Where Am "I"?

This post has no political content whatsoever. It is a random, rather inane question I was pondering last night.

When I think of where "I", am, spatially speaking, the answer is "my brain". That is the seat of my consciousness, it is the physical location I identify as being occupied by the core of my being. When I think, the spot where I feel like the thoughts come from is my head. Which makes sense, since my brain is where I do all my thinking.

But it also so happens that my brain is right behind my eyes. If we imagine our eyes as the holes in our body that we peer through to see the world, it makes sense that we'd conceptualize ourselves as existing right behind them. So maybe that's why that particular spot is the one we associate as being where "we" are.

So here's the question: If our eyes were in our chest, would we still view ourselves as centered around our brain? Or would it move to our chest? Or flip it: if our eyes were still in our head, but our brain was in our chest, would we still identify our thoughts as coming from our head or from our chest? (Or perhaps there'd be a more fundamental divergence between where we feel our thoughts "exist" -- our chest -- versus where the broader core of the "I" is -- our head).

Again, no big moral to this question. Just a random thought that grabbed my attention last night in lieu of sleeping.

On Pain

Pain is your body's way of telling you something's wrong.

There are other ways to do this. I, for one, am enamored with a sort of "damage report" pop up like I imagine Robocop or a TIE Fighter gets. It would have an outline of my body, with the effected portion in yellow or red, and say something like "thigh at 84%". That would also get me the information I need, but in a much cooler way.

Of course, pain does have some unique uses. It's relatively immediate feedback, for one -- you know right away to jerk your hand away from that hot stove (though my understanding is that the reflexive jerk actually occurs before the pain sensation is processed -- the latter is more of a punishment mechanism for your stupidity). CIP is a dangerous condition precisely because those who have it often don't even notice they've been damaged until it is too late. So as much as I hate to admit it, I concede that pain probably has a role to play in my body's damage alert system.

But still, sometimes it just seems ridiculous. Like, if I'm being burned at stake -- I already know something is wrong. I don't need pain receptors firing full tilt. It's sort of like a car alarm you can't turn off -- it's like, I get it! Shut up already! Other times, you feel pain for ailments that you have no ability to affect the relief of. Like (anybody who knows me knows what's coming) a kidney stone. Kidney stones suck.* But there's nothing I can do to ease the process. I just want to tell my body to handle it and stop complaining. A kidney stone would be a great candidate for getting a damage report I could peruse at my leisure.

Anyway, the point isn't to completely knock the current system. I get why it makes sense given the constraints of our meat sacks. But I am telling future designers of our transhumanist future that there's a lot of improvements to be had. So, you know, if you could get on that, that'd be cool.

* Fortunately, I haven't had another one since last year.

Primitive Minds

I was doing some reading yesterday on the science of emotions, and at one point in the course of discussing certain 18th century views on the subject, the author noted a division traceable to the controversy over whether the brain and mind were united or split. This debate, he said, still had some salience today. And I snickered a bit at that -- oh, the West and its preoccupation with the classics. Of course the mind and brain are united -- where else would the mind come from? The inability to abandon the idea that the mind floats free of the brain was, I thought, just a symptom of Western thoughts propensity to assign validity to a concept for no more reason than Descartes said it.

Then later in that same reading, the author mentioned a patient that was referred to him (a neurologist) from a group of psychologists, and observed that the very fact that we distinguish between neurology and psychology is itself a relic of this brain/mind divide mentioned above. And that gave me pause -- because I do find that split very intuitive, but I have trouble characterizing it in ways that don't resort to parceling out the mind from the brain. The closest I could come is saying that neurology deals with physical trauma, scarring, lobotomies, and the like, while psychology deals with chemical imbalances (such as in some forms of depression). But this doesn't seem to leave much room for psychotherapy regarding, for example, traumatic experiences and things like that -- ideas which I would characterize as firmly psychological but do not feel particularly neurological.

So -- egg on my face. Guess I'm one of the Luddites.