Thread: Do I have this right?

Is the mind in the brain? Of course, the brain is just meat that happens to store things and control muscles and what have you...I've often wondered to myself the answer to that question.

Originally Posted by Sloth Face

Is the mind in the brain? Of course, the brain is just meat that happens to store things and control muscles and what have you...I've often wondered to myself the answer to that question.

Use your mind to observe your mind and see where it is. Where is it? Where are its boundaries? Can you extend your mind into your big toe? Or your heart?

*sigh* philosophical conundrums!

Ok, I don't have any answers, but I can speculate and ponder a bit....

Where is the mind located? Interesting to think about. Of course it's just electrical activity in the brain, and it seems to be centered in the head. Is that because that's where the brain is, or is it because your head is the headquarters for your most important and most directional sensory organs? Between your ears, behind your eyes.... how could "you" seem to be anywhere else?

Can you put your awareness in your heart or your big toe?

Well certainly you can center your attention on any area of your body... partly by just thinking about it and partly because every part of the body has some nerve connection with the brain. But in a sense you can also center your attention on anything in your surroundings... the senses cast a net around you of awareness, so that your nervous system effectively encompasses everything you can see and hear and feel and smell... hell maybe everything you remember or can think about.

But is centering your awareness on something the same as being aware within it? Can that even be answered? Thinking happens in the brain, but it suffuses everything throughout your body and even your surroundings and memories and ideas. All carry the light of awareness. In fact ,the instant you think about something, your awareness inhabits it and suffuses it. And that's true whether the thing you're thinking about is a real object or just something imaginary.

I read a bunch of Carl Sagan books over the last few months, and I forget which one I read this in, but he was talking about the sense of 'self'. The I... or the Identity (Id entity?). Apparently there's a specialized part of the brain that creates this sense, and the 'lower' animals don't have it. So... does that mean they go through their entire lives as in a dream (non-lucid of course)? Sometimes we do as well... I Know I have days when I 'got up on the wrong side of the bed" or "my mind is still asleep".

What do we really know about 'reality'? The epistemologists never got past "I think therefore I am"... but most of us are pretty sure there's a real world 'out there' and that it's pretty much like what we see hear and feel etc... when there's a brick wall in front of you you're not likely to try to walk through it, and if you do... better reach for the aspirin.

The senses provide datastreams via nerves to the brain, which has mechanisms to correlate all the data into a sort of 3-dimensional CGI Matrix world. Add to that what we "know" from memory or by being informed by other people or watching the news or whatever... it all get added to the gestalt, and our reconstructed world inside the mind becomes fairly complete.

What's really interesting is the patchy nature of that construct.... we don't have all the data all the time. Sometimes a person might be standing right behind us but we don't know it until we hear them and it gives us a start, then we add them to the gestalt. So reality is essentially very similar to dreams... we use the same mental mechanisms to construct both worlds... the only major difference being that while awake the data is coming in through the senses and based on actual objects that are 'really there', while in dreaming those streams are cut off (apparently some mechanism in the brain is responsible for actually shutting off sensory input while in REM) and the gestalt-building mechanisms are free to create imaginary scenarios.

Tibetan buddhist masters (who are expert lucid dreamers) say that to become lucid in dreams, you must realize that reality is like a dream, and dreams like reality... where as most people (In the west) think of dreams as nothing more than silly fantasy episodes and believe that material reality is absolute.

Ok... sorry for the long and rambling post... you guys just hit my philosophize button!

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

*sigh* philosophical conundrums!

Where is the mind located? Interesting to think about. Of course it's just electrical activity in the brain, and it seems to be centered in the head. Is that because that's where the brain is, or is it because your head is the headquarters for your most important and most directional sensory organs? Between your ears, behind your eyes.... how could "you" seem to be anywhere else?

Can you put your awareness in your heart or your big toe?

This is the same reason why when people get tagged on facebook, it's their faces that get tagged, because that's where people's sense of "I" is located.

Great post, btw.

Originally Posted by bewareofit1505

This is the same reason why when people get tagged on facebook, it's their faces that get tagged, because that's where people's sense of "I" is located.

Great post, btw.

Most people, if they saw a bunch of pictures of ordinary naked bodies without the faces or heads, would have a hard time identifying themselves.

I could identify myself pretty easily.

ditto. so many weird scars.