From: Brent Allsop (allsop@swttools.fc.hp.com)
Date: Fri Jul 17 1998 - 15:09:44 MDT
Michael Lorrey <retroman@together.net> replied:
> You feel your mind is behind your eyeballs because the middle of
> your skill is not only the visual stereoscopic center of perception,
> but aural as well.
This is more or less coincidental. Think about where pain is
located to better understand this. Our knowledge of our fingers are
not the real fingers, but simply a conscious representation of them in
our brain. When we hurt our fingers the pain, which is produced by
our brain, feels like it is in the finger because the pain is in our
conscious representation of our finger, not in the actual flesh and
bone finger. (That is why people experience "phantom limb pain" in an
amputated limb! Amputating a limb doesn't amputate the conscious
model of that limb in their brain.) The pain isn't in the finger, it
is in the brain.
Everything we know is a phenomenal conscious representation in
our brain. There is an entire world, constructed of quale inside our
brain that models, bassed on the data received by our senses, the
world beyond our senses. Despite our optimized intuition, the two are
not the same thing. (If they were, virtual reality would not work.)
One is a cause of perception, the other is the effect. We are not
really aware of what is beyond our senses, including our limbs, but
only of this model of what is beyond our senses in our brain. So, if
it "feels" like our mind is "behind" our eyeballs, it is because our
knowledge of ourselves is constructed in this manner by our brain in
our conscious model of reality. Our brain has a conscious image of
ourselves, including the head or skull, with a representation of
ourselves, just behind our eyeballs in this model. And all of this
model, along with all the other conscious knowledge our brain has, is
entirely inside our real skull.
> Note, if you ask a blind and deaf person where they feel their mind
> is, they will reply: "In my fingertips".....
Exactly, the model of reality that is produced by these
people, or their knowledge, is different than ours. If someone
altered a seeing and hearing person's brain properly, (this can also
occur naturally in dreams) they, too, would feel like they existed in
their fingertips. So, the fact that it happens to be "the visual
stereoscopic center" is simply because our brain models our knowledge
of ourselves that way. It may be efficient for our brain to do it
that way, but it need not necessarily be that way. Anything is
possible in this world of dreams that our brain uses to model or
consciously know about reality. I like to call this world produced by
our brain, that is our conscious knowledge, that is the result of the
cause and effect perception process not the initial cause, the spirit
world. Our true location is really entirely within this model of all
of reality which is entirely in our brains. The true "US" or "I" is
not constructed of flesh and bones, but of qualia, or if you will,
this spiritual conscious or whatever phenomenon that is produced by
our brain.
And that's why out of body experiences are so common. Within
such a dream, you are out of the conscious model of you body, but
though you are out of your conscious knowledge of your skull, you are
still within the conscious dream world that is entirely within the
real bone that is your real skull. One skull is made of bone, the
other is made of phenomenal qualia, is entirely inside the other, and
is merely a conscious representation or knowledge of the other.
When you realize that this is what conscious knowledge is, you
realize that true out of body experiences are absurd and impossible,
and that they really must simply be dreams entirely contained within
conscious model of reality no part of which can ever leave the bounds
of our real skull. At least not YET!
Brent Allsop
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