You know roughly where your body is at all times, but where in it is your “self”?
Your center of mass is around the solar plexus, yet that doesn’t seem to universally be where people feel the center of their self to be. Most people feel they “are” right behind their eyes, probably in the brain.
Sometimes people have out-of-body experiences, completely changing their anchor for a while.
When pointing at themselves, people tend to point a thumb at their chest or face. Do they feel differently about it, or is it just convenience?
Are you a body with a head full of thinking goop and sensors on top, or are you a head sitting on a body?
And wherever you feel you are, have you felt different at any time? Can you change it?
Personally, I can’t separate the feeling of self from my vision, so “I” am directly behind my eyeballs and I can’t change it.
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Accurate. We’re bone mech, wearing flesh armour, driven by gut bacteria in our gut cabins.
You are mostly your brain, which extends to the rest of your body.
The thing about OOB cases is that the human brain is really good at faking information, or just generating it out of thin air.
In fact it never stops doing that, unless it is allowed to completely die.
If a person is resurrected, the brain generates “filler” information for the duration you were “out”.
For some, that is seeing an “afterlife”.
There is no universally specified “afterlife”, it’s based entirely on culture, and what the person has grown to believe in, even if they don’t believe it anymore.
Good Dog
“If a person is resurrected” then they are Jesus, or proof that there is an after-life, and miracles do happen. On the other hand, people are resuscitated all the time by modern medicine.
Shh now, don’t tell them about necromancy.
Oh man, this reminds me of a really cool PBS Nova mini series on the brain and how it’s basically very flawed at perception and how we ingest the world around us. Extremely fascinating.
I’ve never felt particularly connected to my body.
Have you ever felt someone else connect to your body?
No. It’s just more a feeling like my body is a tool I’m using. It’s not me, and has little to do with me personally any more than a hammer I use is personal.
I don’t even know that, I don’t particularly feel like I am either my body, head, or brain. I’ve never felt that I am a part of this body.
There’s a book called Impro by Keith Johnstone.
It’s a book about improvisation, though in there there’s a very interesting part on moving your center around when it comes to character work.
So long as the centre remains in the middle of your chest (pretend it’s a few inches deep), you will feel that you are still yourself and in full command, only more energetically and harmoniously so, with your body approaching an “ideal type”.
As soon as you try to shift the centre to some other place within or outside your body, you will feel that your whole psychological and physical attitude will change, just as it changes when you step into an imaginary body.
You will notice that the centre is able to draw and concentrate your whole being into one spot from which your activity emanates and radiates.
(Johnstone, 1987, p. 179).
You can also imagine a movable centre.
Let it sway slowly before your forehead and circle your head from time to time, and you will sense the psychology of a bewildered person.
Let it circle irregularly around your whole body, in varying tempos, now going up and now sinking down, and the effect will no doubt be one of intoxication.
(Johnstone, 1987, p. 180).
It would be interesting to know whether the location of your ‘self’ is tied to your dominant sense. So people blind from birth could be ‘between their ears’? Which isn’t that different, but would still produce slightly different answers. And how about people missing both hearing and vision? Could a person be ‘in their hands’? ‘Up their nose’? I’d better stop.
Hub. Interesting. My sense of self tends to be around my shoulder/back of head/neck area. I don’t get the feeling that I’m right behind my eyeballs, my sense of self is A bit lower and further back than that. Like, if I were centered between my ears, I’d have to move a bit lower and a bit more back.
Such a strange thing to have to focus on.
Spacetime is a lie.
I’m probably, mostly, behind my eyes, inside my head.
In moments of adrenaline and action, I’m in my chest or gut. Sometime hands, especially when doing delicate or involved work. Sometimes legs or arms when laboring.
In times of pain, I’m often at the focus of the pain until I work and ignore the physical and go somewhere deep inside that doesn’t hurt so much. Usually, a good memory or fantasy.
You are more than just a point in space. You see others perform actions and you attempt to replicate them.
This is a question the greatest minds haven’t been able to answer in millennia. Don’t expect an answer in a random lemmy thread. The closest answer to the truth I could give is “we don’t know”.
Not true. Many people have an answer to this. They are different, and I want to know what they are. :)
Thats fair. I guess because there is no definitive answer, everybody can have their own interpretation.
In Japan, people point to their face to indicate themselves
My location is irrelavent. All you need to know it that I am 1 mile from your location and approaching rapidly.
Under my blanket. No, my dog is sleeping on my legs.
Personally, I can’t separate the feeling of self from my vision, so “I” am directly behind my eyeballs and I can’t change it.
My experience is very similar, and I tend to explain it as “I (feel I) am my frontal cortex”, which it’s conveniently positioned very close.
Can you move?
If I close my eyes, I don’t feel I can move in the sense of “going to a different place”, but I feel like I have an “internal orientation” which (almost always) aligns with where I’m looking at. But with the eyes shut I can change that orientation and point it in different directions.
I don’t know if this will make sense to anyone… it’s very hard to explain these sensations with words.
