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WashMDJD
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 Posted: Sat Sep 06, 2008 10:49 pm Post subject: Locating the 'I' in physical-space |
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Lately, I've been wondering about the physical space in our bodies where we 'locate' ourselves.
I'm not sure if everybody thinks about their bodies this way, but it seems to me that there is something fundamentally different about thinking about myself (and I mean this in the Descartes-like 'I', the ghost in the machine) and thinking about my physical body. When I look down at my hands, the entity doing the looking ('I') is located up in my head.
If I got my arm amputated after a horrific car accident, I think I would be able to think of it as my body losing a part of itself, but that that arm wasn't 'me'. 'I' would be up above it, in my head, looking down at the empty space where an arm was connected to the body that is connected to me.
If something brushed against my leg while I was swimming in a lake, I would be able to look down and see a fish swim by, but the entity doing the observing and reacting wouldn't be in my leg, it would be up in my head.
In short, I locate my 'I' - my conscious self - in physical space in my head.
The question I've been wrestling with is whether my 'I' is located in my head physically because that is where my brain is located physically or whether I locate it in my head physically because my head is the locus of most all of my sensory input.
The thought experiment I've been trying to think about is one of sensory deprivation. Suppose that you were born deaf and blind and couldn't taste or smell anything - in other words, radical sensory data loss. All you have left are your tactile senses.
Do you think you might locate your consciousness in another part of your body, like your hands or torso instead of in your head? Or do you think you might still think of 'you' being in your skull and the 'stuff attached to you' as being below that?
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"Ne mea dona tibi studio disposta fideli,
Intellecta prius quam sint, contempta reliquas."
-Lucretius, De rerum natura
("...that my gifts here set forth for you with faithful solicitude, may not by you be contempuously discarded before they have been understood.")
"Mes amis, si j'avance, suivez-moi! Si je recule, tuez-moi! Si je meurs, vengez-moi!" --Henri de la Rochejaquelein |
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Kraft
Joined: 08 Jan 2005
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Location: MB, Canada.
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| Posted: Sat Sep 06, 2008 11:06 pm Post subject: |
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Usually I feel I'm in the front left side of my head, not sure why...
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'Why [...] is the philosophy of religion so boring?' - Kai Nielsen
"I don't condone reading, I believe it poisons the mind" - Adam Carolla |
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abstract atheist
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Joined: 02 Sep 2008
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Location: Austin, Texas
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| Posted: Sat Sep 06, 2008 11:17 pm Post subject: Re: Locating the 'I' in physical-space |
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| WashMDJD wrote: | Suppose that you were born deaf and blind and couldn't taste or smell anything - in other words, radical sensory data loss. All you have left are your tactile senses.
Do you think you might locate your consciousness in another part of your body, like your hands or torso instead of in your head? Or do you think you might still think of 'you' being in your skull and the 'stuff attached to you' as being below that? |
I think the real question is, "Would you be able to think at all if the only thing you ever experienced was touch?" Or at least, what would you think about. It would be crazy.
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The world holds two classes of men - intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence. - Abu’l‐Ala al Ma’arri
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime; give a man religion and he will die praying for a fish.
Father: Son, I don't want you hanging around Steve any more, I think he might be gay.
Son: He better be gay, he's my boyfriend. |
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Eyedunno
The Great JuJu at the Bottom of the Sea
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| Posted: Sun Sep 07, 2008 12:49 am Post subject: |
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Yeah, I think it's natural to locate "ourselves" in our heads, because it's the seat of four of five senses (including sight, which has the most neural "hardware" associated with it in sighted people).
There's a pretty cool science fiction story called "Seeing" by Greg Egan (it's in Axiomatic), which sort of deals with this, but I don't want to reveal the premise (as in most Greg Egan stories, the premise is basically everything).
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GodCalledInSickToday
I'm just here for the cake.
Joined: 30 Aug 2008
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| Posted: Tue Sep 16, 2008 1:36 am Post subject: |
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Q: How many existentialists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Two. One to screw it in and one to observe how the light bulb itself symbolizes a single incandescent beacon of subjective reality in a netherworld of endless absurdity reaching out toward a maudlin cosmos of nothingness.
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<------ female.
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xena
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| Posted: Tue Sep 16, 2008 2:06 am Post subject: |
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The 'I' looking down...erm...not getting this concept. Nerves though, I do. And, when one does lose a limb, the 'I' doesn't comprehend and the 'I' still feels it.
Phantom pain-look it up.
Oh and the nervous system. |
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WashMDJD
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| Posted: Tue Sep 16, 2008 4:35 am Post subject: |
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| xena wrote: | The 'I' looking down...erm...not getting this concept. Nerves though, I do. And, when one does lose a limb, the 'I' doesn't comprehend and the 'I' still feels it.
Phantom pain-look it up.
Oh and the nervous system. |
I'm not sure that really works for helping me figure out this issue, Xena, but maybe it does and I'm just not approaching it from the same angle that you are. I'm not really concerned with the existence of phantom pain - that's a well-known physiological condition. What I'm more after is an issue in the philosophy of mind, and the concept of mind-brain duality.
Traditionally in philosophy, there is a long history of separating the concepts of the brain (the physical organ that does our thinking) and the mind (the 'entity' which does our thinking). So while it's good to say that the nervous system receives signals from tissues that the nervous system misinterprets as sensations coming from body parts that are no longer present, that's a medical issue rather than a philosophical one.
What I'm more after is the 'mind' side of the mind-brain duality. Although I have no reasoning to suspect this, it seems intuitively true that others probably feel as if their 'mind' entity has a location - that there is something qualitatively different about experiencing phenomena that would negatively impact that location in physical space that wouldn't be true if those same phenomena affected other physical locations (even other physical locations that include parts of your body).
I'm still groping to understand this issue myself, so at best I can approach it tangentially. If a large rock were hurtling toward my foot, I might think, "That rock is going to hit my foot!" But if that same rock were instead going to hit my face, I think I might react somewhat differently ("That rock is going to hit me!"). It's not an issue of which I value more, or which one might cause me more pain; rather it is an issue of identifying my conscious mind (the ghost in the machine, if you will) as being in the space occupying my head, but not in the space occupying my foot. It might even be parsed as an identity question, if one were so inclined.
In any case, my thought was that perhaps my localizing of my conscious mind in the space where my head is located is not due to that also being the place where my brain is located - that it might be because that is the location where the overwhelming bulk of sensory input is located instead. Hence, I think the hypothetical rock is headed for "me" instead of headed for "some attached part of me" because the rock is coming at my eyes which see it, and at my ears which hear the whistle of the air as the rock approaches.
So my curiosity led me to wonder whether a person without senses located in their head, but with the brain still there, would similarly locate their mind in their head or whether they would locate it where the bulk of their sensory input occurred. So if human bodies were like they are now, but our eyes were located in the palms of our hands and an ear on the reverse side of each hand, would we instead think about 'us' as being located in our hands instead of in our heads?
It's an esoteric question, I'll admit, but it's one that's been bugging me for a while.
_________________
"Ne mea dona tibi studio disposta fideli,
Intellecta prius quam sint, contempta reliquas."
-Lucretius, De rerum natura
("...that my gifts here set forth for you with faithful solicitude, may not by you be contempuously discarded before they have been understood.")
"Mes amis, si j'avance, suivez-moi! Si je recule, tuez-moi! Si je meurs, vengez-moi!" --Henri de la Rochejaquelein |
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