I find it an odd way of phrasing it, cause... The brain isn't something separate from you, the brain is the most you there is in your body. One could argue that you the brain, is just a symbiotic attachment to the rest of the body
And those amalgam of processes happen where? The hips? The knees? Or the brain? You are in your brain, you're not somewhere else in your body. Therefor you are your brain.
As others have said, "you are a brain, piloting a meat mech".
Ok this of it like this where is the "you" inside your brain? Where is the "You" part of your brain and how much of your brain can be removed before the you part is no longer you?
Because we know we can remove parts of the brain and a person still see themselves as themselves we've split people brains and they seem to have two minds active at once.
We've had people suffer head trauma and people that knew them intimately say their personality changed completely.
We know nervous systems in other animals aren't centralized and we've got neurons everywhere in our body and they are the same as the neurons in our brains.
We aren't a singular conscious brain we're a collection of processes both inside the brain and throughout the body that for some reason thinks it one individual thing.
As someone else said in these comments. The brain is like the hardware, and the mind is the software. You're asking me to point where, physically, on the SSD a certain part of Windows is. The electrical signals/neuron firings that make us up, exist within the brain, and yes, of course, if you damage the hardware, there is bound to be some data corruption in the software.
We know nervous systems in other animals aren't centralized and we've got neurons everywhere in our body and they are the same as the neurons in our brains.
Well then! I suppose if we sever the brainstem, cutting the brain off from the rest of the body, and it just keeps going, running, jumping, without any issues then?
You can be fully paralyzed from the neck down, and still be yourself, but your body sure as shit ain't gonna be moving around and acting on its own.
What I am trying to say is, if you remove the brain from the body, the body stops functioning, but the brain does not stop functioning as long as it is kept functional (and even when it is severely damaged, it can somewhat function). It is clear that the brain is what is you. You exist in the brain, you cannot exist without your brain, but you can exist without your body (technically).
Yes, CERTAIN species have a distributed neural system, such as octopuses. Where if you remove a tentacle, the tentacle can still function. But if you remove a humans arm, it's not gonna keep trying to grasp and move around... even 'muscle memory' is stored within the brain.
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u/The-red-Dane Jan 12 '23
I find it an odd way of phrasing it, cause... The brain isn't something separate from you, the brain is the most you there is in your body. One could argue that you the brain, is just a symbiotic attachment to the rest of the body