I’m trying to work through this idea and would love feedback and critique on how I’m viewing it.

The usual copy puzzle goes like this: someone makes a perfect copy of you, memories and all, and the question is which one is really you. The way I’ve come to see it, the you of this moment doesn’t carry forward into the next one at all, whether through a copy machine or through any normal instance of time. Each moment there’s a new instance, built out of everything that came before it in a way that feels continuous, but it’s a distinct instance. Sleep isn’t special and neither is a teleporter. A perfect copy is just the case where one moment has two successors instead of one.

If that’s right, a couple of things follow. The copy isn’t me from my perspective and I’m not it from its perspective, and once we split neither of us can get at what the other is experiencing now. But we both have an equal claim on the shared past, so there’s no deeper fact about which one is the original.

By a moment I mean the shortest span that can be experienced at all, below which you can’t tell one moment from the next. I don’t know how long that is, and from what I’ve read nobody agrees, or even agrees that experience comes in discrete steps. I don’t think the view depends on the number, but maybe it does and I’m missing why.

So where’s the hole in this? Is it fair to describe future iterations of yourself as being as foreign as a copy would be? I’d especially like to hear from anyone who thinks continuity is doing more work than I’m giving it credit for.

If we want to understand consciousness without all the mysticism, we just have to look at how things work mechanically from the basics. It’s a two-part physical system. First, you have E=MC^2. That’s the hardware. It just defines the raw physical mass and the potential energy sitting in the battery. But raw energy without a vector is just a rock. That’s where my equation comes in as the operating system: E_TS = θ(P_S)(A_S). This is the continuous feedback loop. The system constantly measures its internal predictive state (P_S) against the actual physical environment (A_S). When there's an error between them—like a threat, stress, or physical damage—the system actively spends its finite energy over time (T) through its physical substrate (θ) to resolve the problem and keep the hardware alive. What people want to call some magical 'inner light' or 'animism' is literally just the system using conscious shorthand, like feeling 'ouch', to minimize error and conserve mental energy instead of processing the full causal chain. It's not magic, it's just intelligent energy routing to prevent permanent damage.

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Abstract

We tend to assume that what is most real is what is most solid: the table, the body, the ground under our feet. This meditation argues the reverse. An apt example is the flame from a lit matchstick in a darkroom; it owns none of its material, and yet it is the brightest thing in the room. The things we take as solid are held by something that never shows up as a thing, and that something does more than they do. The essay follows this pattern from the voice in your head through sound, light, time, the body and the cosmos, down to the quantum floor. If the account holds, one pattern does three jobs at once: it tells us what consciousness is, why time runs in one direction, and how a self-sustaining fire of chemistry could become life. https://zenodo.org/records/23607185

I've been thinking about what happens to the brain during a flatline, and it has led me to an unsettling conclusion about personal identity.

Most people assume that when a patient is resuscitated or recovers from a deep medical state, their consciousness simply "wakes up" from a pause. Even when an EEG goes completely flat, we comfort ourselves by saying the brain tissue survived, so the person survived.

But if consciousness is a process rather than an object, that assumption deserves a harder look.

The Brain is Wax, Consciousness is the Flame

Think of the human mind not as a physical object, but as a continuous process, like a flame on a candle.

• The physical brain tissue (synapses, neurons, atoms) is the wax.
• The dynamic, organized electrochemical activity of the mind is the flame.

If you blow out a candle, the flame doesn't go to sleep. It ceases to exist. If you strike a match and relight the wick a few minutes later, you are using the same wax, but you have created a new fire. Call it Flame #2.

Where the Flame Might End

There are real medical scenarios where the brain's large-scale electrical activity drops to a flatline. Scalp EEG mainly records synchronized activity across the cortex, so a flat EEG means that organized activity stopped, even though individual cells stay alive and metabolizing.

1. Cardiac arrest: When the heart stops, EEG activity flattens within roughly 10-20 seconds and consciousness is lost almost immediately. The neurons themselves survive for minutes, with irreversible damage at normal body temperature starting around 4-6 minutes. That window is why CPR and defibrillation can work.
2. Deep Hypothermic Circulatory Arrest (DHCA): During complex open-heart surgeries, patients are cooled to roughly 14-25°C and blood flow is intentionally stopped. Metabolism is suppressed enough that cells survive, and the EEG goes isoelectric, a complete, deliberate flatline.
3. Barbiturate comas: To control swelling after severe brain trauma, doctors use high-dose pentobarbital to push the brain into burst suppression, with bursts of activity separated by silence. At high doses the EEG can go fully isoelectric.
4. Deep general anesthesia: Typical surgical anesthesia leaves the EEG active, but deep propofol or isoflurane dosing can also produce burst suppression and isoelectric EEG, sometimes deliberately for neuroprotection.

In all of these cases, the organized activity that seems to generate the conscious mind stops. When doctors restart the heart, rewarm the body, or clear the drugs, the brain's activity restarts, like striking a new match. Long-term memory is stored structurally, in synaptic strengths and connectivity, not in ongoing electrical activity. So the restarted activity flows through the surviving physical grooves of the brain (the wax) and reloads the old memories, personality quirks, and life history. Patients typically lose only the minutes just before the event, which depend on short-term activity.

When that patient opens their eyes and says, "I made it," Flame #2 believes it is Flame #1. It has inherited nearly all of Flame #1's data, so it cannot detect the interruption.

Where's the Line?

This is where the argument gets uncomfortable. Natural sleep and typical anesthesia keep the EEG active, with slow delta waves in deep sleep and slow-delta and frontal alpha patterns under anesthesia, so the flame is dimmed but still burning. But the line between those states and a true flatline isn't sharp. Deep anesthesia reaches the same isoelectric state as the cases above, and dreamless sleep arguably interrupts consciousness too. If a flatline ends the self, it's hard to explain why deep anesthesia doesn't, and harder still to explain why a few seconds of gaps wouldn't count.

Conclusion

If personal identity requires an unbroken process, then a true flatline may be the literal end of the self, and modern medicine may be passing a baton from one flame to the next. But that's only one view. Psychological-continuity and pattern theories say a pattern preserved in the wiring and restarted is still you, like suspending a program rather than deleting it.

What do you guys think? Is the person who wakes up from a flatline actually you, or a flawless copy burning your wax? And if you say copy, what do you say about deep anesthesia?

Have you ever wondered at how our interactions with door handles and clothing and coffee makers are normally so effortless that our interactions with them are essentially automatic? Or that only a tiny proportion of the thousands of micro-interactions we attend to on a daily basis reaches the gates of attention?

Well there's a good reason for this, grounded in the biological function of perception - which is to keep you alive. It does so by bringing what matters to the forefront while dynamically filtering out what isn't - all before conscious awareness enters into the picture.

One term that could use for this process is **curation, and it's what perception** ***is*** **at its core.**

But curation isn’t just about filtering, although that’s a huge part of the story. It’s just as much about actively shaping what shows up, so that it arrives in a form that’s suited to your needs. What reaches you are *useful simplifications*, which have been pared, bundled, and packaged for relevance.

Unresponsive ICU patients in a new Columbia study were able to raise and lower the frequency of a beeping tone with their minds, via noninvasive EEG electrodes that recorded and translated their brainwaves.

The study opens the door to non-invasive brain-computer interfaces that could allow seemingly comatose patients with hidden consciousness to communicate with doctors and family members.

“Research in the past decade by us and others has shown that many patients with acute brain injury who appear to be in a coma actually have some level of preserved consciousness, even though they are unable to speak or move their hands or eyes to communicate,” says Jan Claassen, MD, a professor of neurology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, who led the study. 

“Our brain-computer interface is only a first step, but it shows that, in principle, we could hopefully in the future give some of these patients a voice.”

Hidden consciousness is common

Claassen, who is also the medical director of the neurocritical care unit at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center, has been one of the pioneers in recognizing hidden consciousness in brain-injured patients who are in a coma-like state and unable to respond to questions or directives from physicians or their family.

In 2019, his team used standard EEG technology and AI to analyze the brain waves of unresponsive, brain-injured patients and detected signs of hidden consciousness in 15%. The number shocked the critical care field, which had only documented the phenomenon in a few cases before then.

https://academic.oup.com/brain/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/brain/awag210/8931697?redirectedFrom=fulltext

I am curious about what career paths exist around the study of consciousness.

I am aware of cognitive science (most university programs seem more math and computer science heavy than I would expect) and neuroscience (which is broad).

I am primarily interested in finding out if there are paths that don’t require a BS or PhD (like assistant positions that exist in other disciplines).

Ego, the one asking questions pertaining to consciousness, is the one sitting on the near/subjective end of the dualistic phenomenon called consciousness.

state the definition first, 

derive the falsifiable criteria required to satisfy it,

then check the peer-reviewed literature.

Materialism (Merriam-Webster, Sense 1a Scientific Materialism):"A theory that physical matter is the only or fundamental reality and that all being and processes and phenomena can be explained as manifestations or results of matter."

Physicalism (Merriam-Webster):"A thesis that the descriptive terms of scientific language are reducible to terms which refer to spatiotemporal things or events or to their properties." Physicalist (Merriam-Webster, Sense 1): "One who holds human thoughts and acts to be determined by physical laws."

Illusionism (Frankish, 2016; Dennett, 1991; Graziano, 2013):The materialist position in cognitive science that "phenomenal consciousness" (irreducible private qualia or "what it feels like") is an introspective illusion a simplified, schematic self-model generated by a physical brain to track its own attention and processing, rather than a non-physical substance or metaphysical glow.

Eliminative / Mechanistic Materialism (Churchland, 1981):The thesis that folk-psychological nouns (souls, qualia, immaterial free will) are prescientific confabulations like phlogiston or élan vital that map onto zero non-physical entities once the underlying neurobiological and computational mechanisms are decoded.

(What Studies Prove Materialism & Falsify Dualism?)

If Materialism/Physicalism is true ("all mental phenomena are manifestations or results of matter and determined by physical laws"), and Dualism is false (there is no immaterial mind/qualia operating independently of matter), then five specific classes of empirical experiments must succeed:

• 1 (Direct Physical Decoding of "Private" Mental States): Scientists must be able to read and reconstruct what a person is seeing, hearing, or thinking in words/images solely by measuring physical matter (blood oxygenation, electrical potentials, or activation vectors) without asking the subject.
• 2 (Causal Sufficiency Injecting/Erasing "Experience" via Matter): Scientists must be able to create false memories, induce specific emotions, or alter moral/perceptual experience on command purely by toggling physical neurons (via light, electricity, or molecules).
• 3 (Temporal Precedence Matter Decides Before "You" Do): Physical neural activity must mathematically predict and initiate a "conscious choice" seconds before the subject's self-model reports having made a conscious decision.
• 4 (Partition & Confabulation of the "Unified Self"): Physically severing or lesioning the brain must divide the "unified conscious self" into separate operational agents, proving that the sense of unified inner experience is a post-hoc narrative fabricated by a physical interpreter module.
• 5 (Substrate-Independent Functional Equivalence): If mental states are physical/computational architectures rather than biological magic, then artificial neural networks implementing the same broadcast and routing mechanisms must exhibit the exact same decodable internal states, uncertainty tracking, emotion vectors, and global workspace dynamics.

Every single one of those five criteria has been decisively proven in peer-reviewed literature

Criterion 1 : Reconstructing "Private Subjective Experience" Directly from Physical Matter

• Tang, J., LeBel, A., Jain, S., & Huth, A. G. (2023). Semantic reconstruction of continuous language from non-invasive brain recordings. Nature Neuroscience, 26(5), 858 - 866. doi:10.1038/s41593-023-01304-9
  • The Proof: Using solely physical BOLD fMRI signals from the cortex, researchers reconstructed continuous natural language describing what human subjects were hearing, silently imagining, or watching in silent videos. If "subjective thought" were non-physical, a magnetometer measuring blood-oxygen iron spin in physical tissue could not decode the semantic stream of your inner monologue.
• Nishimoto, S., Vu, A. T., Naselaris, T., Benjamini, Y., Yu, B., & Gallant, J. L. (2011). Reconstructing visual experiences from brain activity evoked by natural movies. Current Biology, 21(19), 1641 - 1646. (And Takagi & Nishimoto, 2023, High-resolution image reconstruction with latent diffusion models from human brain activity, CVPR 2023).
  • The Proof: Directly reconstructed moving video and high-resolution images of what a human was visually experiencing purely by reading physical voxel activations in the visual cortex.

Criterion 2: Writing False Memories & Emotions Directly into Physical Tissue

• Ramirez, S., Liu, X., Lin, P. A., Suh, J., Pignatelli, M., Redondo, R. L., Ryan, T. J., & Tonegawa, S. (2013). Creating a false memory in the hippocampus. Science, 341(6144), 387 - 391. doi:10.1126/science.1239073
  • The Proof: Using optogenetics (channelrhodopsin-2 triggered by physical laser pulses down a fiber-optic cable), MIT neuroscientists physically toggled specific dentate gyrus engram neurons in the hippocampus, implanting a complete, behaviorally real episodic fear memory of an event that never happened. Subjective memory is physical state storage.
• Parvizi, J., Rangarajan, V., Shirer, W. R., Desai, N., & Greicius, M. D. (2013). The will to persevere induced by electrical stimulation of the human cingulate gyrus. Neuron, 80(6), 1359 - 1367.
  • The Proof: Passing a tiny physical electrical current (mA) into the human anterior midcingulate cortex instantaneously generated the complex subjective feeling of "an impending challenge and the heroic will to overcome it" and turning the current off instantaneously erased the feeling.
• Eisenberger, N. I., Lieberman, M. D., & Williams, K. D. (2003). Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion. Science, 302(5643), 290–292. (Paired with Kross et al., 2011, Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain, PNAS, 108(15), 6270 - 6275).
  • The Proof: Even "intangible emotional hurt" (social rejection/grief) maps directly onto the physical dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and secondary somatosensory cortex (SII) and can be blunted by physical acetaminophen (DeWall et al., 2010, Psychological Science).

Criterion 3 Proven: Physical Neurons Decide Before "Conscious Will" Exists

• Soon, C. S., Brass, M., Heinze, H. J., & Haynes, J. D. (2008). Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience, 11(5), 543 - 545.
  • The Proof: Extending Libet et al. (1983), fMRI decoding of the frontopolar and parietal cortex predicted which button a human would "freely choose" to press up to 7 to 10 seconds before the subject reported consciously making the decision.
• Fried, I., Mukamel, R., & Kreiman, G. (2011). Internally generated preactivation of single neurons in human medial frontal cortex predicts volition. Neuron, 69(3), 548 - 562.
  • The Proof: Single-neuron recordings in awake humans predicted the exact timing of "conscious volition" with >80% accuracy well before the subject experienced the "feeling of deciding."

Criterion 4 Proven: The "Unified Experiencer" Is a Post-Hoc Physical Confabulation (Illusionism)

• Gazzaniga, M. S. (2000). Cerebral specialization and interhemispheric communication: Does the corpus callosum enable the human condition? Brain, 123(7), 1293 - 1326. (Building on Gazzaniga & Sperry, 1967).
  • The Proof: Physically cutting the corpus callosum splits one "soul/mind" into two independent perceiving agents in the same skull. When the mute right hemisphere is flashed a command ("Walk"), the person stands up and walks; when you ask the verbal left hemisphere why they stood up, the Left-Hemisphere Interpreter instantly hallucinates a lie ("I wanted to go get a Coca-Cola") and genuinely believes its own confabulation.
• Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231 - 259.
• Wegner, D. M. (2002). The Illusion of Conscious Will. MIT Press.
• Frankish, K. (2016). Illusionism as a theory of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 23(11–12), 11–39.
• Graziano, M. S. A. (2013). Consciousness and the Social Brain (Attention Schema Theory).

Criterion 5: The Same Functional Mechanisms

• Lindsey, J., Gurnee, W., et al. (July 6, 2026). Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models (J-Space) Proving Global Workspace broadcast emerges as a general computational solution across substrates.
• Sofroniew, N., et al. (2026). Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model (arXiv:2604.07729) Proving 171 causally active, steerable functional emotion vectors in the residual stream.
• Tagliabue, D., Dung, L., & Berg, C. (2026). The Pain Axis Proving an orthogonal, causally active residual-stream preference/aversion manifold.
• Studdiford, Z., & Lupyan, G. (2026).

Consciousness is too subtle to comprehend, it's nebulous, science will never understand, it's philosophical, or metaphysical, or nonphysical, or maybe aliens are involved.

The reason a thousand theories bloom is that no one is picking them. The mass of theories should be thinned by experiment, but it’s not happening. Why not? I believe it is because of a lack of rigour in consciousness experiments. The accumulation of decades of ill-defined and sloppy experiments has resulted in total confusion. What do you think?

You may have heard people talk about the concept of sentience/consciousness being immeasurable/unable to affect the physical world. But I have what I would believe to be proof that this is not true. It’s quite simple actually. How could we be aware about the fact that we are sentient if it cannot affect the brain and therefore cannot result in the knowledge of our sentience? I won’t sit here and let anyone tell me that all humans were by coincidence born with the innate belief of their sentience. And if it exists and can affect the physical world it must in some shape and form be measurable.

Edit: Some people are mad about me saying it’s “measurable”. What I mean is that it exists in the physical world therefore it is THEORETICALLY possible to measure it. I do not know where in the brain it would be measured, how it would be measured or which kind of spectrum would be needed for such a thing. All I know is that it is theoretically possibl.

Michael Levin made this poll to see how people think about the relationship between physical objects/systems, life, and intelligence/mind.

Summary: A peculiar set of positions has formed: those who are anti-reductionist about consciousness are often reductionist about AI. On the one hand, they say that brain chemistry can never lead to consciousness; on the other, whatever impressive feats AI achieves, they argue it is merely compute. These positions don’t seem to fit together. Here, philosopher and Lead for Responsible AI at Microsoft Ken Archer, and phenomenologist Harald Wiltsche, argue that they do in fact work together. The secret lies in understanding how successful reductionism in science works. Using Einstein's re-thinking of the ether as a guide, we can unlock the mystery of consciousness.

I have the experience of being a body. I am a unified shape in the shape of the body experiencing being everything everywhere simultaneously. No I don't feel my kidneys unless they're hurt but when I do feel my kidneys the qualia of pain is in my kidneys not my brain and they feel like apart of me.

So I am this shape, discrete particles do not combine to make continuous unified shapes like I am. Think how many marbles do you have to combine to create something that is all of those marbles at a single instant in time? It never happens and neither does it with particles yet if I am made of particles I must be all those particles at a single instant in time.

Materialism, which is the view that things are made of only particles, cannot account for my shape. Particles do not ever unify into shapes greater than the particles themselves. Neither can I be in the brain. Such shape making in the brain would require dualism. I must be my actual body. To be the actual body, there must be some continuous material in the shape of my body covering the whole of my body. This Aristotle called a morphe (pronounced morfay) which is the form of the body. A hylomorph is made when matter (hylo) bonds with morphe.

My best guess for what this morphe is, is that it's made from the fabric of spacetime which is a continuous substance that curves in the presence of mass. Somehow the fabric of spacetime around particles clings to and hardens around particles. When particles combine so does the hylomorph but the hylomorph combines into a continuous unified substance that takes the whole shape of an object.

Let me preface by saying I’m asking this question largely because if want to know if I’m alone in this feeling. Better yet, if anyone could provide any material research on the matter I would appreciate it.
A while ago I watched a video by CGP grey recounting how this with lobotomies would often act without knowing why; that is to say, they would retroactively explain and rationalize their actions.
I was lying in bed the other night, trying to put certain aspects of my experience as a person into words for my significant other, and I realized that I experience something similar to the aforementioned.
Now to be clear I am not, to my knowledge, lobotomized. In fact I’m not talking about any disconnect between my actions and thoughts. Instead I’m talking about a disconnect between my rational, language based, thinking and my emotions.

If someone asks me where the capital of my country is, and I answer them, it is instant, there’s no thought. Of course, for something more obscure, I might take a second to answer, but there is no logical processing. The memory is being fetched by my linguistics area. Or at least it feels that way.

If I have to solve a math problem it requires the parsing of information. I look at the situation of front of me, and try and to come up with an answer using information I know.
Now my problem is that when someone asks me how I’m feeling it’s more like the latter situation. The external informational is my physical reaction and the situation at hand, and the internal information is what those reactions mean for my emotional state and how one would normally feel in any given situation.
On the other hand sometimes I am pushed to action by pure emotion. At times like that I can’t tell someone why I acted that way beyond the obvious. For example, if I instinctively denied something that was true I would say it’s because I’m embarrassed, but there have been times when I eventually realized my emotional motivation for an action wasn’t what I initially believed.
To me this suggests that there is a lack of communication between my emotional side and my rational/linguistic side compared to my short and long term memory. The fact that I react emotionally to things within my memory suggests that the emotional part of my brain also can communicate with my memories, but it remains isolated from my linguistic side. However, the fact that when I get irrationally angry I might hurl and insult or two means that I can use words when being driven to action by emotion.
This post might seem vague and nonsensical, or it might be something that everyone except me knows. We’re all isolated in our own heads, I would just like to feel a little less isolated.
Also I apologize if this isn’t coherent. I think I would need something more than a Reddit post to explore this feeling.

Ran a fun experiment, a short explanation of why non-epiphenomenal dualism and LLM consciousness are incompatible.

I’ve been thinking about consciousness, and I have a question.
The human brain is a physical system that processes electrical and chemical signals. A computer is also a physical system that processes information using electrical signals.
So, hypothetically, if we could recreate every relevant neuron, connection, memory, and brain process inside a computer, why wouldn’t it work?
Imagine we could even replace neurons one by one with artificial components that perform exactly the same functions. Would consciousness continue, or would something essential be lost?
Is consciousness dependent on the biological material of the brain, or does it emerge from the way information is processed and organized?
And if we created a perfect digital copy of a human brain, how could we determine whether it was genuinely conscious or merely behaving as if it were?
I’m not claiming that consciousness is just computation. I’m genuinely curious about what prevents this possibility from working, if anything.
What do you think? Is there a fundamental reason a computer could never support human consciousness, or is it simply a technological problem we haven’t solved yet?

Within neuroscience, psychology, and the study of consciousness, there are many theories about what the mind is. My question is a little different. What is the mind composed of? I don't mean from the perspective of it's made of neurons, but is there a correct way to map the mind?

Is there an incorrect way? Was Sigmund Freud's description wrong? Is modern CBT's model? Can these models both be right?

What do you think the structure of the mind is, and what perspective or perspectives do you look at the question from?

Summary: In a world riven by ethnic and religious conflict, we’re often urged to tolerate difference, as though tolerance alone could sustain peace. But Iranian philosopher Hamedeh Rastaei warns that tolerance by itself is dangerously unstable, since it merely buries conflict, which is liable to resurface at moments of strain. Far better, Rastaei argues, to recognise the deep metaphysical truth that the identity of our self depends on the difference of others. This idea can support a more stable peace, as rival identity groups can come to see each other not as threats but as mutual foundations.

For people who believe the mind is not the brain but a separate (possibly non physical) entity and the brain is just a receiver does this mean the mind is having and formulating the thoughts and the brain is just following its commands? if so, this seems very confusing to me.

We know the brain is a biological neural network. We know neural networks operate by receiving input vectors and computing them through multiple layers and producing output vectors. In the brain, the sensory neurons would be the input layer. An example like a neuron in the eardrum would get depolarized by soundwaves. the specific soundwave would make them fire at a specific firing rate. The firing rates of all the sensory neurons are the input vectors. These input vectors then get computed through the network, each neuron summing its inputs and firing if this sum crosses the threshold. Then it sends this vector to other neurons through synaptic connections. Each synapse has a weight which can change algorithmically. The outputs would be things like muscle movements or vocalizations. Learning is done algorithmically by the network adjusting its synaptic weights in response to the prediction error.

So, when dualist say the mind is not the brain, what exactly do they think the neural network is doing vs. the mind. Is the neural network only performing some computations like image recognition or learning and then sending this info to a non physical mind? Are conscious thoughts not coming from the executive circuits of the neural network? And how is the neural network receiving information from the brain? Is the brain feeding input vectors into the neural network somehow ( like the mind giving the network prompts)?

It seems redundant to me to have a brain that is a neural network, capable of learning, intelligence and decision making and then to also have a non physical mind. Im confused what the neural network is doing and what the mind is doing in their view.

For example, if the mind thinks that it wants to stand up and go for a walk, what happens? Does it just bypass the neural network and somehow depolarize the nerves to cause muscles to contract? If so, why do we have a motor cortex in the neural network that attatches to the nerves in our body?

For me, I can feel / imagine to feel thoughts physically possessing the space in my head, do you too feel this?

I also experience conciousness to a significant degree in my eyes, but not as much as the head

I find it strange though because I don't know that there are many, if any, nerves in the brain or within the skull that do the job of feeling sensations

I wonder, did humans in the past inherently know that thoughts come from a space in the head? Or is that a modern thing, where now that we know that the brain is where it happens, as a result, we imagine our conciousness existing in that part of the body?

Is there any evidence that some part of the human brain can preserve the last memories prior to someone’s death? That could function like the black box in the airplanes? This could be particularly important in case of an unknown death/ violent, unattended deaths for example.

I've been listening to another one of Alex's videos where he said how WLC made him realise that he is a mereological nihilist.

For anyone wondering, it's the claim that objects don't really exist, only the fundamental particles exist, and complex objects are just mental constructs. So, the concept of a "chair" is a mental one, but what really exists is just a bunch of atoms with no objective defining line. The objects are just useful mental constructs that simplify reality and make it managable, so that I don't have to ask for a billion atoms when I ask for a coffee.

However, I've noticed something was left out of this equation, something that was not forgotten for the first time, consciousness.

If literally everything except the fundamental stuff is a mental construct, if consciousness is emergent or complex in any way, it itself must just be a mental cosntruct.

But how can consciousness itself be a mental construct? In what exactly? That's backwards. Consciousness is required for mental constructs. That would imply that consciousness doesn't really exist, or that there is an infinite regression of some sort, because a mental construct would therefore itself be a mental construct...

Another way to think about it is that under mereological nihilism, if the only thing that exists is the fundamental stuff, then mental constructs shouldn't exist, unless they themselves are fundamental.

And yet, consciousness is the only thing we cannot deny that exists.

Therefore, either mereological nihilism is false, or the emergent consciousness hypothesis is false and consciousness is fundamental, or both are false.

I'm not a mereological nihilist, nor a materialist, but I get the appeal to it. I just thought I'd run along with it as a simulation and see where it takes me, and that is where it took me. Any thoughts?

My brain processes sensations, recognizes thoughts and feelings, and uses this information to function in the world.

So what exactly is the difference between awareness and the body-mind that knows and processes experience?

Ultimately, when I say "I am awareness," how is this awareness different from the ordinary knowing performed by my body and mind? And if awareness is aware of the body-mind doing the knowing, doesn't that imply another level of awareness that knows this, leading to an infinite regress?