Where is my mind?

Today, most humans accept the brain as the seat of human consciousness, but this was not always the case. Join Robert and Joe as they explore ancient, alternative views on the anatomical center of reason and tackle contemporary mysteries regarding the neurological seat of consciousness. Where is your mind? Prepare to find out…

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert lamp and I'm Joe McCormick. And
today we're going to be having a conversation about consciousness,
probably one of the thorniest, most controversial, and most difficult

(00:25):
subjects in all of scientific investigation. But we want to
start in a in a thoroughly unscientific way by just
trying to manipulate your experience a little bit. We'll see
if we can get any traction or you game Robert
It okay, So if you are able, if you're not
operating a vehicle or juggling hatchets or something like that
at the moment, please try this weird little meditation exercise

(00:48):
with us. I want you to focus on an object
in front of you. Can be any object. It should
be something that stays in place that you can continually
return your gaze. You. Yeah, so look at look at
a detail on the wall. Don't look at your own reflection.
Maybe don't look outside the window and passing cars. Your

(01:09):
own reflection is just too interesting, right, and it's gonna
move and then you're gonna fall over it's just too beautiful. No, okay,
so yeah, pick an object, focus on it, look at
it and think for a little bit. Just contemplate the
physical processes involved in sight. You don't have to know
all the science. Just think about the light passing from
that object to your eyes, reflecting off that object coming

(01:34):
into your eyes, being filtered through the lenses of your eyes,
coming onto the retina, this layer of light sensitive cells
being turned into information electrical impulses that are transported into
the brain via europtic nerve. And look at your object
and think about the light passing through all the stages

(01:54):
it goes through to get to your mind to form
the image that you're seeing right now, not just the
object itself, but your perception of it. Here's the question,
where does it feel like this process ends physically? Where
does it feel like this process ends scientifically? You might

(02:15):
know something about the visual processing center of your brain,
but don't worry about that. Where does it just subjectively
feel like the image is going or where does it
feel like you are seeing it? Where's the part of
your mind that recognizes what you're looking at, or even
just the part of your your body To go beyond that, Sure, now,

(02:36):
for me, i'd say default, if I'm not trying anything weird,
I guess it feels sort of like it's located somewhere
near the front of my skull, sort of hovering behind
my face. But I often wonder if it only feels
that way because I've sort of been taught to think
of my brain and specifically my prefrontal cortex as the

(02:57):
seat of higher thought. And if you feel something similar
or really no matter where you feel like this seeing
is taking place, try a weird experiment see if you
can move it. I sometimes find that if I relax
and focus my attention, I can, Though this sounds weird,

(03:19):
subjectively move the center of seeing back in my head
where I tricked my mind into feeling like I'm really
seeing it somewhere further back in my skull, pushing that
perceptive mind space further and further back, maybe just going
outside the skull. Can you imagine feeling that like you

(03:41):
are seeing in a place outside of your own head. Yeah,
but I've experienced this sort of thing before. Yeah, I
mean you can. You can also in addition to moving this, uh,
this sort of imagined spot of consciousness, besides moving it
around in the skull, and outside of the skull, there's
also the ability to move it down your spot mine,
into your heart, into your belly, uh, and then again

(04:03):
moving it outside of the body. Yeah. And now, of course,
seeing isn't the only mental activity that we have conscious
awareness of, so you could try similar experiments with perceptive
activities other than just the imagination of the mind's eye.
You could try to move the part of you that
perceives sounds, or you could try to move your internal monologue.

(04:24):
So we're talking about meditative states here, really, and it's
important to note that there are multiple forms of meditation
and tailing varying methods of closed eye, open eye, visually
aided meditation, audibly aided meditation, walking meditation, yoga meditation, etcetera.
And in terms of imagining, we're gonna get into some
of the different views that have existed throughout time about

(04:47):
different places in the body that consciousness is centered. But
also it's worth noting that out of body states factor
into a number of different faiths and supernatural world views.
There's actually an interesting version of this in scientology that's
called the exteriorization. Oh boy, So the idea here is
that uh, and this is This is right off of

(05:08):
what is scientology dot org the state of the theting
being outside of his body, with or without full perception,
but still able to control and handle the body. When
a person goes exterior, he achieves a a certainty that
he is himself and not in his body. And to
explain that er scientology of theting is essentially the concept

(05:30):
of a soul not to be confused with a body, theting,
which is like a disembodied theting that's lodging in your
body and it's causing physical and mental problems and you
have to exercise it via auditing. Yeah, this sort of
interrogation process, right, Yeah, which we touched on in our
episode on religious technology if you want to go back
and listen to that. But that the idea here is
like this is just one example of a of a

(05:52):
a supernatural mode of viewing the world or or religious
state of mind that in evolves a system of of
imagining the seat of consciousness exiting the body. Yeah. Now,
even if you have some success with this experiment, if
you can do it, if you can move the place
where you're thinking outside your head, we are certainly not

(06:16):
trying to suggest or at least I'm not. I think
you'll be on the same page here, Robert. We're not
trying to suggest that anything is actually moving, or the
thought takes place outside the body, or the existence of
an immaterial soul or anything like that. I think it's
pretty clear that information processing is performed by the nervous system,
primarily the brain, and your brain isn't leaving your head.

(06:39):
So whatever the organ is in the body that's generating
the experience of consciousness does seem to be stuck in
your skull. But today we wanted to explore this odd
feature of human consciousness that it sometimes feels like it
has the subjective experience of a place of a sort
of self and an identity, even though it's this immaterial concept.

(07:03):
It's an experience we know created by a material brain.
But but why is it that you might be able
to feel like you can move your seat of thought
around two different locations. Um, And if you had, like
if you were living in ancient times and all you
had to go on was your own subjective reflection, where

(07:26):
would you believe your mind was? Yeah, because I believe
we we take it for granted with our with our
modern scientific understanding of the human nervous system and then
the brain. Like most of the time, I don't even
really think about where I'm thinking from, though I do
find myself at times falling into the idea that I'm
if I'm feeling like particular love or warmth, uh, that

(07:49):
this is somehow emanating from my heart, not in a
rational sense, but in kind of a literary romantic sense.
You know, this is a kind of crazy thing to suggest,
but I've sometimes wondered if the idea of the heart
as the seat of emotion and emotional warmthing connection is
something that is derivative from the cultural institution of hugging,

(08:12):
in that when you embrace someone, you bring them into
your torso like your chest area, and you you close
the distance between chests, essentially creating this sense that you're
bringing hearts together. I've I've wondered if it's actually backwards
like that, that, like the hugging leads to the belief

(08:32):
that the heart is the seat of emotional connection, and maybe,
knowing what we know about the brain, that's where we
get these scenes in movies where like two very manly
individuals were like one will grab the other by the
head and they'll kind of like do this slight head
butt in all their foreheads to each other. You know,
they're like having this this manly bond of minds. Oh,
it's not just it's not just men. Forehead hugging is

(08:53):
like a kind of cool thing. I remember there's a
scene in Mad Max Fury Road and there where like
Furiosa and and Max sort of put their heads together
for a minute. It's sweet. Okay, Well, what we'll think
about that is we proceed here. So in terms of
thinking about like how ancient people thought about the seat
of consciousness, we we have to begin with the ancient Egyptians.

(09:15):
And I just to clarify, we're not going to do
an exhaustive study of of ancient cultures and how they
thought about the mind. But but we're gonna go through
a few just quick examples. Well, the ancient Egyptians are
a good one to feature because they had lots of
thoughts on the mind. Oh yes, and the and ultimately
the soul. For for them, the human soul wasn't so
much a single entity but a composite. So you had

(09:38):
you had to bob the human headed bird combined with
cod a life force coup the spiritual intelligence, seek them
the power cohibit to the shadow and Wren, which was
your name. Uh and isn't many of you might know
or remember from our episode on the Egyptian Mummy. While
other organs were removed and placed in canopic jars for
use in the afterlife, the brain was removed and discarded.

(10:01):
Only the heart was left in the body, as this
was the seat of the mind. Uh. And in this
they were cardiocentrics. The heart is the center that and
and they also believe that the heart would be eventually
be weighed on a scale against the head dress of
mock the goddess of truth. Yeah. I love this, this
story about the afterlife where you're a part of your soul,

(10:23):
one of these aspects. Uh, this sort of like heart
mind thing gets weighed on the scale against I think
it's like an image of a feather usually or something.
And if you're you're too heavy, if you're too heavy
with sin or with burdens whatever. The conception they had
was that weighed down this part of your soul, you
get eaten by this hybrid monster that's part hippopotamus and

(10:45):
part crocodile. Isn't that great? I love it? Yeah? Yeah.
Egyptian cosmology is just fabulous. Now let's turn to another ancient,
UH civilization that that did a lot of thinking, not
just about the state of the mind, but just in general.
And that would be, of course, the the ancient Greeks.

(11:07):
The Greeks thought a great deal about the seat of
consciousness between the sixth century BC and the second century CE.
And we could essentially spend an entire hour discussing the
various models proposed by the great minds in those eight centuries. Uh.
But just to boil it down, I'm gonna refer to
a two thousand seven paper Soul, Mind, Brain, Greek Philosophy

(11:30):
and the Birth of Neuroscience, by authors Crivolto and Rebody,
and they boiled down Greek perceptions of the brain to
the following. So under our Camion and the fifth century
b C, there's this idea that that the brain is
the seat of sensation and understanding. And then under Hippocrates
around four b C, the mind is the interpreter of things.

(11:53):
The brain is the interpreter of things, the messenger of
understanding um. And then under Plato three forty seven b C.
The brain is the seat of the rational soul. Under Aristotle,
three four through two B c E. The brain is
the cooling agent of body heat. Okay, under Herophilus through

(12:17):
two A d b c it commands the center of
the body. And under Galen about nine to two uh
fifteen c E it's uh the seat of hegemonicon. And
this is the this is the idea that that So
the brain is the hedgemonicon, the ruling principle of the body,

(12:38):
the regent or hedgemonica. I know it needs to That's
that's the band name right there for sure. So we're
talking Galen or Galen of Pergammon again sixteen his lifespan.
Central to his interpretation of the human nervous system is
this idea of the hegemonicon. Now, the term itself was Stoic,

(13:02):
but Galen firmly believed in the brain central role, which
was in sharp contrast to the stoics largely cardiocentric views.
So the Stoic philosophers would be more like the Egyptians
that saw the heart has played some role in empowering
the mind and thought, yeah, they believe that the heart
that's where you found the human soul, the intellect, uh,

(13:23):
and in the the numa around the heart, and in
this the micro world reflects the macro world. So they believe,
you know, here's here's the heart as the sun of
human life. And thus it was regarded as as the
seat of the logos, the universal intelligence. And they offered
various bits of rhetorical argument and support this, as well

(13:44):
as the argument that the voice clearly rises from the
heart via the throat. Oh that's kind of interesting. Yeah, so,
but Galen was not having it. You know, with lots
of ideas like that, I'm always like they're funny in retrospect,
but it must have seemed incre doubly clever at the time.
So yeah, obviously you think with something down in your

(14:05):
chest instead of in your brain. Otherwise, why would speech
come from down there If it's coming from the part
of you that's thinking, it has a It would be
very circuitous for information to be going from the head
down there and then coming out of speech. Yeah, understanding
what they knew and did not know at the time,
it has a certain truthiness to it. Right. So again

(14:26):
Galen was was not having any of this, and uh,
and he may have engaged in the first experiment to
to to produce evidence that the brain controls behavior and thought.
So he offered up a rigorous and objective anatomical demonstrations,
such as such as noting the disappearance of voice in
a pig after an incision of the inferior laryngeal nerves.

(14:48):
And he also stressed that the heart produced neither sensation
nor modification of consciousness when touched. So he was he
was all about, let's get down though I would think
it would produce some kind of effect when touched. But
but the take home here is that Galen will listen
to these ideas, and he said, well, let's put them
to the test. Let's actually conduct experiments and uh and

(15:11):
and see if if there's any truth to this idea
that the heart is uh is the seat of consciousness.
And he concluded that it was not. Now one thing
that we could look at and separate. Here is is
back to the classical hard problem of consciousness, the one
you're going to encounter every time, which is that, like
if you're doing experiments on animals or something like that,

(15:31):
you can never get inside the animal and really know
whether you're affecting its consciousness or not. You can just
look at its behavior. Um, you can even really say
that ultimately you'd have the same problem with other human beings,
except human beings can at least tell you they can
claim to experience consciousness or not. Um But yeah, so

(15:52):
we are dealing with these sort of related but different concepts.
On one hand, there is activity of the nervous system,
as in the central command of the body that produces behavior,
and then the other thing is the subjective experience of being.
We assume those things are linked because when you know,
we can think about our behavior and that experience is subjective.

(16:16):
But but yeah, you could imagine that maybe animals are
behaving as automata. They have behavior and even apparently some
kind of information processing thought, but it doesn't feel like
anything to be them. So I guess those are concepts
to to sort of keep separate in the mind. But
throughout the history of investigating the seat of consciousness, we're

(16:37):
always going back into blurring them, aren't we. You sort
of can't help but do it. Yeah, And now I
like that you mentioned the objective and the subjective here,
because to get back to this idea that most of
us don't have any problem thinking about, the brain is
the seat of the mind. In this the subjective and
the objective tend to line up for most people, Like

(16:59):
I haven't seen a cardiocentric argument made by even the
most like the the most out there fundamentalist adherent to
a faith. You know, I can't think of an example
off hand where someone's saying, look, dinosaurs are fake. The
world is three years old, and you think with your heart. Man, Like,
nobody's making that argument. So we're kind of lucky too,

(17:22):
if you will to to to largely live in a
world where the subjective and the objective line up. Yeah,
And I mean, to another extent, I kind of wonder, um,
how to put this, Like I sort of wonder how
you could think your mind was powered by your heart. Now,
I know that's just my chauvinism as a as a

(17:42):
you know, brain centric thinker, knowing what I know and
having the cultural beliefs that I do. But I also
have thoughts like, um, a strong blow to the head
does seem to temporarily impair your consciousness to some extent,
Like you lose lucidity, you're sort of harshly removed from
the world and you're thinking. Even your subjective experience of

(18:05):
thinking seems to kind of slow down and grind its
gears a little bit. This doesn't really seem to happen
when somebody hits you in the body, or at least
not to the same extent. Or I don't know, maybe
you wouldn't agree, but just that kind of thing alone
would seem to suggest that people should get the idea
the thinking and the subjective experience of being has something

(18:27):
to do with what's in the skull. Well, certainly a
sort of a heart. Well, we'll stop you. Well, that's
certainly true. Yeah, And and in pro wrestling you have
the heart punch, which for a while and many territories
was banned because you would you would you'd like you
take the individual's arm and like folded behind them, thus
exposing that the ribbed area, and then there would be
like a very calculated punch to the heart and you

(18:50):
would just go out like a light. So maybe, uh,
you know, I wouldn't put cardiocyentracism, uh you know, you know,
out of the framework of professional wrestle, and in case
if it seems like it could work in the context, Well,
but I mean, do you do you generally agree or
not that, like the something does feel very natural about

(19:12):
thinking about thinking being in the head. Yeah, I largely
agree because I can. It's it's hard to imagine a
situation where you have have you know, not only intellectuals,
but like working people and soldiers engaging in activities that
would result in a in in cranial injuries that they
wouldn't you know, be privy to this connection, right, But

(19:35):
then again, I guess maybe in defense of the idea,
maybe you could think about it more like it's just
an injury to things like the eyes and stuff like that.
You know, if we were primarily visually oriented in the world,
if you if you hit the part of my body
that has the eyes on it, maybe you could explain
a loss of lucidity through that somehow. Now, this this

(19:57):
leads to our next example. We're gonna We're gonna roll
through here, uh, a spiritual supernatural idea, and that is
of the seven chakras. Now, this is something I feel
a little embarrassed that I think I should know about.
I've always heard of chakras, but I really know almost
nothing about them. So give me the the beginner's crash course, Robert.

(20:17):
What what's the deal with the chakras? I know there
are multiple chakras in the body, Yeah. Then this is
another one of those topics that if we wanted to,
we could explore just had nauseam. Uh. It shows up
in Hinduism, Johnism, Buddhism, and of course your your local
neighborhood yoga studio and uh or your local neighborhood tool

(20:37):
album cover. Yeah. Yeah, the work of Alex Great It
features into a lot of New Age belief systems as well.
And uh. And this is something I've always I've always
been fascinated by the metaphysics of chakras. They're various artistic
representations and uh. And when I adjust to the my
own perceptive lenses to the worldview and of these these models,

(21:01):
I can certainly say that I believe in them and
find the model useful for meditation in yoga, like when
you put on the spiritual glasses. This makes good sense
to Yeah, when I check and do a yoga class,
I can engage in this this model of thinking. So
chakras or wheels in Sanskrit, are concepts of the subtle
spiritual body. The idea that you have energy points position
down the body, from the top of your skull to

(21:23):
the base of your spine roots roots chakra to crown chakra,
so it would go root, sacred naval heart, your third eye,
and then the crown. Whoa, Now, so these all go
up sort of the center of your body, right, Like
there's a line going up your spine from in the middle,
from sort of from your butt to your forehead. Yes,

(21:44):
and and I've seen it argue that that animals with
tails would have more chakras, but maybe that's one of
their more you know, their chill. That's when we turn
to our pets for a little slices in My pet
is not chill. Oh yeah, well not always okay, but
sometimes at least he lives in the moment, right, that's true.
That's the great thing about pets is they are very
much in the moment. They don't care about past or future.

(22:04):
That they don't have too much trouble with losing the self. Well, uh,
with each chakra, each one is tied to different organs,
different aspects of personality and human behavior. There's a whole
system built up around this. Uh. The numbers vary, but
but seven is pretty much the norm. And it's a reverent,
rather different take than the two previous views. The idea

(22:27):
that it's been that consciousness and everything that we are
is based on neither the heart of the mind, because
the energy of being flows through these points, and it
can be focused in certain chakras. So, for instance, there's
an exercise for opening a particular chakra, concentrating it, even
breathing into or through one's third eye. And this is
an interesting experience because in which I've I've engaged in

(22:50):
because naturally you know that you're not actually breathing through
a non existent aperture in your skull. But if you
close your eyes and you focus on the concept, you
can you can kind of feel it. You can imagine
yourself as this ball of energy moving up and down
your body. You can imagine and even feel your center
of being pooled into different parts of your anatomy. I mean,

(23:10):
part of me wants to ask, like, why is it
that we can do that? But that sort of goes
back to the question we started with at the beginning,
to the extent that some people can move the location
of their consciousness around and in this at least subjective sense,
they can make it feel like they're thinking from outside
their body. Why can they do that? But why why
is that a feature of the human mind? Well, I

(23:31):
think a lot of it comes back to this whole
the whole mind body connection there and this this tendency
especially you know, you could say we have a definite
advantage in modern civilizations of of knowing intrinsically that we
think with our mind, but we also fall into that
you mean think with the brain. Yes, yes, that we
think with a we think with the mind, it's positioned
in the brain within and ultimately that we think with

(23:53):
the brain. But uh, in doing this we often fall
into this model of the right are on a horse,
where the rider is the brain and the horses the
rest of the body, when really there we're connected. Really
were a centaur. So the you know, study after study
continues to you know, to to point out, oh, your
your your digestion has a has a role to play in, uh,

(24:15):
in what you're thinking and how you think and how
your mind works. This is something I wanted to get
into later in the episode. Maybe I'll save part of it,
but yeah, there is this idea of embodied cognition, which
is one subset of the discipline of extended cognition. And
this is just sort of ways of thinking about all
the different ways that the human mind is really based

(24:37):
in more than just the brain. Not not to say
that the brain is not the primary organ doing the
information processing, but that parts of information processing and body
processes that inform information processing are offloaded to other things.
For example, counting on your fingers, you are literally using
your hand for part of the information processing right there.

(25:00):
And is no matter how much we think of ourselves
as a brain, we are not just a brain. We
are a body. Like like who are you? You are
your body. So I think that's one reason that the
chakra model is is interesting and and why we can
pour ourselves into it so easily. But I also like
how this model lines up with the experience of of

(25:21):
multiple cells and the ebb and flow of identity and emotion.
The idea that you know the person you are first
thing in the morning is not necessarily the exact same
version of you right before you go to bed, the
person that there's the person yesterday that you are yesterday
versus the person you are today. And I'm not I'm
not using this as like a real hippie dippy model
of of your multiple people. Man, and you've been multiple

(25:42):
people throughout your lives. No, it's just the exact manifestation
of who you are is gonna vary. Sometimes you're gonna
be angry, Sometimes you're gonna be sad. Sometimes you're gonna
be a more Um, you're gonna more me be more
mentally engaged. Other times you're gonna be more heartfelt. Yeah,
I don't think that's hippie dippy. I mean I think
we've got two things in conflict, which is that, Um,

(26:02):
On one hand, we feel a strong sense of the
unity of our experience. We feel like I am the
same person I was yesterday. Like, um, here's one example.
If I told you, like, okay, uh, tonight, when you
go to bed, your conscious experience will forever cease. Essentially
you will die and your experience, but tomorrow morning your

(26:24):
body will wake up and continue doing that thing, and somebody,
some other consciousness will inhabit your brain. That maybe the
that consciousness is identical to yours except yours just ends. Well,
people don't like that idea. I mean, that would not
be very enticing to most people. But then again, how
can you prove that's not already what happens? Yeah, we

(26:46):
have this like there there is no way in which
you could know that you don't in fact die every
night when you go to sleep and wake up with
a new consciousness full of the old consciousness is memories.
And that's sort of the the bizarre fleeting nature of consciousness.
It's experienced as an endless succession of moments, and yet

(27:08):
we have this strong sense that it's unified throughout our lives. Yeah.
I mean, that's the kind of the trap of belief
in a soul, or or even even outside of thinking
like specifically of a soul, just the thinking of a
mind state that it's this thing that could be taken off,
put on a shelf, restored, saved, backed up, put in
a new body, etcetera. Uh, and instead it's this. Uh,

(27:31):
it's the string. It's this, it's the it's a timeline. Yeah. Uh.
Just as a weird little side note, I also think
that thinking like that, though it sounds kind of weird
to people, this idea that you know, every every moment,
your consciousness sort of dies and becomes something new, constantly
rising from the ashes every time it goes down a
new train of thought. That could sound kind of weird

(27:54):
and depressing, but I think you could also think about
it the other way. That can be a kind of
exciting liberal rating thought that I think maybe could even
help people, you know, people who have fear of death
and stuff like that. Just try try try getting around
that by thinking about your whole experience is a series
of moments that perish every second. Yeah, that's not something

(28:14):
you're gonna have to do. It's some future schmuck version
of you that's gonna have to do that. So you know,
chill out right. Likewise, quit quit worrying about you know,
some transgression you made, uh, you know, several years ago,
because that that version of us gone. This is a
different to you, moment to moment. It's all open for interpretation,
That's what I'm saying. It was the heat of the moment.

(28:38):
All right, We should probably take a break at this point,
and then when we come back, we will we will,
we will leave the realm of ancient Egyptians and chakras
and uh and cardiocentric stoics, and we'll get into some neuroscience. Okay, alright,
So note that there are two different things you could

(28:59):
really be talking about when you talk about the location
of consciousness. Right. One is what we were doing in
that experiment at the beginning, the subjective sensation of the
location of consciousness. Some people might be able to do uh,
some kind of meditative exercise. They could be very skilled
meditator and place their subjective experience of consciousness in somebody

(29:21):
else's head. I could think that I'm thinking from Robert's brain.
That would not mean that Robert's brain is what's generating
that sensation, obviously, So the location that really and objectively
physically generates consciousness is a different question that where than
where it feels like you're thinking from um And as

(29:43):
as always with our discussions of human consciousness, we've gotta
stress again there's no final answer regarding what's true. We
you know, we don't know that. There's no final insight
as to the objective nature of it, certainly not yet,
and there there may never be. We don't really know.
But humans have have been banging on this nutshell for
a long time trying to crack it, and there have

(30:04):
been some interesting discoveries. Right. Oh, yeah, So the human
brain contains about a hundred billion neurons, and neuroscientists have
a general understanding of how that network of neurons computes information.
But how and where does this computation computation transform into
awareness into sentience, into the human condition. Uh, and this

(30:26):
is the so called hard problem of consciousness. Right. One
way of putting this might be you could easily explain
how organisms with our behaviors would you know, would evolve,
But why does it feel like something to be one
of those organisms? Why aren't they just automata with with
unfeeling intelligence, performing these behaviors in the universe where there's

(30:49):
nothing like to be anything. So for starters, let's take
a moment and refer back to to Galen and we'll
go ahead and raise his hand in victory over the
cardiocentric stoics. Yes, yes, yes, the brain is the seat
of cognition, or rather, it's certainly the seating section for
the concert. Right. We've already discussed a couple of the
interesting qualifiers on that, but I think we can say

(31:11):
without blushing too much, that the brain is where information
processing primarily happens. Right, But if this is the seating
section in the stadium, what are the exact seats? What
does what does consciousness look like? From? Where does it arise?
Neurologically speaking? Well, obviously something that we haven't dealt with
much in this episode except to sort of ignore it.

(31:33):
Maybe we will just continue this tradition is that for
a lot of human history people have had some version
of what's known as dual is um Cartesian dualism, the
idea that the mind is the thing separate from the body,
maybe a thing that controls the body, that it is
in some sense immaterial, as it has no physical embodiment whatsoever,

(31:55):
or or sometimes I think in the ancient world it
was thought of not necessarily as immat he real, but
it's certainly not as a solid object you could you know,
extract with a scalpel or something. It was maybe more
like a numa or a breath, some kind of gaseous thing.
So this concept that we we talked about earlier, the
scientology concept of a thetan, like that would be a

(32:15):
duelist concept, right, because it is a thing outside of yourself. Yeah,
I guess so. Though I wonder in that case is
it is the theting considered material or immaterial. I don't
actually know the answer there. I think, based on what
I was looking at earlier, I think it would be
considered immaterial because I think there's a I think el
Ron Hubbard had some some writings where he's talking about

(32:38):
it about it, you know, not having mass etcetera. But
I am no expert on scientology on the details the
theology of scientology. Now, obviously a lot of people are
still very committed to dual is um today for various
you know, faith reasons and things like that, and and
that's cool, but I'm not aware of any good scientific
evidence that has been produced in favor of dual is um.

(33:00):
It seems like pretty much everything goes the opposite way.
So I don't think we should really consider that their
scientific grounding for the idea that thinking happens outside the
brain in some other place and we're forced to try
and figure out the connection the differences between how brain
activity seems to work and how we actually experience consciousness.
Right now, for my own part, I i've I've tended

(33:22):
to favor the the epi phemonologist viewpoint of Thomas Huxley.
So he was a duelist and believing in that the
mind and the brain are not identical, but he also
believed that the mind was an unnecessary byproduct of the
of the brain, a sort of cognitive shadow, and I
tend to like that that view of it. Now, some
people react to epiphenomenalism with real rank or Some people

(33:44):
are deeply offended by the idea that the mind doesn't
actually do anything, that it's just an unnecessary byproduct of
the brain. Yeah, or an accident, a happy accident, or
a sad accident, depending on what your mood happens to be.
I think you could also look at that is a
very beautiful thing to believe. That's the kind I mean,
that's the way I tend to interpret, Like wow, Like

(34:05):
this shadow puppet on the wall is amazing. It's not that,
you know the fact that it's it's accidental, it's it's
caused by this just machinery moving to to make this,
uh this ape body do its thing. Uh. You know,
I don't think that that takes away from the miracle
of it all at all. Of course, the opposite of
that view would be the idea that in some sense

(34:25):
it would be hard to understand exactly what this is.
But that doesn't mean it's wrong that in some sense
consciousness is adaptive, that that consciousness plays some kind of
role in the survival of the organism. It happens for
a reason. But in general, we we struggle to comprehend
this the psycho physical nexus between our immaterial consciousness or
mind and the physical lump of brain in our head.

(34:49):
And to be clear, consciousness does not make its nest
in any one portion of the brain. Well some people
might argue with that, but I think you're right. Okay,
Well more on that argument in just a set can.
But okay, this idea that there's no center of the brain,
no brain of the brain where everything is aggregated. Uh,
this mirrors what we know about memory, right, we have

(35:10):
we we don't just have memory like this this one
little uh you know, zip drive in our head. We
have multiple systems, multiple regions of the brain. Uh. The
brain can suffer damage in one area, in an entire
system of memory can go offline. But the brain lives
on by by the You live on by virtue of
other routes of memory. I kind of like the way

(35:32):
I think one episode in the past, I can't remember
which one it was, we talked about the metaphor of
the brain as almost like an office full of workers,
where there are some people who maybe stopped showing up
to work, and other office workers may be able to
fill in for them, sort of pitch in and cover
the bases. Now, some people may be more crucial than others.

(35:53):
Like if your operations manager who keeps the power on
doesn't show up, Uh, then you might be in real trouble.
Other people might not show up and you can you
can find ways to get around it. Yeah, Jim's not here,
who's gonna make the coffee? Well, maybe Jane can do it.
The coffee might not be as good, but there will
still be a caffeinated beverage. Now, a lot of what

(36:14):
we understand is as consciousness seems to boil down to
awareness and integration of information. Yeah, this is often a
model that's put forward. It's it's this idea of um. Yeah,
I'm trying to define awareness. But that's a really hard
to do, isn't it. Yeah, Because again we're getting to
this this situation where we're trying to explain away the

(36:36):
magic of the of the human experience and uh and
take it apart into functional um aspects of itself. So,
for instance, research into the effects of anesthesia and the
brain suggests that integration of information across the brain this
might be our best gauge of consciousness. And some argue
that this might be consciousness that what we experience again

(37:00):
the shadow cast by this integration. So in other words,
that if this is happening, consciousness wouldn't necessarily be rooted
in one particular place in the brain. If we're still
talking about the location of consciousness, but it's more like
a phenomenon arising when the brain is talking to itself
across many different regions. Yes, yeah, well that does sort

(37:20):
of tie into something I do want to get to
in a second about a proposed localization. Now, one one
interpretation of this that I really like this comes down
to a book by a neuroscientist Michael Graziano title Consciousness
in the Social Brain, and he breaks it down more

(37:40):
or less to this. This is a This is the
the elevator version of this. This is the crash course version.
You take me up to the thirteenth floor. All right,
up here we go. Animal nervous systems evolved to process
incoming data more efficients efficiently, but a lot of data
streams in so the brain has to sort it all
out and apply deeper processing to what really matters. So

(38:03):
this is, yeah, we all know this experience because there's
a ton of stuff in your field of vision right
now that you absolutely are not noticing you see way
more than you really see. Yeah. For another great example,
as of your are at a party and you can
focus in on either the conversation you're having, or you
can sort of loose depart from the conversation you're locked

(38:25):
into and and fully engage and listen to another conversation
that's more interesting. Yeah, you can keep going like yeah,
uh huh, Well, really, what you're doing is evesdropping exactly so.
But we see some more things in insects. We see
it in our ability again to see yet not see,
to hear yet not here, the less important bits of
sense data in our surrounding. And so this focus, the attention,

(38:48):
or the control of attention, Graziana argues, is key to
our experience of consciousness. Our brains process all of this
sense data, as well as our knowledge of self in
the world. The self we're aware of is like a
game piece on a table. Consciousness then it's just information.
That's his argument anyway. I mean, that's a really interesting

(39:08):
way to put it. But as with a lot of
these explanations of consciousness, it's hard to feel it. I'm
not suggesting that's an argument against it. I don't think
it is but a lot of times when people try
to say, here's how you explain how consciousness is generated
by the brain, however coherent the explanation might be, it's
hard to make it feel like, oh, yeah, that feels right,

(39:31):
that's what my consciousness is. Um um, I mean, how
does it happen? Like? Where does it come from? You
might be able to explain it as attention, But yet again,
why is this not some kind of automated, non subjective experience. Yeah,
anytime we actually try to see ourselves in these uh,
these explanations of consciousness, that they almost always fall flat. Yeah.

(39:54):
So I mentioned a minute ago that there actually have
been multiple attempts to locate the seat of consciousness in
in one brain subsystem or brain region, uh you know,
the place where you'd see the certain brain activity light
up on the f M R I or whatever. And
one example is that, I don't know if you remember this,
there was a lot of hubbub back in about a

(40:14):
brain region known as the clostrum I guess the clos
drow because there are two of them, and how research,
which was new at the time, might implicate it as
the single region responsible for generating the experience of consciousness.
I believe Francis Crick, who worked on you know, the
d n A it was involved in investigating the idea

(40:37):
that the clostrum played a major role or was the
seat of consciousness. So the clostroom is a small little
sheet of neurons underneath the neo cortex, the all important
neo cortex, and it's very thin. It's completely surrounded by
what's known as white matter, this connective tissue that's said
to sort of wire different brain regions together. And there

(40:59):
are two of them in your brain. As I said,
these closter their their positions sort of anterior center location
around around where the temples are on your head. And
the classroom has been referred to as this quote neuronal
super hub as a sort of central exchange where information
from all other all over the brain travels to and from.

(41:20):
So it's got information coming in and out from all
over the place, and that makes it kind of interesting.
If we're going with the hypothesis you talked about earlier,
that uh that the experience of consciousness is the integration
of the activity of multiple brain regions, right, that's putting
all this information together. Then there have been some really

(41:41):
interesting case studies certainly not definitive, but things that make
people in consciousness studies prick up their ears. One of them,
for example, is this case of a woman who repeatedly
lost conscious experience or reported doing so, when this region
of her brain was electrically stimulated. But it was not
the same kind of losing consciousness where usually when we

(42:04):
say lose consciousness, it means like go to sleep, you know,
or something like that, you sort of close your eyes
and you lose all you stop acting, you just kind
of fall over, and all that really continues is like
breathing and heartbeat and digestion and stuff. This lady was
not like that. She could, according to UH to the
reports about this, she could continue very basic behaviors for

(42:28):
a few seconds after the point where she claimed her
conscious experience stopped. So if she was like doing simple
movements or repeating a word, just very simple things like that,
they could do this stimulation. Her memory of being conscious
goes away, and yet her body continues doing the thing
for a brief period of time. Wow, And so I'm

(42:51):
assuming they're doing this with electromagnetic stimulation or some other
similar I think it was. I think it was electrode stimulation. Um,
this is this is scary if you start thinking about
the possible implications of this in the same way that
they're you know, the the the alleged god helmet. What
if you had the zombie helmet where you just do
you put it on and then your consciousness is out
and you're just just go about about like, you know,

(43:14):
cleaning an apartment, right, you act without awareness? Of course,
would you really mind that? You might mind? You might
mind missing that time later? Um? Yeah, So I don't
know what to make about that. I I'm a little
skeptical about the idea that you'd ever be able to
pin consciousness on one particular part of the brain. But

(43:38):
then again, I'm I'm not a neuroscientist. I mean, there
might be something to that. I'm also sympathetic to the
ideas that that consciousness is not one unitary thing, but
is in fact as symboled out of different experiential components.
This is also a controversial idea. It's but by no means,

(43:58):
you know, widely accepted a lot of people don't like
that idea at all. But I think this might be
a good place to to come back to. This idea
of extended cognition. You know that we mentioned earlier with
the idea of of embodied cognition. So if you do
something extremely simple like write down a note on a
piece of paper to help you remember something, say you

(44:20):
write down, you know, uh need need to buy five
golf balls at target. Yeah, in what sense is that
piece of paper and pencil not a part of your cognition,
not a part of your information processing. It's only in
the sense that you would make a perhaps arbitrary rule

(44:40):
that says only stuff that happens inside the brain counts
as cognition. But there are tons of external tools and
phenomena that aid in our cognition, from calculators to hand
gestures and even other people. You can use other people's
cognition to supplement your own, and that would be sort
of like computer adding on an extra processing core. In

(45:02):
what sense is that not part of the information processing?
And that's happening. And this is the main idea behind
the concept of extended cognition. The brain is obviously the
primary organ used in thinking, but thinking includes the activity
if tons of external things hands, pen and paper, computers,
other people. And with that in mind, I don't want

(45:24):
to take a take this in a spooky direction. But
could we not begin to see how extended cognition could
imply a sort of willingness for the brain to engage
in extended consciousness. If the subjective experience of the world
is generated by information processing, and information processing involves external

(45:46):
activity hands, pen and paper, other people, could part of
the experience of consciousness be thought of as generated by
something external to the brain. I do want to be
clear here again, not not proposing anything supernatural or ghostly
about that, just trying to introduce some more weirdness into
this idea about where the mind resides. Yeah, because if

(46:08):
you're doing a math on your fingers, then is there
is there is their mind all over your fingers. It's
got cognition over your your hands. I don't know that
that might be a nonsensical idea, but I do think
it's at least worth contemplating, at least maybe long enough
to dismiss I'm not sure. All Right, we should probably
take one more break at this point, but when we

(46:28):
come back, we'll discuss this topic a little bit more,
and we'll even get into a little bit of Daniel Dinnett.
All right, we're back. Okay, one last thing I wanted
to talk about in this episode, Uh, about asking the
question where is my mind? And it's a short story

(46:50):
by the philosopher Daniel Dennett. Daniel Dennett's philosopher we've talked
about on the show before. I always think he's a
really interesting dude. Uh. He's written a lot about philosophy
of mind. He's trying to He wrote a book in
the nineties called Consciousness Explained, where he tried to outline
a theory about how consciousness was generated from the ground
up by these different cognitive processes sort of having additive

(47:12):
properties adding up to consciousness, and how things could He
had the idea that consciousness is not either just an
either or like it's there it's not. He has this
idea that things can be sort of conscious, there can
be varying degrees of consciousness and uh, and that we
represent some level of consciousness that is common to human animals. Yeah,

(47:35):
because certainly when you start looking at at other animal specimens,
you look at say dolphins, um various primates, or another
example is is octopi, you start you have to ask yourself, well,
to what extent do we dare take the human model
of cognition and say, all right, octopus, do this make
this shape with your with with your brain. Uh, that's

(47:59):
that's that's the ridiculous. But then even if we get
the octopus to do it, it's it's still hard to
know what's going on inside the octopus's experience. I mean,
I probably assumed that other animals are having some sort
of experience. You can never really know for sure. It
would just seem by analogy that they are to some extent, probably,
but yeah, it's hard to know. But anyway, I want

(48:19):
to get into this. So Daniel denn it's this philosopher,
but years ago he wrote a sci fi short story
and this was to get into some of his weird
ideas about the mind. So Dennett's main character in this
story is a fictionalized version of himself who is delivering
a lecture to an auditorium full of students and colleagues.
Here's the setup. He says, several years ago he was

(48:42):
recruited by the government to undergo a dangerous mission. And
what it was was that the Department of Defense had
developed a new type of weapon, which was an underground
tunneling nuclear warhead. It sounds like a great centerpiece for
a nineties movie, right, like the has Nicolas Cage in it. Maybe, yeah,
Nicolas Cage, I think. I think it's it's like the

(49:04):
sequel to con Air. They get him to come in
there an con drill um and it's known as the
Supersonic Tunneling Underground Device or STUD exactly. So. It was
designed to tunnel through the core of the Earth and
be capable of delivering a nuclear payload to weapons installations
on the other side of the globe. But it became

(49:27):
stuck about a mile beneath Tulsa, Oklahoma. Oh. So, the
government wants dinn It to go disarm the device, and unfortunately,
the device is known to emit, a type of radiation
that is considered harmless to the body but fatal to
brain cells. But the government has a solution. They want

(49:48):
to remove Dinnett's brain from his body and store it
in a jar full of liquid in a lab in Houston,
allowing it to control his body remotely via a radio link.
This is great now, so you think, wait a minute,
that's crazy. Not really, they explained, because the body is
already connected to the brain through a series of nerves.

(50:08):
For all practical purposes, you can think of these as
wires of varying lengths. So what if you just imagine
making the wires a little bit longer, and a little
bit longer, and a little bit longer still, and then
eventually just skipping the wires altogether and substituting wireless radio
waves that can do the same types of energy and

(50:29):
information transmission that the nerves do, just like the communication
between your computer and your WiFi router. See this, This
blows another hole in the RoboCop to scenario where you
had Tom Noonan's brain put into this this robotic war machine,
and then RoboCop is able to defeat RoboCop too by

(50:52):
reaching and pulling his brain out of the machine and
crashing it on the smashing it on the ground. Why
did Why did it? Because his brain was just connected
by via wires to the rest of the robot. It
could have been an a vault somewhere protected. Why So anyway,
Dennett says, well, yes, I'm very curious about the mind
and the brain, so I will undergo the procedure. So
he wakes up from surgery and everything feels basically normal,

(51:15):
as if nothing has changed, except he has some antenna's
poking out of his head, but otherwise he feels like
he is him. But then he goes to view his brain.
There it is, He sees it sitting in a vat
full of He describes what looks like root beer. Um,
and or wait does he say ginger ale or root beer?
I can't remember. It's sitting in something that looks like

(51:37):
a delicious sugar yeah, okay um, And it's attached to
a bunch of electrodes in antenna's. But then he is
struck with a really odd thought. Why does he think, here,
I am looking at my own brain instead of there's
my body looking at me. After all, the brain is

(51:58):
the thing doing the thinking. He's looking at the thing
that is thinking right now. It's the organ responsible for
generating the idea of the self, maintaining it through every
environmental variation. And yet he cannot shake the idea that
he is still, in some sense in his body. Uh.
And in the sense he is because he's looking out
through eyes that are attached to his body. But to

(52:20):
answer the question where am I? He subjectively feels that
he is in his head, but consciously knows that he
is in the jar. Now for somebody who doesn't usually
write science fiction. I think this is a really good
setup for a story. Yeah, I'm digging it. I can
I can imaginate at least as an Outer Limits episode. Now,
can you only imagine how it would end if it

(52:40):
were a Twilight Zone episode? Okay, So he's trying to
sort out his feelings, and Dinnett decides to rename the
two objects. So he names his body Hamlet and he
names his brain Yorick. Good choices. If Dinnett is not
strictly in Hamlet Hamlet, and he's not strictly in Yorick,

(53:01):
where is he? Where? Where is the self that he's
thinking from? Uh? And maybe maybe he's wherever his point
of view is. He goes through a bunch of different
options here, but then he also discovers there's a switch
he can flip to turn off the antennas on his
brain and sever the connection between his brain and body.
Flipping the switch causes him to become groggy and collapse,

(53:23):
and somebody else has got to flip it back on
for him. And now eventually he's got to go face
down the underground nuke, so controlling his body via a
radio link just like before, then it goes down into
the tunnel to disarm the stud but unfortunately, while down there,
one by one his radio links begin to fail, So
first he loses his hearing, then he loses control of

(53:45):
his speech, then of various motor functions, eventually goes blind
and loses all connection to his body. At this moment,
he realizes something very weird has happened. Um his body
has collapsed in the tunnel with nothing to control it,
and he has become a disembodied mind nobody, only a brain.
And the odd thing is that whereas before his intuition

(54:08):
told them, he told him he was in his body,
even though he knew otherwise, now he asked the question
where am I, and his intuition tells him that he's
in a jar in a lab in Houston. It's only
by like subtraction of the rest of what's available that
he starts to put himself in the brain. Uh. And
this makes me wonder just as a side we we

(54:31):
would usually assume that some version of this is possible,
but should we, like, could you really think at all
if your mind was confined to a total void, and
you had no input or output or any kind any
kind of anything whatsoever between your brain and the outside world.
I wonder if that would actually preclude thinking somehow. Well,

(54:51):
you know, Lovecraft actually got into this little bit and
he hit a short story titled The Whisper and Darkness,
and there's a plot concerning the ego. These alien fungal
creatures from another world, and they have a habit of
removing a human's brain, putting them into a mego brain
canister so they can be uh, you know, stored away

(55:12):
or shipped elsewhere, and you just go mad inside the canister. Well,
this is something I think that's legitimate to worry about.
When people talk about this sci fi trans human kind
of idea of downloading your brain into a computer, Uh,
a lot of people think this is really gonna happen someday.
I remain highly skeptical about it. Um, but okay, let's

(55:32):
say it is possible. I'm not sure that would be
a good thing to do, because I mean, there you
run the risk of putting your consciousness into a scenario
where you would be uh possibly psychologically tortured by you know,
lack of some kind of crucial input or output, and
also at the same time unable to even kill yourself

(55:54):
and escape it. Yeah, I mean you could have like
a virtual sense of your body. But eventually you're gonna
have to hire mcjag or to kidnap the MeV o
este as from the past so he can occupy his brain.
Is this the plot of Free Jack? I have Anthony
Hopkins in it. Yeah, he plays the brain in question. Okay,
so back to the story. We're getting close to the

(56:16):
end now. So he's been in this brain. Now he's
just a brain, and he goes into a dreamless sleep.
He wakes up about a year later, and upon awaking
in a hospital, he again finds himself having the sensation
of being located in a physical body, but it's not
his original one. He has the sense that his personality
has been maintained. You know that he's the same person.

(56:38):
This thing we're talking about earlier, the unity, the unity
of conscious experience over time. But he's in this new body,
supplied to him by the government from previous circumstances unknown. Uh,
of course. And yet, of course the organ doing the
thinking is still in the jar in Houston, connected to
his body via new radio links just like the old one. Uh.

(57:00):
And in keeping with his Hamlet theme, he names his
new body Forton bra all right, now refresh me. I
certainly remember that, of course Hamlets, the main character Yorick
is the skull that how does Forton brought factor in?
Forton Bra is the character who comes in at the
end of Hamlet, and uh and just sort of survey.
He's the conquering invader who comes into the castle at
the end and sees the devastation and a sort of

(57:21):
comments on it all. Oh, yes, yes, gotcha. So if
Dennett's original body, the first body he had Hamlet, is
dead in the tunnel in under a huge grave marker
reading stud why why does he still feel that he
is alive but with a new body, rather than feeling
that he died and now some other person is being
controlled by his brain? Uh? That that seems to root

(57:44):
the idea of the location of the self in the brain.
But then Dinnett, in his new body Forton bra goes
to view his brain again. Once more, he tries to
flip the switch to sever the connection between his brain
and his body, and this time nothing happened. He doesn't
become groggy and collapse. Here he discovers he has unwittingly
been the subject of a secret side project scientists in

(58:08):
the lab have made a computer copy of his brain
named Hubert. Now, who knows if such a thing as
possible to do in reality, But let's go along with
it for just a second. Running on a computer attached
to radio transmitter, is a piece of software that is
a perfect duplicate of his brain, exactly replicating all the
function and retaining all the memories. And the scientists have

(58:31):
been been experimenting with it to see how closely it
mirrors the actions of his real brain, and so far
its behavior has been a d identical. Furthermore, he discovers
that the reason he did not experience any problems upon
severing the connection between Yorick and Forton Brough is that,
in fact, Forton Braugh is not being controlled by Yorick

(58:51):
the organic brain, but by Hubert, the computer copy. Both
Yorick and Hubert are simultaneously fed the same input from
the body, and they both react to it the same way,
So it does not seem to matter which one of
them controls the body. Forton bra Now where is den
it Um? And so there's some more wonderfully fun things

(59:13):
that happened at the end of the story. I don't
want to spoil the very ending of it for you.
But that's sort of like the meat of of the
philosophical questions posed. But as interesting as it is, it
makes me wonder like, can you ever really learn anything
about the nature of consciousness purely through these kinds of
thought experiments? You know, can can um can just coming

(59:36):
up with scenarios and and sort of ratiocination in the
chair get you to a place of understanding the nature
of consciousness that say, you wouldn't have arrived at just
by having the experience of being conscious. Yeah, it's an
interesting argument because on one hand, like looking at your
own consciousness, like your own CONSCIOUSNSS kind of like this

(59:58):
weird ledge we've built out over a canyon, and it
makes sense that maybe to perceive it, we've kind of
got to build a new, uh, a new artificial ledge
over the edge of the canyon, so that we can
actually have the perspective to look back on the previous perspective.
If that makes any sense. Yeah, I guess what I'm
trying to say is if we kind of have a

(01:00:19):
blinder up uh. In fact, our future guest are Scott Baker.
I've talked a lot about this blind brain theory, about
the brain not being able to perceive itself. It's just
it has not evolved with the tools to study consciousness.
That just is not relevant to survival. So we have
to have a work around there. We have to sort

(01:00:39):
of build new thought structures to try and perceive what
we are. Yeah, but I mean, who knows if these
thought structures really provide any insights. I mean, I I
find this story really interesting, and a lot of this
is the kind of thing, A lot of this thought
about consciousness. I mean, you know, a lot of times
they're not doing scientific experience ements. Who knows of scientific

(01:01:01):
experiments could give us any useful information about consciousness either,
or maybe even that doesn't work. Um. But yeah, it's
this big, wonderful, juicy problem, and you're always tempted to
come back to it and think you can have some
new insight about it. But in the end, every time
I have one of these conversations, I'm left wondering, like,

(01:01:22):
was any new ground covered or we did we just
kind of run in circles with this question that's so
enticing but maybe never solvable. I don't know. Well, one
of the great things about this, this story, which is
essentially a thought experiment is one of those thought experiments
that the cause that that if if you if you
pay close enough attention and you read it and you
think about it, you may reach that point where something

(01:01:44):
kind of clicks and you you're suddenly viewing your own
reality in a way that either you haven't before, are
certainly in a way that you do not view it
on a regular basis. It's not your default view of
your subjective reality yea. And and that those movements can
be magical where it takes you out. You're kind of
taken out of the mud of who you are and

(01:02:05):
you're able to to glimpse it almost like a imagine
two dimensional being pulled out into a three dimensional world
and and trying to just get a glimpse of everything
before sinking back into place and to take it back
to where we started at the beginning. This is what
a lot of meditative practicees. I mean, there are a
lot of different ways to meditate, but one of the
things people do when they meditate is to try to

(01:02:27):
get out of themselves, to see themselves to and to
to get out of you know, to shut down the
default mode network too, to get out of this constant
past versus present way of living and just be be present,
to just set there and stare at an electrical outlet
and and not even think about the electrical outlet, to

(01:02:48):
just be this moment of perception. And another thing that's
interesting to think about the location of consciousness is the
idea of losing consciousness while being conscious, if this makes
any sense, not not like going under general anesthesia or something,
but uh, one way of thinking about it is that
we're constantly losing consciousness whenever we become absorbed in something.

(01:03:12):
You know, like when you're absorbed in watching a movie
and you're you've you've hit that point where you stopped
thinking about yourself, sitting there reflecting on things, and you're
just in the story. You could look at that as
a sort of loss of consciousness. You stop being, you
stop being aware of the self, and you you're just experience,

(01:03:34):
just pure experience. And the same thing happens in like
some kind of creative projects, you know, you can be
like writing or or painting or something. Yeah. Yeah, that's
a lot of what the flow state often seems to be.
Is it's like that physical location of consciousness disappears. You
no longer have a sense that you're thinking is taking
place somewhere. You just are what you're thinking about. Yeah,

(01:03:57):
And and there are different versions of it too, because
like I'll experience this kind of flow state loss of consciousness,
if you will, while maybe reading something really good or
or hit or writing something and I'm really into the writing.
But I'll also experience it when I'm painting a miniature sometimes.
So it's so my consciouence has kind of becomes the
tip of a paint brush, which which is is rather

(01:04:18):
different than it becoming this, uh, this fictional framework. Um.
And then also in like say a yoga class or
even outside of a ya like a purely um you know,
a purely secular, purely physical activity of say running on
a treadmill or what have you. Um, this too can
be a situation where you just become the act. You

(01:04:38):
just become the physical thing that you're doing, and everything
else can, at least for a little bit, melt away. Well, folks,
I don't think we had any answers for you about
the nature of consciousness. Somehow, that's always the case whenever
we come back to the subject. But but I nevertheless
I always feel called back to it anyway. That's it
for this episode, but as always, you can head on

(01:05:01):
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(01:05:23):
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