly what it is assumed the human brain can do, maybe Kurzweil can show us how he is right. Until then, we should all keep in mind that reduction does not equal construction. Reducing the Universe to fermions and bosons is not an argument in any way for how these in turn construct a Universe, which includes humans singing "Ode to Joy."

Kurzweil's moment may come soon. I suspect we'll find not only that Moore's Law obviously only applies to hardware and not software, and not only that there is a huge difference between 'complication' and 'complexity', but that our century is marked by that which marks every century: hubris.

Cheers to you, HB!

Human

(To your point to Munchy: I love the Mary's Room thought experiment.)

*All the above is typed with my deep apologies to Bryan Appleyard.

I think my original brain would still be me, and the duplicate brain would be a new, separate self that was identical to me at the moment of duplication but would continue to develop independently. I think you're making it a little more complicated than it needs to be.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/06/2013 02:54PM by munchybotaz.

Interesting question. This struck me as odd:

munchybotaz Wrote:
---------------------------------------------------

> Not that I don't understand. It hasn't been that
> long since I gave up the thought of being able to
> leave my body. But I can't say I ever thought of
> it as an entirely separate thing.
>


My experience is that the sense that I am a something inside a body is very much a *feeling* rather than a thought. I have never *not* felt like a 'consciousness inside a container'.

Of course I can think about it, and have. I can think about your idea that you are your body and your body is you and that the 'your' is a mistake inherent in language. But while I think about it I never lose the sense, the *feeling*, the experience that the me that thinks is somehow separate from the brain that is used to do the thinking.

I can take on and "give up" many thoughts, but how (I wonder) could I ever "give up" the sense, the feeling, the experience that the 'Me Myself' is separate from my body? Thinking alone would never accomplish it.

Human

And it has nothing to do with mormonism.

When I saw the movie Inception, it freaked me out. I leaned over to my ex during the movie and said, 'you mean other people feel like I do.'

Recently, I've felt more in my body than I had for a long, long time. I don't know if it comes from trauma or what. For years and years, I was just surviving so I think it may have something to do with that.

If you could successfully get a brain transplant, who would you be now?

I've been to a vast many places in my mind, but I've never managed to leave my head.

Considering it's a proven fact that our thoughts and memories exist in the neural networks of our brains, I seriously question the theory that there exists a spiritual consciousness that is both so disconnected from physical reality as to escape all scientific detection, and at the same time so intricately connected with physical reality as to intertwine itself with and manipulate the very neural networks that make us who we are. Sorry, not buying it.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/06/2013 03:32PM by kimball.