How does my mind talk to my body? [audio] | Hacker News Reader

How does my mind talk to my body? [audio]

bbc.co.uk

27 pointsdavesailer16 comments

How does the speed talk to the car? How does the stirring talk to the coffee? How does flow talk to the river? How does the orbit talk to the planet? How does the flight talk to the airplane? How does breathing talk to the lungs?

All these questions make the same amount of sense: The mind is activity a part of the body (cf. the brain) is doing. It can stop doing it anytime. When it does, the mind didn't go anywhere; it stopped existing. Later the brain might start "minding" again, with a substrate of memories and sensory activity to direct it. If it gets damaged enough, anything we would recognize as thought can no longer occur.

The title using "mind" instead of "brain" also made me think it'd be about this, but it seems to just be about how the brain sends signals to the rest of the body through the nervous system (specifically the vagus nerve).

That's a nice reductionist way to look at it.

Given deeper thought, one will find that it's a much more complicated problem to model for. Intuition starts to get fuzzy and practicality goes out the window when factoring in physical constraints.

It's quite an interesting interaction and there's much to look into the mind-body "problem" and causality. There's a few different models from various bodies of thought.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_problem#Mind...

The problem is not about minds connecting to bodies. The problem is all, 100%, about the minds of the people asking the question: fatally confused minds.

How does the driver software in the printer make the paper move? The software is a pattern of 1s and 0s the microcontroller is following, that directs when various signals turn on and off. Some of those signals are involved in making the program work, copying bits here and there inside it. Others turn motors on and off. But the signals are all exactly the same—just electric currents in transistors. Literally, literally the only difference is whether they connect back into the microcontroller, or out to the motor.

How come you imagine blue when you read "blue", but downvote me when you read this? Some nerves connect back to other nerves, some connect to muscles. It is all just nerves pinging. Absolutely nothing except nerves pinging, modulated this way and that in a bath of hormones. Anything else is failed imagination.

But you can understand it if you don't deliberately confuse yourself.

It might be easier to understand what you're actually saying if it didn't seem like you were being deliberately vague and hand-wavish just to sound sophisticated.

> It might be easier to understand what you're actually saying if it didn't seem like you were being deliberately vague and hand-wavish just to sound sophisticated.

And, yet, your refutation is:

>Given deeper thought, one will find that it's a much more complicated problem to model for. Intuition starts to get fuzzy and practicality goes out the window when factoring in physical constraints.

I think one of these is deliberately vague and hand-wavish just to sound sophisticated. The one that's arguing for some mystical mind-body duality and "deeper thought".

It might be worth pointing out that I'm not the author of that refutation. But I agree that that refutation was itself pretty vague. I was still more irked by the guy being going full Zen-master in the level of clarity of his posts, calling people fatally confused for even thinking about the question and then wondering about being downvoted.

The degree of confusion that could lead one to conclude from what I wrote that I was "wondering about being downvoted", is positively dizzying. Anyone so confused would certainly starve to death absent continual provision by others.

Anyone who could read the above and think it is vague will be fatally confused about every subject.

I think that breathing is pretty profound in that, it’s one of the few body processes that you can actively engage in. I highly recommend breathing practices a la XPT / Laird Hamilton.

Oh no! You made me think about it!

That is one of the weirdest things about breathing to me, that it's an autonomic process that suddenly feels "manual" when when you think about it.

Furthermore what is the relationship between you and your brain. It does a lot of stuff while you're not paying attention.

wires?

We are flying spaghetti monsters: https://www.livescience.com/61599-dissected-nervous-system-p...

That's quite the link. I like to read Kandel 'Principles of Neural Science' because it's amazing. That picture just unfolds from dna in all of us. Fulfills the old adage of "we're just brains riding in skeleton mechs powered by meat"

Indeed. A self-modifying base 4 program, that generates analog structures...quite amazing.

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