• NOS4A2
    9.2k


    When you say that I must "be a body" in order to do those things, what do you mean by "body"? Must I have arms and legs? What about eyes and ears? Or does a brain suffice?

    I mean you. The thing that goes to sleep and dreams, or sits and plays World of Warcraft—call it want you want, but it is a human being.
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k
    That last animated GIF just about sums up my feelings about your annoying tendency to post animated GIFs, especially mockingly-toned ones like the last twopetrichor

    giphy.gif
  • Terrapin Station
    13.8k
    It is amusing but extremely distracting and annoying. It is impossible for me to read and take seriously anything nearby without actually covering it up with my hand. I am having a hard time even thinking clearly and writing this post with those jumping heads just above.petrichor


    Find a therapist
  • bongo fury
    1.6k
    It makes me feel trapped in my self and give me anxiety.raindrop

    I can cheer you up.

    See yourself as an information processing machine (don't go away...) levels more complex than any artificial model, but still a machine we could in principle enter...

    as into a mill. And this granted, we should only find on visiting it, pieces which push one against another...Gottfried Leibniz, Monadology

    Then notice that, often, it isn't at all clear where one such "mill" or processing system ends and another begins.

    Certainly, within a physically defined building or person, processing appears to consist in sharing of information by relatively independent subsystems, but this doesn't lead us to doubt the single collaborative function of the larger whole.

    Less obviously, but arguably, information mills and persons, by sharing information (talking, singing, grooming, exchanging letters), often collaborate in a larger system of the same kind that each of them exemplifies individually.

    On this view, seeing mind as a function or process instead of a substance, human communication (when it happens) is what we often naively take it to be: a meeting/joining of minds. Only dualistic habits of thought spoil the view, and make us think we are separated from each other, and each trapped in some interior, like an audience in a theatre.
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