Are you a brain or do you have a brain?

right now youre reading this with your eyes. you can see your hands on the keyboard or mouse. You have hands. How do you know theyre your hands? Silly question. Theyre attached to your arms which are attached to your body. How do you know its your body? You control it. Do you own it? In a sense you do. You can do with it what you want, as long as you dont harm others (or get caught doing it, hehe.) Its even a sort of a legal possession, you can not legally sell it to anyone while youre alive =P, but you can legally transfer ownership of your body to a medical school once it is dead.
If you have a body, youre something other than your body right? when you say you own your body , you dont mean your body owns itself. Or does everythign that no one else owns own itself? Does the moon belong to everyone, to no one, or to itself? What can be an owner of anything? You can, and your body uis just one fo the things you own. In any case, you and your body seem both intimately connected and yet distinct. you are the controller, and it is the controlled. most of the time.
Then in that case, could you trade your body for another, a stronger, or more beautiful body?
Impossible you think?
But it is perfectly imaginable and hence possible in principle.
What if your brain were to be transplanted into a new body, which it could then control? Wouldnt you think of that as switching bodys? there would be vast technical problems, but given our purposes, we can ignore them.
It seems likeif your brain were transplanted into another body, you would go with it. But are you a brain? Which sounds more like truth to you?

"I have a brain."
"I am a brain."

The more i think about it the more i think i am a brain. I like to think i have a soul, and i am more than a biological machine. But someone made a point to me, If you get shot in the foot or in the arm, you still work. If you get brain damage or something happens to your brain, you stop working. But then, if your heart stops working, your brain stops. Does that apply?
And what about the things ive seen that i think are supernatural? Just chemicals in my brain? My imagination? But what about when two or more people see the same thing? How can that be explained through physics? If so many people see these things they must be there right? so does that mean we have a soul?
I took this from one point to another. hehe ill stop now.
-shreaky

You speak a lot about ownership. But no one really owns anything in this world. We use things. The things that we have to use are gifts. Like the moon - no one can own it. It's a gift. From who, from what? Well, that's a whole other argument. The idea that we own our bodies is twisted. We can't legally sell our bodies, we can't legally dispose of our own bodies.. so other people own our bodies? It's a man made concept born of our greed. It doesn't say much.

It's kind of like Pocahontas (you know, the Disney movie). How the white man came in to own the land and she kept saying that no one can really own the land. The land is a gift, a thing unto itself.

Anyway, I personally believe that our bodies do not make us. Sure, we need a body to live as human beings in this reality/dimension, but we are so much more than a brain, a muscle, an organ. I believe that we are our souls/astral bodies/etc. that happen to be inhabiting a body right now.. and that we will reincarnate into something else.. perhaps even into nothing. The theory there being that we're done traveling in this plane/dimension and we're moving on to greater enlightenment. There are really so many theories, and I have yet to agree with only one, it is all speculation.

These are only some of my initial reactions to what you've written, but they give you a few ideas to think about and contradict.

Its much nicer to think about it from that angle, and thats how id like it to be. But i dont really know. Im not saying that i believe all we are is brains. I dont know. And i may never know. Im ok with that. Its just something that i think about. I have a lot of ideas and curiousities, but i dont believe in just one, or any of them. The point i was trying to make in that post was not about ownership.
I do like to think that we are carriers of a spirit. But how or why or where? Who knows? Its much nicer to think that when we are done here our spirit passes on, enlarged, enriched and more strange and complex. And what we learn in each lifetime stays with it forever.
But if that is the case. we are being used. In whose service? we do not know. Yet we have a quest, and give unwitting loyalty to that and whoever sets us out.
and what is a spirit? and what are we?
If we have a spirit, and we are vessels... what does that make us, or our brain. What about reincarnation? If you move on to another body, you have a different brain, and youre a completely different person. So how much of "you" is your spirit?
"Man is the vessel of the spirit, ... Spirit is the voyager who, passing through the land of man, bids the human soul to follow it to the spirits purely spiritual destination." - Erich Heller
"we know, or believe, to have been molded by the free play of physical forces to which we cannot attribute any design, any 'project' or purpose. Not, that is, if we accept the basic premise of the scientific method, to wit, that nature is objective and not projective." - Jacques Monod

I have trouble making the points i try to make, and they are usually taken the wrong way.
Like i said, i dont believe in anything, but i dont not believe in anything. i am open to anything.
I dont know the meaning of anything, and i dont know how anything works. Nobody does, and i do not pretend to. I am ok with not knowing. i just have a lot of things, like i said before, that i think about and am curious about.

i hope i make sense =)

Well, those are the kinds of things many of us think about or have thought about. It's all in what you feel to be right, or perhaps what you wish to be true.

I don't believe that your brain really defines you.. well in a sense. Sure, there are people that are born with cognitive disabilities, but the idea is (I believe) that our spirits control how we use our brains, what we do or do not do - our potential. Our overall personality.. the things that make us unique. Perhaps the way our brains develop is a reaction to our spirits, a melding, a process.

Just some thoughts

i know a lot of people dont like her, but have you ever read sylvia brown? I think you would like her books. Ther is one called "The other side and back". its a good book. you should check it out.

hmm.......first off, considering merely the brain (not the mind) it too is a part of the body.....now, avoiding the idea of spirits, transplanting a body would be no different than transplanting a heart.......i would just have someone else's body.....

but because the mind does exist, and is not necessarily what you seem to call the brain, for their is no proof that the mind is in the brain, it just seems that way because that's where we think and understand and such, but in reality the mind has not yet beem proven as physical.....so, in that sense, some believe the spirit as you call it is actually the mind, and whether or not it is also the soul is debatable, but what is not debatable is the idea of essence.....my mind, and my body, make up my essence, but does that mean if i take someone elses body, or perhaps just a part like the heart, my essence is no longer? not at all, your essence is everything that is you, even if what is you was not yours to begin with.....in a sense, your essence would now entail the essence of someone else, but not literally, just figuratively....for your essence is still your essence, even if it shares a part of someone else's.....

The word that would better suit ur argument is mind.

I have a mind or
I am a mind

I am a mind.. I'm a mind looking through a big TV screen... like a computer game.

But the brain is proven. Your thoughts and how you feel come from your brain. Your moods and everything, its all because of chemicals. So how do you know that your mind is in fact seperate from your brain?

ooh.. a challenging question on the philosophy board.

well.. since brain is physical you can not be sure that it exists... but since you think.. therefore you are.. so you know for certain that thinking is not physical.. and you cant doubt that u really are thinking..

descarte stuff

ofcourse i'm not bringing in psychics and other people who can communicate with dead people and stuff

so a physical brain may only be an illusion... but what ever u look, see, feel stuff with is real.. and to..

bleah

*faints*

i want to point out that i never said i didnt believe in the spirit. Also i never said that i believe we are only a brain. they are just thoughts.

ofcourse there is an Entire college course about "Is the mind the brain"

Also.. if a clone is made.. the brain will be exactly the same.. but the thoughts will be different... for the minds will be different

but if the expereinces are exactly the same then they may have the same thoughts.. its not proven.. then that doesnt work either

not true......that whole chemical ordeal only works so-so far.....for example, your thought do not really come from your brain, what proof is there.....it is true that when certain things happen to the brain thought processes seem to be in motion, but this is what is known as mental states, but what causes these states? well, then that comes to whether or not your mental states follow the cause and effect relationship, or whether or not your mind is simply memories constantly changing......simply put, you cannot deny the existence of the mind, and as i said, there is no real proof that the mind is physical....think of it this way, you can touch a part of the brain and cause someone's arm to move, you can also tear out a piece of the brain and cause someone to become retarded-like......but you cannot touch a mind and cause memories, or awake the sub-conscious, or immediately cause them to dream, nor can you simply erase all their thoughts and understandings and create your own......although, chemicals like acid and such, do indeed screw with your mind, it does not necessarily mean your mind is physical....however, all scientist, philosophers, scholars, and what not, as far as i know, cannot prove the mind is indeed physical, but somehow the mind effects the body as does the body effects the mind......all scientists and philosophers are trying to do now is understand how the mind and body are correlated.....their are several views in this subject, such as dualism (which considered the mind and body totally separate.....which therefore comes the saying cogito ergo sum=i think, therefore i exist) then their is subjective dualism (which considers the mind and body as separate, but correlated), then their is behaviorism (cause and effect) and so the list continues....

that is a far better proof than mine......

externalism too

ephinomenalism......is interesting as well, for it considers that a mind does indeed exist, but is something like a shadow, having no real purpose.....

wow... never heard of that before.. thanks.. i'll search the internet for more information on it.

That's a very complicated subject. I think nobody does know a right answer to it. It may well be behind our comprehension ability. I try to give my thoughts on it however.

In my opinion, a live being is defined by it's memories, it's experience. They form your mind. Every thing you do, every decision you make is influenced by your previous experience of similar situations applied to the new situation at hand. The body is just a tool for interacting with the world around you and the brain is a tool for controlling it and a place where your memories are stored. I believe that if there was a way to transfer memories of a living being from one brain to a new one, it would still be the same being. Perhaps, there's even a possibility of two or more beings merging together to become one, but that's just a theory.

I agree with you. Nobody does know. Im not claiming to know. Like i said, these are just thoughts, i have many many many of them. Many different ones. I lean more towards some than others... and us being a brain was never one of them. But someone made some very good points to me recently, so ive been thinking about it a lot.

so total amnesiacs are not human?