I want to weigh in a bit because I'm quite fascinated with people who think that there's this "something else" that houses our consciousness, memories and identity.
First off, let's establish that even as we are, we're not conscious about a lot of things. You're not conscious about how the neurons are working in your brain or how your stomach is digesting food and so on, even though it's part of you. So our consciousness is severely limited, and if it wasn't we'd probably be too distracted to do much at all, which suggests that whatever it is that allows us to be conscious is subjected to evolutionary pressures as well, which strongly suggests that it is susceptible to death.
Secondly, split brain people. One of my profs is actually making us do a review on neuro stuff recently, and split brain is something that really sheds light on how consciousness is affected by the state of the brain. For those who aren't familiar, cutting the corpus callosum, splitting the right and left brain and preventing any transfer of information between them, creates split brain. These people are only able to verbalize what their left brain perceives. The left brain isn't conscious about what the right brain perceives and cannot express it. But the right brain can express itself by moving the left hand or drawing, with the left hand, from all appearances,the right brain is not conscious of the left brain. So these patients' left hand would behave in a contradictory manner to their right hand occasionally, as if there are 2 personalities in one body. You can look up experiments (nothing creepy, just asking these people to perform simple tasks) with split brain people on youtube, it's very interesting.
As I delve deeper into neuroscience and psychology, it seems that the brain is all that we are. I know some people think that we just don't know enough, but I have a suspicion that nothing will qualify as "enough" until we find the existence of a "soul" or "something else".
First off, let's establish that even as we are, we're not conscious about a lot of things. You're not conscious about how the neurons are working in your brain or how your stomach is digesting food and so on, even though it's part of you. So our consciousness is severely limited, and if it wasn't we'd probably be too distracted to do much at all, which suggests that whatever it is that allows us to be conscious is subjected to evolutionary pressures as well, which strongly suggests that it is susceptible to death.
Secondly, split brain people. One of my profs is actually making us do a review on neuro stuff recently, and split brain is something that really sheds light on how consciousness is affected by the state of the brain. For those who aren't familiar, cutting the corpus callosum, splitting the right and left brain and preventing any transfer of information between them, creates split brain. These people are only able to verbalize what their left brain perceives. The left brain isn't conscious about what the right brain perceives and cannot express it. But the right brain can express itself by moving the left hand or drawing, with the left hand, from all appearances,the right brain is not conscious of the left brain. So these patients' left hand would behave in a contradictory manner to their right hand occasionally, as if there are 2 personalities in one body. You can look up experiments (nothing creepy, just asking these people to perform simple tasks) with split brain people on youtube, it's very interesting.
As I delve deeper into neuroscience and psychology, it seems that the brain is all that we are. I know some people think that we just don't know enough, but I have a suspicion that nothing will qualify as "enough" until we find the existence of a "soul" or "something else".
