No Stupid Questions

I'm a mind hosted by a brain piloting a bone mecha covered in flesh armor

I take the Buddhist view that what we call the self is a misconception or misunderstanding. While you do exist, there isn't a soul or some permanent entity that takes residence and jumps around before or after death.

Thus, you can ask questions like these and get a million different answers because the question is not valid. It's what the Buddha would call proliferation, or basically hot air. There isn't an answer, why ask the question?

Don't mistake this for a cynical view, though. A good Buddhist is very happy because even though the idea of a self is false, freeing yourself from all of these self-based concepts and desires leads to great peace. The obsession with self and self-based craving is what leads to any kind of unhappiness.

You are mostly your brain, which extends to the rest of your body.

The thing about OOB cases is that the human brain is really good at faking information, or just generating it out of thin air.

In fact it never stops doing that, unless it is allowed to completely die.

If a person is resurrected, the brain generates "filler" information for the duration you were "out".

For some, that is seeing an "afterlife".

There is no universally specified "afterlife", it's based entirely on culture, and what the person has grown to believe in, even if they don't believe it anymore.

This post illustrates well why some Buddhists, among others, regard the self to be an illusion. When called to locate it or bring it forth, we ultimately can’t do so.

Quite literally you are your brain, trying to account for the entire body and mind as the self simultaneously. But you may catch yourself thinking or saying things like "I can't wrap my brain around this." Isn't that odd? Your brain refers to itself as my brain. Is that a linguistic issue or is your sense of perspective off?

"Don't you have a heart?" Why do we imply that our sense of compassion is only located in an organ that just pumps blood? That clearly can't be the case.

We know cases where someone gets a brain tumor and suddenly becomes violent or unfeeling. When the brain is damaged either during life or during gestation, we know that we can lose all manner of things: cognition, motor skills, memory, emotions, etc. It's all the brain.

What confuses the issue is everything the brain is attached to. What I think all conscious humans do is try to make sense of the mind-body connection. I feel tired, that's not just my brain feeling tired. I can feel tired in every single part of my body independently or all together. "I" am the brain. If I lose an arm, I don't lose my sense of self. But losing important functions can damage the self I've constructed of myself. If I lose my eyesight I will be a very different person when I'm unable to visually enjoy video games, movies, art, nature. But clearly blind people still have a self. If it sits behind their eyes, will it move? Adapt to their ears?

All this to say, your self is self constructed. It's malleable. But make no mistake that the source of where self and consciousness are maintained is the brain.

Hub. Interesting. My sense of self tends to be around my shoulder/back of head/neck area. I don't get the feeling that I'm right behind my eyeballs, my sense of self is A bit lower and further back than that. Like, if I were centered between my ears, I'd have to move a bit lower and a bit more back.

Such a strange thing to have to focus on.

These are questions you should ponder after a nice healthy dose of psilocybin. You can be just about anywhere you want to be and pick what works for you.

There's a book called Impro by Keith Johnstone.

It's a book about improvisation, though in there there's a very interesting part on moving your center around when it comes to character work.

So long as the centre remains in the middle of your chest (pretend it's a few inches deep), you will feel that you are still yourself and in full command, only more energetically and harmoniously so, with your body approaching an "ideal type".

As soon as you try to shift the centre to some other place within or outside your body, you will feel that your whole psychological and physical attitude will change, just as it changes when you step into an imaginary body.

You will notice that the centre is able to draw and concentrate your whole being into one spot from which your activity emanates and radiates.

(Johnstone, 1987, p. 179).

I live in my head. My body is annoying.

I've never felt particularly connected to my body.

It would be interesting to know whether the location of your 'self' is tied to your dominant sense. So people blind from birth could be 'between their ears'? Which isn't that different, but would still produce slightly different answers. And how about people missing both hearing and vision? Could a person be 'in their hands'? 'Up their nose'? I'd better stop.

Spacetime is a lie.

My brain silently groaned "Ugh, I need more coffee to process something like this so early! Body, take me to the coffee."

I feel this is an answer to the question.

I don't even know that, I don't particularly feel like I am either my body, head, or brain. I've never felt that I am a part of this body.

I am my whole self most of the time but sometimes specific parts are more attention grabbing than others. Usually during orgasms or when something hurts.

If you are more kinesthetically aware of your body, you will feel every part of it and be able to better understand what is going on in it.

In Japan, people point to their face to indicate themselves

I'm probably, mostly, behind my eyes, inside my head.

In moments of adrenaline and action, I'm in my chest or gut. Sometime hands, especially when doing delicate or involved work. Sometimes legs or arms when laboring.

In times of pain, I'm often at the focus of the pain until I work and ignore the physical and go somewhere deep inside that doesn't hurt so much. Usually, a good memory or fantasy.

The bit that thinks is in my head feels to be at the front. But it knows that my heart is equally important. So I feel that I am my head and my body.

People who have lost a limb say they feel like they’ve lost a part of themselves not just physically but in their sense of wholeness.

You are more than just a point in space. You see others perform actions and you attempt to replicate them.

You have a brain in your head and a "second brain" in your gut, so thinking of yourself behind the eyes and pointing at yourself in the center of mass when you are referring to yourself both have arguably valid reasons behind them.

This is a question the greatest minds haven't been able to answer in millennia. Don't expect an answer in a random lemmy thread. The closest answer to the truth I could give is "we don't know".

So, you're talking about perspective, basically "where it seems someone is looking from". You can control this, it's not locked-in to how it normally feels like it functions, even if it normally seems that way.

It just takes significant amounts of practice in directing and controlling your attention instead of letting it control you. There's a lot of ways to practice, but meditation regimens are probably generally one of the quickest.

Like, your internal dialogue for instance. Just because it's always on doesn't mean it has to be. But unless you can turn it off, the constant stream of dialogue through your head is going to make it very difficult to "look from" anywhere else. It'll always pull you immediately back so long as it is present.

Personally, I can't separate the feeling of self from my vision, so "I" am directly behind my eyeballs and I can't change it.

My experience is very similar, and I tend to explain it as "I (feel I) am my frontal cortex", which it's conveniently positioned there.

Can you move?

If I close my eyes, I don't feel I can move in the sense of "going to a different place", but I feel like I have an "internal orientation" which (almost always) aligns with where I'm looking at. But with the eyes shut I can change that orientation and point it in different directions.

I don't know if this will make sense to anyone... it's very hard to explain these sensations with words.

I vary.

My oddest self is working. I operate a lot of automated machinery that are interactive, and many levels of recirculating materials. I have to zone in and become my machinery, feeling the vibrations, heat, smelling, and hearing the manufacturing processes and guiding the settings to keep as optimum as conditions allow. My day can turn very bad in minutes, it is that unforgiving of specs. I don't like being too public in what I do on the internet, but there are only a few handfuls of who operate at my scale throughout the world/ per my employer.

I can only compare it to a race car driver, or aerialist flyer in the mind/machine joining of sense of space.

I don't know how to work the body...

My location is irrelavent. All you need to know it that I am 1 mile from your location and approaching rapidly.

I am this. The human nervous system is actually what I am, most of it is concentrated in the brain, but there's also lots of it outside of it. The rest of my body is just an astronaut suit made out of flesh to keep me alive.

I'm most of my self. There's a small part with severe nerve damage that, well, it's something else. I've given it a name. It kind of has a mind of its own. We exist.

Under my blanket. No, my dog is sleeping on my legs.