From the way I have seen it, the heart doesn't literally think, but rather it is a center of emotions. Emotions lack logic most of the time it seems and don't make much sense anyway. It seems to have been used more as a figure of speech than something to be taken as is.

On the other hand, it is said that the digestive system possesses its own self-governing system that is not dependent on the brain.

I like what Antonio Damasio said:

Consciousness, much like our feelings, is based on a representation of the body and how it changes when reacting to certain stimuli. Self-image would be unthinkable without this representation. I think humans have developed a self-image mainly to establish a homeostatic organism. The brain constantly needs up-to-date information on the body's state to regulate all the processes that keep it alive. This is the only way an organism can survive in an ever changing environment. Emotions alone—without conscious feelings—would not be enough. Adults would be as helpless as babies if they suddenly lost their self-image.

The brain is part of the organism as are the heart, the lungs, ....treating parts as the whole is a fallacy.

The heart's nerves aren't wired to extract or process information. They're just wired to set a rhythmic pace of heart contraction. The gut's N.S. just helps to mediate reflex - peristalsis coordination. I dont think it's capable of awareness or experience.. there are special brain specific networks that mediate those processes

Could it be that the heart has, somewhere in its biology, a neural network capable of thought, just like the mind/brain itself? — TheMadFool

You do realize, don't you, that the term "heart" in this context is a metaphor? It doesn't refer to the actual heart muscle. It's a representation of the emotional aspects of our internal lives. Although all aspects of our selves take place throughout our bodies, a primary seat of both emotions and thoughts is the brain.

An inability to recognise metaphor is my own Achilles heel. Who would have thought that the inability to do something would reside in the foot?

center of emotions — Lone Wolf

According to current biology not so. I think it's called the limbic system - the part of the brain that does emotions.

People (it's a hunch of mine) like paradoxes. It seems to stimulate them somehow. Some of these pardoxes are unsolvable and even if answers are found they're, on the most part, unsatisfactory.

Why is this? What about the obviously irrational (paradoxes are contradictions) is appealing?

I don't think it's our rational side. It must be something else. For lack of a better term I call this side of our personality, which finds paradoxes appealing, the ''heart''.

Some have mentioned that ''heart'' is a metaphor and they're not wrong but are they completely right?

Why can't the heart (the actual biological organ) think?

I know most think that the heart organ lacks the neural network to be capable of thought but the mind-heart connection is hard to ignore. Thoughts give rise to emotions and vice versa. Most think this connection is unidirectional brain-->heart but what if it goes both ways like brain<-->heart?

That would be interesting right?

Thinking is what an organism, embedded in an environment, does. — Πετροκότσυφας

Taking this one step further...what if the environment itself is part of the thinking process? It is in a sense right? Without the environment providing the stimulus there could be no thinking and that's a passive interpretation. I'm talking more of a direct and active involvement of everything in the process of consciousness or thinking.

The brain is part of the organism as are the heart, the lungs, ....treating parts as the whole is a fallacy. — Cavacava

:up:

The heart's nerves aren't wired to extract or process information. They're just wired to set a rhythmic pace of heart contraction. The gut's N.S. just helps to mediate reflex - peristalsis coordination. I dont think it's capable of awareness or experience.. there are special brain specific networks that mediate those processes — aporiap

The problem is that we're so certain about what we know. I think we're not warranted to be so.

I guess biologists have ''proof'' that the brain is the thinking center. My advice, not that I'm an expert, is to, once in a while, revisit the pages we've read and ''understood'' from the book of knowledge, just in case we might've missed something.

You do realize, don't you, that the term "heart" in this context is a metaphor? — T Clark

I understand the metaphor and I used ''heart'' as a matter of convention. For my purposes ''heart'' means anything non-brain and capable of thought.

An inability to recognise metaphor is my own Achilles heel. Who would have thought that the inability to do something would reside in the foot? — Cuthbert

Please read above. Thanks.

According to current biology not so. I think it's called the limbic system - the part of the brain that does emotions — TheMadFool

Oops,I must have been half asleep when I wrote that. Let me try again once I get off work.

I used ''heart'' as a matter of convention. For my purposes ''heart'' means anything non-brain and capable of thought. — TheMadFool

How about 'subconscious'. Intuition, for instance, may be an example of subconscious thinking.

Why can't the heart (the actual biological organ) think?

I know most think that the heart organ lacks the neural network to be capable of thought but the mind-heart connection is hard to ignore. Thoughts give rise to emotions and vice versa. Most think this connection is unidirectional brain-->heart but what if it goes both ways like brain<-->heart?

That would be interesting right? — TheMadFool

From what I understand it does go both ways, in a way. If, for example, you were given a drug that instantly sped up your heart rate whenever you smelled a rose, eventually you'd be conditioned to where you no longer needed the drug for your heart rate to increase with the same stimulus. You may have heard of Pavlov's dog. The basic interoception of an increased heart rate is high arousal, so if you like the smell of roses you might experience a generally stimulating and pleasant affect. How you interpret this feeling is determined by past experience and your cultural upbringing, but there's probably some room for free association as well. Anyway, in this scenario the emotion originated from an artificially stimulated heart.

According to current biology not so. I think it's called the limbic system - the part of the brain that does emotions.

People (it's a hunch of mine) like paradoxes. It seems to stimulate them somehow. Some of these pardoxes are unsolvable and even if answers are found they're, on the most part, unsatisfactory.

Why is this? What about the obviously irrational (paradoxes are contradictions) is appealing?

I don't think it's our rational side. It must be something else. For lack of a better term I call this side of our personality, which finds paradoxes appealing, the ''heart''.

Some have mentioned that ''heart'' is a metaphor and they're not wrong but are they completely right?

Why can't the heart (the actual biological organ) think?

I know most think that the heart organ lacks the neural network to be capable of thought but the mind-heart connection is hard to ignore. Thoughts give rise to emotions and vice versa. Most think this connection is unidirectional brain-->heart but what if it goes both ways like brain<-->heart?

That would be interesting right? — TheMadFool

Okay, what I was trying to say was that a lot of the time people say things in reference to the heart when they really mean emotions. It doesn't literally mean that the heart thinks, they just say that for whatever strange and unusual reasoning they have. It seems they use the "heart" to justify illogical conclusions when they don't have a rational answer to the problem at hand. The blood-pumping muscle really has nothing to do with it.

I am more inclined to think that the heart receives transmissions from the brain for physical matters. If one is anxious, for instance, the brain would send signals to the heart to pump faster, and so forth.

As for paradoxes, it may be a resistance to accept a more "rational" claim or an intuition that the new claim isn't rational and the old belief seemed better. Basically, habit.

I completely agree it's good to be skeptical and questioning of orthodox thought. But I think the underlying circuitry of basic perceptual processes is so well known and characterized that it would be extremely unlikely for a nervous sytem without that circuit organization to have perception involving capacities like thinking .

I am not sure how the heart -- that cardiac muscle located behind your ribs, usually on the left side of your body -- was tasked with feeling emotions. Probably it was because when we get excited the heart beats faster. Something like that. We have also assigned feelings to the gut -- gut instinct, gut feeling, having the guts for war, etc. The enteric nervous system which runs the digestive tract is sensitive to emotions, and may have more to do with our lives than we would like, so it is natural that people might think the gut emotional. A digestive tract diagram would probably be more suitable for St. Valentine's Day than the :heart: which doesn't even look like a heart. More to the point would be a great erection.

There are a small number of cells in the Medulla (the brain stem) that control heart and lung function. There is also a network of nerves in the heart that coordinate it's sequential contraction and relaxation. There aren't any nerves running from the limbic system to the heart. Chemicals, yes -- nerves no. (The vagus nerve - Cranial Nerve #10) doesn't traffic in emotions with the heart. it carries instructions, mostly, like "beat now". )

The whole body is involved in the brain, so everything from your heart to your anus is involved in emotion. But there are good rhetorical reasons to focus on the heart. A bleeding-ass hole liberal is even less attractive than a bleeding heart liberal. "From the bottom of my heart" sounds better than "from the heart of my bottom". A rectal throb is more ambiguous than a heart throb. The anus is a critically important structure (just wait until it clamps down for a week) but it doesn't get good PR.

The heart gets gobs of great PR. Why aren't they working on rectal transplants? It would be better than messy colostomy bags. But no, it's all about heart transplants. Heart this, heart that.

Fuck the heart. Up with assholes.

Baby's are born crying. We are born with emotions. They are genetic and as such they are apart of what's kept those genes alive for 100's of thousands of years. Emotions are our survival instincts. They are where all of our sensibilities come from. Gut instinct, common sense, empathy (The ability to imagine how others feel), etc. Immanuel Kants critique of pure reason hits on this. It explains that strictly mathematical thinking prevents us from predicting what might come next because math problems give you no clue of what's coming next. 1+... what comes next could be an infinite series of numbers or a symbol they came up with at a university conference yesterday. Our sensibilities give us an idea of what's coming next based on our prior experiences and sorts through though experiences at a much quicker rate than the conscious mind is capable of. People who lack sufficient life experience lack these sensibilities and are intern prone to argue their existence.

Can the heart think? — TheMadFool

Literally? No, obviously not. Figuratively? Conventionally, no, obviously not. You think with your head and feel with your heart.

What if it could? — TheMadFool

What if fish could fly planes and kangaroos could recite the alphabet?

The heart may not be able to think per se, but there's strong evidence that its role as a keeper of internal rhythm is vital to our ability to think and feel in certain ways. Check out this BBC article from a while back that discusses the case of a man with two 'hearts', his own, and a mechanical one that was fitted near his stomach:

"When Carlos tapped out his pulse, for instance, he followed the machine’s rhythms rather than his own heartbeat. The fact that this also changed other perceptions of his body – seeming to expand the size of his chest, for instance – is perhaps to be expected; in some ways, changing the position of the heart was creating a sensation not unlike the famous “rubber hand illusion”. But crucially, it also seemed to have markedly altered certain social and emotional skills. Carlos seemed to lack empathy when he viewed pictures of people having a painful accident, for instance. He also had more general problems with his ability to read other’s motives, and, crucially, intuitive decision making – all of which is in line with the idea that the body rules emotional cognition."

And: "Along these lines, Furman has found that people with major depressive disorder (but without other complications like anxiety) struggle to feel their own heart beat; and the poorer their awareness, the less likely they were to report positive experiences in their daily life. And as Dunn’s work on decision making would have suggested, poor body perception also seemed to be linked to measures of indecision – a problem that blights many people with depression."

Super cool stuff.

:lol:

What does "direct and active involvement", as opposed to involvement simpliciter, mean? — Πετροκότσυφας

By that I mean like the neurons in the brain - involved in thinking actively rather than say a lung cell, a passive background upon which the neurons think.

I'm just putting it out there just in case we have it wrong.

Forget the heart for the moment.

We're drawn to mystery and the unknown. Does the proclivity for paradoxes originate in our minds? Why does the mind, seat of rationality, like an unsolvable riddle?

Is it because we want to find the fallacies within them or is it another part of our brains, a non/i-llogicaly dimension, that finds these paradoxes interesting and worth visiting.

Note, some of these paradoxes are literally unsolvable.

Interesting. Thanks.:up:

Do neurons think? And if everything is actively involved in thinking, then what is this everything? Isn't a lung cell part of it? — Πετροκότσυφας

The accepted truth is that the brain, the thought machine, is made of neurons. I question this too but what I'm really interested in is whether other cell types (muscle, connective tissue, lung, etc) can have thinking functions similar to neurons.

Can you give an example of a paradox which you think is unsolvable?

I think you pinpointed the real problem with this kind of discussion in your first post above: human beings (and perhaps other animals) think and feel, not their physiological parts. Of course, playing around with any of the physiological parts of a human being might affect how they think or feel, but we all already knew that : if you stub your toe, you feel pain, but it's not your toe that feels pain. Same principle: if you stimulate the visual cortex you can improve spatial recognition (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4961578/) but it's people that see things, not visual cortexes. Same principle: if you add an artificial heart, the patient's reactions to people might change (it's pretty major surgery after all) but it's neither his real nor his articifial heart that reacts to people. In Ryle's terminology, a fundamental category error is being made even by posing the question: Can the heart think?

Do you accept that thinking is a function of an organism embedded in an environment? Do you accept that the organism, as a unitary system, and its relation to its environment are indispensable for thinking as we know it? — Πετροκότσυφας

Yes and yes. I don't know what you're getting at though.

Can you give an example of a paradox which you think is unsolvable? — Sapientia

''This sentence is false''.

The accepted solution is to call it nonsense - that it's not a logical proposition. Isn't that convenient? I could do that to all paradoxes too but surely that would be avoiding the problem rather than providing a solution.

Kurt Godel employs it to undermine, validly, mathematics. Despite labelling it nonsensical, the liar statement is useful right?

This situation is a paradox in itself, a meta-paradox if you like.

Forget the heart for the moment.

We're drawn to mystery and the unknown. Does the proclivity for paradoxes originate in our minds? Why does the mind, seat of rationality, like an unsolvable riddle?

Is it because we want to find the fallacies within them or is it another part of our brains, a non/i-llogicaly dimension, that finds these paradoxes interesting and worth visiting.

Note, some of these paradoxes are literally unsolvable.

I think we have an innate drive to resolve kinks or contradictions in our knowledge. Feeling of dissonance and/or confusion, or feelings of knowledge incompleteness I think fuel the drive. Fixation on paradox is an extension of this I think.

Why does the mind, seat of rationality, like an unsolvable riddle? — TheMadFool

I'm not sure the mind likes anything, but insofar as you mean "how do paradoxes arise"? perhaps Kant's suggestion is worth thinking about: that it is a result of us taking principles of theoretical reason that apply only to actual and possible experience, and trying to apply them beyond all possible experience.

''This sentence is false''.

The accepted solution is to call it nonsense - that it's not a logical proposition. Isn't that convenient? I could do that to all paradoxes too but surely that would be avoiding the problem rather than providing a solution. — TheMadFool

There are many different types of solution to the liar paradox, I don't think any one of them qualifies as "the" accepted one. The Tarski-style response, that truth cannot be part of the content expressed by a sentence in any given language, would make the sentence nonsensical, I agree, but there are other responses, including some that involve rewriting classical laws of logic - such as getting rid of the law of excluded middle - which would leave the sentence expressing something meaningful.

I think we have an innate drive to resolve kinks or contradictions in our knowledge. Feeling of dissonance and/or confusion, or feelings of knowledge incompleteness I think fuel the drive. Fixation on paradox is an extension of this I think. — aporiap

You're right. Our logical mind is driven to solve the paradox. But what if there's truth in these paradoxes that some other part (non-logical) of our minds can understand?

But what if there's truth in these paradoxes that some other part (non-logical) of our minds can understand? — TheMadFool

The gut feeling that there is a truth behind some apparent paradox seems to me to stem from either of two things:1) it's not actually a paradox, we just haven't figured out the logic of it yet, but when we do it will be something our rational side will be able to comprehend; 2) our gut feeling is wrong.

No. 2 could happen for logical reasons. Like there being logical reasons why I want to eat a whole tin of brownies at once (yummy fat and sugar are hardwired into my senses by evolution), but it is illogical to do so (unhealthy, and I know I will feel like heck afterwards).

There is an expression in esoteric philosophy, The Eye of the Heart. It refers to a different kind or level of 'seeing' that is associated with spirituality. The little prince in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s book of that name said, “Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” It refers to a sense of the unity of the understanding, of the 'heart' (symbolising the emotive and affective aspect of the being) and the 'mind' (the 'organ of thought').

Whether this is 'thought' is another matter; perhaps not 'thought' in the sense of discursive intellection but more of a unitive intuition, a true 'seeing' that, as the saying has it, 'goes to the heart'.

In transcriptions of talks by Buddhist teachers of the Thai/Burmese 'forest tradition', the Sanskrit word 'citta' which is usually given as 'mind' is often translated as 'heart' or 'heart-mind'. Actually the root of the word is 'cit-' (चित्) which literally means awareness or consciousness, "true awareness", "to be aware of", "to understand", "to comprehend".

From a philosophical perspective maybe but not from biology. See this.

Some of these paradoxes have defied solution. It's probably true that the best minds have been working on them for centuries. In other words some paradoxes are unsolvable through logic.

Give up logic, its laws, and paradoxes vanish.

Realization is different from comprehension. The latter is brain and the former is heart (whatever ''heart'' is a metaphor for).

I don't see how one can contradict the other. Your stomach does not think. Your brain does not think. You think. The video is pretty much irrelevant. — Πετροκότσυφας

Well spoken for one confident in the status quo. However, what of ongoing research? Do you think all new discoveries will fit perfectly with the current framework of knowledge?

Is there no room for the new and TRUE in your world?

What kind of discovery would discredit the point that thinking is a function of the organism and not its organs? — Πετροκότσυφας

If only I knew.