another pseudoscientific ramble:
people, our minds, our 'spark' of sapience, our soul if you want; exist almost exclusively in memory. before I expand, some core notions;
there is no separate plane of reality where a soul or consciousness exists, invisible except for the impact in has on the material physical world. our bodies are not vehicles for these souls, there is no mind-body distinction, in fact significant elements of our 'minds' reside outside our brains, in our bodies. you cannot put a brain in a jar without removing portions of the mind, necessary for it's full potential.
this does not mean that people lacking senses, lacking limbs or any other kind of disability are less sapient, but it would be patronising and false to deny there is any absence. this absence is self explanatory, it's effects are what it is. there isn't a hidden mental ability in our limbs that we lose when we lose a limb. we lost a limb, and now we are short a limb and that informs what we are. which sounds remarkably trite, but it is crucial to understand this in the context of the orthodoxy of mind body distinctions.
I am infinitely tempted to extrapolate on my theories as to the source and nature of this orthodoxy, which I believe cannot simply be credited to religion or a dominant western academic body of knowledge. But it's not important and I'm constantly thinking about it differently. same with the main topic, but this is too different and deep a tangent to follow.
what is crucial is that our bodies and minds are singular, systems layered upon interconnected systems that function in unison towards what we consider ourselves. we also function similarly in a greater whole, but that's another labyrinthine tangent. from the interaction of single cells, their ancient subsuming to form mitochondria from disparate parts; when we consider something singular or composite is an arbitrary border, less we break everything down to composites of fermions and bosons, or even less. so we unify and summarise, although much we generalise exists above even molecular compositions. anyways. the mind is not actually exclusive from these groupings, nor is it contained to just the brain, or even the nerves. our sapience, our consciousness, our minds, must be necessarily considered a part and product of our entire self, and even our broader environment. our environments inform our thinking, from the abstract high level behaviours to the most basic causal correlation.
it frustrates coherent and straightforward analysis to adopt this perspective, but this individualistic mind body duality is far more limiting, and it leads to further splintering where speciation of even our minds lends our language a absurd birds eye perspective of ourselves, where our minds are something we can view and engage with externally.
we exist, to ourselves and others, not in the instance of our actions, but after the delay of sensory reception and processing, in memory. in the same way a sentence is composed of stored words, which are composed of stored sounds, patterns of sensory information held in sequence over time and given specific meaning; an entire mind is held is sequence. after all, the person you are, I am, is largely consistent day to day. even when specific memory fails, the persistence of self is embodied by memory, not a continuous sequence of arbitrarily short moments. when you sleep and wake, the same person bridges that gap because it exists as memory. so significant is memory, that I would genuinely argue memory orientated neuroscience will be the most accurate and successful approach. it's the only approach. sensory processing, even thinking itself, all feeds to, functions within the framework of holding a sequence across time. it all persists within memory. but, as explained above, the mind is not just the brain, not even just the body. so what is memory, or does my definition warp into something so general and mystic that it just becomes the ether, the abstract fabric of reality, pointless to define or study and utterly false?
that one is tough. but I would point to trauma. its effects beyond just the mental, beyond the physiological damage to neural structure, but the holistic manifestation, the impact crater that shapes a mind and it's tangible expression. there is therapy for trauma, but it helps us reach some level of capacity, some standard arbitrarily assigned as normal or useful. and it remains, else it is forgotten and never existed, leaving no evidence. which isn't the case, it remains, we remember, and are informed and formed of it, even if it doesn't define as much of us. the boundaries of trauma aren't contained, our actions, the environment we cultivate are products and part of our minds which contains that trauma. we can examine an individual outside that context, or at least as isolated from those expressions as possible; but that would be deliberately excising a portion of it, not evidence to it's presence elsewhere, but a section of that presence itself.
I'm repeating myself in a different way; that's not evidence, just a very rough example. unfortunately it's one of those notions that's so simplistic and self-justifying that it becomes ontological, just a perspective of existence entirely, one unlikely to gain any traction because it simultaneously constrains a theory of mind to a specific frame, then expands that frame to encompass pretty much anything. if we recognise it and interact with it, the frame has already subsumed it, thus everything technically fits in the box: there is no box.
frustrating. arbitrary nonsense. ether.
but somewhere here is a portion of something meaningful.
