That's a pretty direct causal link between a measurable brain state and something as fundamental as "where does my body end?"
The self changes rapidly when dementia, alzheimers, a car crash, or a concussion which rocks someone's world the wrong way.
Who we are is incredibly fragile. You are just one bad infection away from being a different person.
My life is materially the same as it was on Friday but I definitely feel different after events this weekend.
- Heraclitus
‘When I believed [that personal identity is what matters], I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.
When I believed [that personal identity is what matters], I also cared more about my inevitable death. After my death, there will be no one living who will be me. I can now redescribe this fact. Though there will later be many experiences, none of these experiences will be connected to my present experiences by chains of such direct connections as those involved in experience-memory, or in the carrying out of an earlier intention. Some of these future experiences may be related to my present experiences in less direct ways. There will later be some memories about my life. And there may later be thoughts that are influenced by mine, or things done as the result of my advice. My death will break the more direct relations between my present experiences and future experiences, but it will not break various other relations. This is all there is to the fact that there will be no one living who will be me. Now that I have seen this, my death seems to me less bad.’
Hence 'I' is relative.
Should more read the book to get the same powerful benefit you received or stay away from the book?
Sharing more: It shattered my prior beliefs about who "I" thought I was. When I read certain passages from the book, I knew it was true. It hurt my ego because it was undeniable. My old belief system was floored. My ideas about myself and others was insufficient. That shattered "me".
In many ways, it probably just helped me to be more compassionate and accepting of my situation and that of others. You cannot really put a price on wisdom like that and I guess for some people, getting to that point doesn't come without collateral ?
I already subscribed to the idea of the self and identity being independent and constructs. A lot of reflection around that and physics in younger years maybe helped.
Some knowledge of physics would help for sure. From memory, there is some mention of psychics it in the book?
Maybe there was some warning in the book, but I was young and keen enough that I would've just heeded that.
Even the author of the books father is a renowned meditation teacher, I'm sure that was helpful.
An excellent example of research that maybe shouldn't have been pursued, although it's possible that there are a large number of potential recuperative applications as well that I'm not aware of.
Now, of course, we know those algorithms warp regular users (and by extension societies). Or... maybe they don't? Some research has suggested that just putting this many people in direct communication with each other is the root cause of the problems we see. There could be other ways to fix those without shutting down the internet. How would we know without more exploration?
So, ping>1 = that part is outside.
That's the limit of "you"? Sounds more like a sampling rate/processing speed of the sense of touch.
> With a third group of participants, they used a non-invasive technique called transcranial alternating current stimulation to speed up or slow down the frequency of a person's alpha waves. And sure enough, this seemed to correlate with how real a fake hand felt.
I know this is largely orthogonal to the article, and I know what “non-invasive” means and why it’s used in this sentence, but it made me chuckle - “this technique that changed the subject’s brain waves sufficient to literally impact their sense of self - but don’t worry! It’s non-invasive!”
OTH nearly all brain experiments are non-invasive. Did they mean to use the word to downplay how seriously impacting the experiment was?
We've noticed that each of us integrates not just sensory information differently, but we also seem to be "wired" differently.
For instance, we are AuDHD, and I, the primary host, lean strongly to the autism behavioral side, my co-host is somewhere between, and a secondary host leans strongly to the ADHD behavioral side. Things that are easy for me can be hard for another.
We also experience senses very differently. There have been many times where one of us can smell something strongly, switch, and the other can't smell it at all.
This affects other senses as well. When I watch a 24 fps movie at a theater, for about the first 10 minutes, all I see is a strobing of still images before I finally adapt and see motion. My co-host sees continuous motion right from the start. This may relate to the temporal binding window discussed in the paper as a motivation for their research.
Our working hypothesis since we were finally diagnosed has been that identity is, at least in part, an integration of both sensory information as well as how strongly various brain regions are activated by whichever identity or identities are most active at a particular time.
Lastly, we have the ability to "take control" over just part of the body. For example, for whatever reason, the motion of stirring a sauce is difficult to me, but it's trivial for another, so sometimes they'll take control of our arms to stir the pot while cooking. To me it feels like my arms have disappeared and someone else's arms are now attached and stirring the pot. This may be temporal binding window related because we do seem to experience sensory information at different speeds and this might cause us to get that alien hand feeling, which is sort of opposite of the rubber hand illusion.
So, I suspect that each of us would react differently to the rubber hand illusion test.
I wonder if the brain can experience if clothing, tools, bikes are part of the body?
Can things like meditation modify that? Or how about stuff like OOBE's like what some folks call astral projection? What do those practices to to the body's electric field?
There are some capacitive sensors (Electric Potential Integrated Circuit or EPIC) that can work through clothing fabric (which is a resistor). Within a few millimeters they are good enough for a diagnostic EKG. It's also used for stress monitoring, and can be embedded in a mattress or seat back.
There are also magnetoencephalography, magnetocardiography, magnetogastrography, and magnetomyography systems in use, which use superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUID). Those are orders of magnitude sensitive enough (10^-18 T sensitivity vs 10^-6 T to 10^-9 T for some body processes or 10^-15 T for neural activity).
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20664147/
Meditation can alter a lot of “you” , and there is a reason you learn the advanced stuff under a guru (yoga mostly) or monk (buddhism).
>Recent health research has focused on subtle energy and vibrational frequency as key components of health and healing.
*ding ding, crackpot alert, ding ding*
I'm not adverse to that, as I do believe that much of metaphysics does have real physical backing that we haven't uncovered yet.
But I also asked a strong scientific question. First, with the human electric field, how far does it extend outside the body and at what strength? Secondly, can drugs or practices modify this, and how so?
Electromagnetic fields extend infinitely.
>Can things like meditation modify that?
Anything you do with your brain changes the electric field. Reading this comment changed the electric field generated by your brain by some tiny amount.
The perception goes beyond feeling fine sensations in the interface to the instrument/equipment, but literally feeling like it is a part of your body. I've gotten it in both alpine ski racing and sportscar racing. When it is ON, moving a ski or wheel to a particular spot feels the same as when I'd put my foot on a particular rock where running in rough terrain, and often even more part of me than when kicking a soccer ball with my real foot. Both the sensitivity of the feel (feedback) and the precision with which I could execute was just an entire other level, and it is still weird to think of how it was often better feedback & precision than my own foot in a less-skilled situation.
https://duckduckgo.com/l/?uddg=https%3A%2F%2Fneurophysics.uc...
> I _have_ a body, I _am_ a soul.
Maybe what they're identifying is the first half of that statement, how we interpret the former, through the presence of the latter.
I heard Michal Levin talk about dualism recently. He has an interesting point: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Qp0rCU49lMs&t=6210
singularity, described by The Swans: https://youtu.be/Wn7xv6SNSUc?list=PLUcXHQ7VorrWZwLE5j2m89ltg...
That we have first-person experiences shows the soul is definitely not "a process your body runs" : it's where your whole experience "registers".
That we are not flesh robots is also why we have free will. You could coherently argue that free-will is an illusion, but you can't argue that first-person experience is an illusion, as you need something to perceive the illusion.
Yes, with an advanced version on an LLM on top that makes it seem like you is you. As of so far we've found zero external magical devices that cause our body to act like it does other than the cells and electrical signals they produce.
>we have first-person experiences
Do you? You say you do, much like an LLM says it knows things. But all these things you say about you are actually effects many orders separated from the cause. Your idea of first-person is something you're experiencing many filters later. Which is what the article is somewhat about. Messing with the input signals to your brain via physical mechanism changes what you feel about who you are. There is not magic, just electron flows.
>but you can't argue that first-person experience is an illusion, as you need something to perceive the illusion.
A computer can generate and play it's own video game. This can be entirely virtualized like a dream, or it could be more like AR where it's getting inputs from the world around us. "But, but, but, that's totally different in ways I cannot explain nor do I want to because I'm special"
Our improvements in AI will never lead to AI being proven smart. It will just lead to humans being proven dumb.
Whether personality is entirely based on laws of physics or not - is a separate question.
But once you carry that reasoning to its full conclusion, the original argument for a "soul" or "self" that can even be meaningfully called "I" vanishes entirely. There still is some sort of underlying "true" subjective awareness that's felt to be ontologically basic in some sense (just like the "soul") but now it's entirely impersonal (the traditional term is "spirit", or "the absolute") since anything that's still personal is no longer comprised in it: an ongoing phenomenon and perhaps an inherent feature of existence itself, not a "thing".
You better always feel like you otherwise you may not help this non-you survive, hence the non-you's went extinct quickly.
Person me = new Person {
body: { ... },
personality/soul: { ... },
emotionalState: { ... },
memories: { ... }
}
I think for a visual only test you'd need something to the effect of a neuralink that gave control over the robot arm.
Otherwise we're dealing with a set of signal mixing where your brain is attempting to take the strongest/what it deems the most important signals and give an effect based on that. The eyes give us far more data than we can actually process so the has to filter down this data to a usable stream. This can also happen with tactile response, but the number of situations this occurs in is rather rare.
I guess what I'm trying to say, at the end of the day all observed effects (except maybe reflexes) are psychological as the brain is trying to create an accurate virtualization of the input data it's receiving and that more data doesn't necessarily mean better outcomes.
You always hear about how something is an extension of the body to the best athletes.
How about now?
Now run the same kinds of tests while listening to music, meditation, sleep, orgasm, psychoactive substances (including caffeine/alcohol/nicotine), during simulated stress event (hard slap in the face?), on different age groups, genders, races. Perhaps there are more than one version or definition of "You" that arises in certain circumstances.
Curses!