Who thinks that?
Even little kids know that if you get too hungry or tired you aren't going to be able to do a complex task.
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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well like most of the wellness programs i've seen. they only admit to like general "you'll feel better" but otherwise it's like they demonize it when someone's brain doesn't let them do some thing and somehow they're just supposed to power through that.
I'm a bit confused about your point here. It doesn't seem to address the question and in general I'm not sure what you're trying to say
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I once read that the Romans didn't really understand what the brain was for, and believed that thoughts and emotions emanated from the heart. They certainly saw enough warfare and bloodshed to know that a massive head wound/ brain injury was fatal, but didn't really understand its purpose.
I have a tumor in my thalamus. I've also survived a TBI with subarachnoid hemorrhage, and I have bone spurs compressing my spinal cord. I get random spells where I get super dizzy, dripping sweat, my heart rate skyrockets, my vision starts going dark around the edges, and I feel like I need to sit down before I fall down.
I'm struggling to find work from home because driving with presyncope is dangerous. My inlaws think it's just an excuse to be lazy and siphon money off my partner.
Because the brain seems to think it is not a part of the body.
Source: Brain told me to type this.
who is the me the brain told that to tho lol
Body.
why does the body feed the brain with info like senses and chemicals then?
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It's because of mind-body dualism. Most people have absorbed some amount of mysticism from the culture around them without realizing it, and a distressing amount of Western mystic traditions have some form of mind-body or spirit-body dualism.
True, and nondual traditions like tantric Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and Kashmir Shivism really have a leg up in that regard, but Descartes really cemented it as the supposed “objective” fact (lol) that it is today.
The root problem though is the felt sense of separation the mind creates but that mystical experiences can dissolve.
I put it like this: if you replaced any other part, or even all your other parts with machines, you'd still be (what you think of as) you... because your brain would still be in there.
There is, however, no replacing the brain. If your brain goes, you go with it. You are your brain.
But if we cut the bridge between the two brain hemispheres that allows them to communicate with eachother - the corpus callosum - it still feels subjectively like “you” remain unchanged. Yet there are ways to communicate with each hemisphere independently, as shown in the so-called split-brain experiments. The findings show that the two hemispheres often give different answers to the same questions. They also show that if you tell the left hemisphere to perform an action and then ask the right hemisphere why it did it, the right side will invent an excuse. So the question is - which hemisphere are you?
My answer to that is that it’s neither - there is no “you.” The sense of there being a center to consciousness is an illusion. There’s only consciousness and its contents. If we could perfectly copy your brain, that copy would also subjectively feel like you.
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Are you talking about consciousness? As this is separate from the mind. It would disappear from being encased within the body without a mind just as it would without a heart being that the body without these elements is not capable of reaching consciousness because it’s not capable of sustained living.
Note: it has not been scientifically proven yet that the consciousness resides in an exact spot in the brain hence they speak of consciousness and mind as separate.
Note also that there have been people who lived their entire life missing about 80% of their brain (or more https://www.sciencealert.com/a-man-who-lives-without-90-of-his-brain-is-challenging-our-understanding-of-consciousness ) without even realizing it
One case where the brain was only a crust within the scull bone and still had an operating consciousness.
but that's not true tho, if you replaced my hand I'd be like "well I AM one handed now", there won't be a two handed me anymore so i'll be a new me. and like if this was true, then transgender folk would have a hell of a easier time i think.
Yes it is true, very much so. You took one part of the argument and reflected it.
So how about the other part of that comment.
Do you believe you would still be you without your brain?
The real flip side of your question is: do you think you'd still be you as a "brain in a vat" without any body?
Ultimately this whole discussion boils down to challenging the definition of "you" or "I". Biologically every "singular" person is the result of many living things working together, so the concept of "I" is an illusion. Physically, there is no "I", but only "us".
This makes the discussion easier. If the hand is removed, then of course "we" are different because "we" lost a piece of "us". This would also be true if "our" brain was removed.
Nevertheless, there have been cases of brain dead people's body adapting to the lack of central nervous system, so the body is more independently alive than we tend to give it credit.
Nevertheless, there have been cases of brain dead people's body adapting to the lack of central nervous system
We're they on life support, or do you have an example of it happening without any outside assistance?
so the body is more independently alive than we tend to give it credit.
Being able to biologically adapt to a different control mechanism is cool, but it's not necessarily 'alive' depending on your definition. The biological mechanisms may still fire, but that doesn't mean that you're doing anything more than keeping a meat sack functioning while it otherwise atrophies.
You are correct, the person was on life support. But they grew and went through puberty like any other normal functioning human. (I believe the person was born brain dead, and the wealthy parents couldn't let go so they kept the person on life support at home).
Cells are living things by definition. So it is alive, though the body functions more like a tree than a mammal at that point. But a decentralized nervous system grew around the different vital organs.
Why not? When I am asleep, I consider myself to be me but asleep.
All language breaks down under scrutiny.
Oh please. Nice words and all, but if you fall into a ditch, you don't say "well, shit, we're fucked!" like Gollum. You feel like a single entity in trouble. You don't say "my dear neurons, gut bacteria and anus cells, let's work together to get out of this mess!!"
You truly believe the semantics of the English language disproves the point? English and the way it defines "I" is greatly affected by things seperate from biological definitions (one being the spiritual concept of the "soul")
Also, there did exist languages in other cultures that did not have the same concept of "I" as the English language. Your counter-argument is very weak.
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that's kinda a pointless question because we can't verify?? you have a brain when ur born but obvs it's a different kind of brain when ur old. the brain changes too so what is the "me" here? like my brain is different already from when i started writing this.
It can easily be verified. Find someone without a head and ask them. Are they the same person just without a head?
no but go and find that head and ask the same question lmao
He said "things are cool baby"
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Ship of Theseus
Descartes, and Protestantism.
not followin ya completely... i see lots of people call themselves 'spiritual' thinking their consciousness is somehow distinct from the body.
its an emergent property of the connectome. you arent you without those interconnected neurons.
That's even more complicated. Not only do some people struggle with the brain being connected to the body, there's lots of people who think that you consciousness is disconnected from your brain.
Now it's true that we cannot exactly trace thoughts traveling through their respective neurons, but we definitely know that that's all that thoughts are. Tiny electric impulses rushing through the brain and creating associative ideas and concepts. And then we call them thoughts.
So yeah people get weird about it,I think they won't stop unless we manage to map out all neurons, which I don't think will happen anytime soon.
Something i have thought about for some time. Do we only have one consciousness? Like if you literally split your brain in half via operation suddenly you got two brain halves tha't can not communicate with each other in any way. Do you now have 2 personalities and consciousness? If yes, why don't you have them before? Maybe you always have two but they are just in agreement. And why stop at two? There are some interviews with siamese twins (the teacher sisters for example) and it's so interesting to see how they talk. They finish each other sentences which is natural i guess but they also say "ehh" when the other one doesn't know a word. It's like a single person talking. I am not arguing they are distinctive persons. Just some random thoughts.
The findings from those split-brain experiments are fascinating - and maybe a little unsettling.
I often wonder whether the “second consciousness” is created the moment the corpus callosum is cut, or whether it was always there, just hidden by the brain’s integration. If it’s the latter, that opens up some really interesting implications. For instance, when you feel like you should do something but don’t want to - could that inner conflict actually be the two hemispheres quietly disagreeing with each other?
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The self, whatever that actually is, believes it's separate from the body. It's one of the key reasons people believe in spirits/souls and afterlives.
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People think the blood brain barrier is a lot more absolute than it really is.
Most people don't know the blood-brain barrier exists.
Who says the brain is the most important organ in the body...? The brain...
Because their brains decided so.
who are they then? are they the brain?
You're getting into some fun philosophical concepts with this. Look up the mind body problem and you might find some interesting reads. :)
yeah lol i actually looked at the wikipedia article but like i don't really get the probelm?? to me there obviously isn't a disconnect and i didn't realize other people ACTUALLY think there is? like i realized it makes a lot more sense now why some people think like "you can just WILLPOWER your way through" whatever. Like they ACTUALLY believe it's a thing??
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I was going to say something about the body being an extension of the brain (a very important one), though given some of your responses I feel like it's more relevant that many areas of our society treats commerce as a higher priority than human ecology. Even ignoring statistics.
I think quite a few people don't treat it like an organ(if that what's it actually is). Like mind over matter can work for anyone no matter what is wrong with the fucked up brain
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I blame Plato
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