> What does it mean that that I feel my anxiety in my gut? And that I clearly feel when I’m speaking from my head or my heart (or both)? [...] What does it mean that that I feel my anxiety in my gut? And that I clearly feel when I’m speaking from my head or my heart (or both)?
An unjustified logical jump here seems to be that where you feel your thoughts and feelings are coming from is where the responsible neurons are. The assignment of the feeling of origin may be a separate mechanism.
There's a case cited in that paper which does suggest something similar:
> A report in the lay literature describes the case of Claire Sylvia who reported changes in her personality, preferences, and behaviors following a heart and lung transplant at Yale-New Haven hospital in 1988. Following surgery, Sylvia developed a new taste for green peppers and chicken nuggets, foods she previously disliked. As soon as she was released from the hospital, she promptly headed to a Kentucky Fried Chicken to order chicken nuggets. She later met her donor’s family and inquired about his affinity for green peppers. Their response was, “Are you kidding? He loved them… But what he really loved was chicken nuggets” (p. 184, [9]). Sylvia later discovered that at the time of her donor’s death in a motorcycle accident, a container of chicken nuggets was found under his jacket [9].
I haven't read the whole thing, maybe there's something more relevant as well. That report isn't really about accessing the previous persons "memories" but at least claims she adopted a part of their personality. I'd be skeptical about its accuracy without more such reports, however.
A safer assumption would be that our body influences our behavior and tastes, and in turn they are directly affected by changes in our body, like an organ transplant.
A more interesting question regarding the case above would be "what's in our hearth and lungs that affects our perception of capsaicin?".
> I find it more plausible that the feeling of speaking from the gut is akin to allowing that center of intelligence coordinate the rest of our body.
The author thinks that mentally poking the bodymap created by the brain can cause changes in the actual processing. I wouldn't believe this without proofs other than introspection(1). Technically, the vagus nerve can carry enough information to produce speech (the gut should be articulate, of course), but it certainly nowhere near the corpus callosum or the spinal cord. I doubt that it can allow to "coordinate the rest of our body".
(1) As far as know conscious manipulation of the heart rate is achieved by changing respiratory patterns, not thru direct control of the signals that the brain sends there.
There's a short science book called Hidden Guests, it talks about why women have the potential to end up with microchimeric "incursions" from sexual partners and their own fetuses, fetuses can have microchimerism with each other (not just twins but prior fetuses from same mother) and fetal cells crossing into the mother and towards the end talks about the resemblance between this and transplants( someone else's cells thriving in one's body). So if organ transplants can potentially have that effect, it's already happening to sexually active women, with the caveat that for the fetal cells it wouldn't have much formed personality, yet.
That reminds of a piece which frames pregnancy as a biochemical cold-war between the body of the mother and the child, which can turn "hot" to the detriment of both. In this framing, the chimerism isn't just from cells getting lost, it's the legacy of structured infiltration and sabotage.
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> In primates and mice, it’s a different story. Cells from the invading placenta digest their way through the endometrial surface, puncturing the mother’s arteries, swarming inside and remodelling them to suit the foetus. Outside of pregnancy, these arteries are tiny, twisty things spiralling through depths of the uterine wall. The invading placental cells paralyse the vessels so they cannot contract, then pump them full of growth hormones, widening them tenfold to capture more maternal blood.
> These foetal cells are so invasive that colonies of them often persist in the mother for the rest of her life, having migrated to her liver, brain and other organs. There’s something they rarely tell you about motherhood: it turns women into genetic chimeras.
You mean, having a medical procedure that involves a major organ disease, a long waitlist with your life on the line, start by knocking you out, cutting you open, replacing one of your organs, follows with a recovery period, and then a lifelong regime of immunosuppressant drugs to prevent rejection might affect your personality somewhat?
Have fun controlling for confounders with this shit.
By the same logic, you could ask "what part of a computer 'is' the computer? The CPU? The hard drive? The RAM? The TPM? The power supply? The sum of all peripherals? Etc"
You could ask all kinds of philosophical questions about this, but at the end of the day, there are parts that are easily replaceable and parts that are harder if you want to preserve the identity of a particular machine.
E.g. while RAM, CPU, GPU, power supply etc are all essential for running a PC, you can also swap them out without many problems. In contrast, the data on the hard drives or the TPM might be hard or impossible to restore.
In the same way, I'd still see the brain as the center of the self, because so much cognitive information is stored there.
Identity isn't a scientific question, science can't tell you who you are. Collectivist ideologies throughout history have encouraged people to think of themselves as - or rather maybe, be subsumed in an identity outside their body. And it might be wrong in a moral sense, but in a scientific sense it's neither right or wrong. Of course there's complex interaction and information exchange going on inside a state or a "race", and it's not clear why that shouldn't make collective "intelligent" in the same way we argue an individual human is intelligent. Philosophies which derive identity/value from intelligence (I don't agree with those philosophies) have very little to answer to collectivist ideologies which reject humanism.
A modern computer looks more like a worm that believes it is self-aware.
There are so many SoC subsystems in a computer that the CPU only thinks it knows what's going on and can be catastrophically wrong about it in some cases. Brian Cantrill has a pretty good rant about it in one of the recent Oxide videos.
As a fun fact, humans and worms have a common hypothetical ancestor we call “urbilateria”, likely living over 550-600 million years ago, before the Cambrian explosion.
This ancestor gave rise to a branch called protosomes (worms, insects, mollusks) and another branch called deutorosomes (which includes humans and other vertebrates).
Worms and humans share: bilateral body organization, a digestive tract, basic nerve structures, many shared genes that control body development.
I don't know about chakras, but 'Chi' followed imaginary conduits through the connective tissue that... turned out actually there are conduits through connective tissue for lymph to move. They're just really really tricky to image so we didn't know about them until about ten years ago.
I took a Yoga class years ago (my tight wrists made it very unpleasant) and on the last day of class the instructor pulled out some obscure stuff and had us do some energy work, which I was sure was going to be complete bollocks. And about five minutes before the end of the class I experienced feelings that were identical to Flow state (that slightly buzzy feeling when you're in the grove and just crushing a task.) I recall thinking, "Oh this is potentially addictive. I'm glad this is the last class."
I'm betting that 10-20% of the mysticism stuff eventually turns out to be true and the rest is speculation built on top of correlation with those objectively true bits. Science eventually gets around to studying coincidences. Medicine tends to be more arrogant and dismissive of anything they can't measure, for far longer than is strictly healthy.
Sort of, but it generally goes more like: base/perineum, genitals, navel, heart, throat, forehead, and then one at the top of the head or just above. The Sefer Yetzirah, however, references specifically "Head, Belly, and Chest" as the three loci of the human body. (§ 3.4-5)
There's a healthy debate about whether the dantien is below the navel being mistranslated as near the pubic bone versus three inches toward your spine, either in your viscera or in the lowest layers of muscle in your abdominal wall.
"[i]f you look closely at our nervous system, you’ll see that there are neuronal clusters distributed throughout the body. Human computation is better understood as distributed than centralized."
It's kind of like having a computer at the home, but tens of thousands of computers at a data center. Things like reflexes can happen quickly because you don't have to go all the way to the brain, but your arm isn't going to be adding 2+2 by itself.
It's almost entirely in your brain. Less "your muscles remember how to do things" and more "your brain remembers how to do things using your muscles".
The muscles and the nerves within your limbs adapt some - they respond to being used - but they don't have the representation capacity to store action patterns in them.
The spine itself is another matter - it's much more complex and adaptive, it has some capacity, it can learn things. It mostly carries a set of reflexes you get at birth, and some commonly used learned action patterns. Less "how to play the piano" and more "a set of finger motions useful for playing piano". The most studied thing is probably the spinal involvement in gait generation and stabilization of bipedal locomotion.
Now, things would be different if you were an octopus. But humans are pretty centralized, as far as nervous system goes.
A very powerful meditation practice is called self-inquiry. One version of it is after you calm your mind down (say with breath meditation) you look for where u think u r. Wherever that is, ask yourself if that’s where u r, what is looking at it? Keep going, don’t intellectualize it, and keep looking.
Interesting article, Douglas Hofstadter's book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop takes it a step further and says that parts of our consciousness/soul lives outside of ourselves and in the minds and brains of others. Since one can generally guess how person you know would respond in a given situation, such as how a spouse might be able to know exactly what their spouse would say/do, and in that sense our "souls" are distributed. It's a bit more nuanced than that, but I think that gets the point across of how parts of ourselves live in others.
An alternate theory is that we develop models of other people’s behavior to predict their actions, and then we apply a form of those models to ourselves, which becomes what we think of as self-awareness. But the models are just models, they aren’t the mind, which is why our conscious self often has trouble controlling, or even predicting our own behaviour.
> our conscious self often has trouble controlling, or even predicting our own behaviour.
That doesn’t ring true for me - I hardly ever find myself behaving unpredictably or out-of-control - I remember sometimes feeling that way as a child, but now? As an adult? It almost never happens.
Do you really feel that you are ‘often’ out of control or behaving unpredictably?
> I hardly ever find myself behaving unpredictably or out-of-control - I remember sometimes feeling that way as a child, but now? As an adult? It almost never happens.
Good for you. I almost parted with a very good friend just because I had a very bad day and a big headache yesterday. Fortunately she is understanding enough. Due to lack of mental clarity I've said things that are simply untrue but I felt that the words I'm writing were correct at the time. I felt it was wrong reaction pretty soon after sending and rereading.
But I'm not "often" out of control. It just happens once or twice a year.
I think that is Hofstadter grieving his wife, and reflecting on how we embed models or predictions of others in our own neural networks, more than anything else.
We build models of the world in order to predict it.
But I guess you could say other people are objectively shaping the neurons in our brains. But so is that fiddly printer tray or whatever, to a small extent.
Hey that printer tray is a bit of someone's soul too. Many people's work and decisions, even a bit of the nature of our whole society is recorded in those flimsy things. It may or may not be comforting that most of what we contribute to the world will ultimately be considered mundane, even and perhaps especially if it's successful.
An unjustified logical jump here seems to be that where you feel your thoughts and feelings are coming from is where the responsible neurons are. The assignment of the feeling of origin may be a separate mechanism.
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