rachmiel wrote:Fishy, I like that. To me, it's ALL fishy!
I was going to take credit for that pun, but possibly my brain just picked up on signals from your avatar
Interesting thought experiment, thanks for sharing. My result: If all the sense organs remain in place and only the brain moves, there is little to no sense of movement of mind/consciousness. It's a bit like moving a CPU with respect to a keyboard/mouse/screen. It doesn't matter where the CPU is located, as long as the keyboard/mouse/screen function normally.
Great! Stay with this. Again: if experience (mind) is located in the brain, then mustn't it move when the brain moves? If we stick to physicalist notions, isn't this inescapable? But, as you rightly noted, if there was
no change to experience, is it really reasonable to say that experience
moved? Try it now. You can simulate the experience of the brain being relocated by... just sitting there
. Does it make sense to say that your experience is "moving"?
How else might we make experience "move"? What if we move our head, or start walking? Is this "experience moving," or is it just a series of new experiences? Can you do
anything to make experience move? If it cannot be moved, then where is it? Is it still located where you were born? Is it meaningful to assign it a physical location at all?
Could it be that when we say that experience is "located in the brain," what we really mean is something more like: because experience seems like a "real thing", and because "real things" must have physical locations, the most sensible location for experience is the brain?
Perhaps it is only our insistence that experience is a (physically) "real thing" that causes this difficulty?
As they say in Dzogchen texts, it is not nonexistent, because it clearly appears. Yet it is not existent, because it cannot be pinned down as this or that (i.e., assigning it physical characteristics leads to nonsense, as we see above).
Edit: I now see that you've perhaps come to this recognition from this thread already