"[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.
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)
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.
Gut feelings about bad things are older than dirt. Your brain already noticed something odd and dangerous about the environment, yet your eyes/ears didn't. Maybe some predator related smells, or the hormones from a potential aggresor. Or nearby people having fears...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Any discussion of embodied intelligence or the realization of how much of our nervous system is outside of our brain makes thinking about genital mutilation (such as non consensual infant circumcision) even more horrifying. How many nerves are lost when intersex children or infant boys are mutilated?
The assumption that neuron activity == consciousness is incorrect.
A lot of neurons in our brain are doing visual processing. How much of it is conscious?
Writing this comment, I have very little insight into how I am able to create this sentence and then read it. Makes me wonder what's the point of being conscious anyway.
From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that the body would explore all possible ways to increase intelligence, with neurons located anywhere in the body and with chemical in addition to electric signals. It's not like a car or something that was designed with specific functions for specific components.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 55.0 ms ] threadAren't those the supposed locations of the "chakras"?
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.
crown of head
center of forehead ("third eye)
throat
heart
solar plexus
belly
bottom of ass/below feet, depending on if your magical tradition prefers to work seated or standing
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.
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.
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.
Also. We are very neuro-centric, but the system also had all type of hormones and other chemical messages affecting it.
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.
That does not seem at all to be what citation 2 is saying.
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.
A lot of neurons in our brain are doing visual processing. How much of it is conscious?
Writing this comment, I have very little insight into how I am able to create this sentence and then read it. Makes me wonder what's the point of being conscious anyway.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365412617_Polyatomi...