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James Damascus's picture

re: where are we located within the nervous system?

I've been wondering about this division between our "inner selves" and our material bodies. When we're young, we may assume that while we sleep, our surroundings are born away by some entity, or that we ourselves go some place (I was thinking about Dylan Thomas' poem "Fern Hill"). Perhaps these childhood observations are suggestive of the real answer in some sense- in other words, while the inputs and outputs we associate with waking life are shut down (we 'move away from our surroundings'), we are disconnected from the materially observable world, and retreat into some other 'place'- which we learned in class was inner-neuronal activity ('we go someplace'). A related question is just where are our "selves" located within the nervous system. Are our inner selves related in some way to the function of our inner neurons or the i function? Also, how do we deal with the example of Christopher Reeve following his accident- was the unaffected region of his brain really the only remaining vestige of "Christopher Reeve", or do we also consider the regions of his body that he no longer controlled actively part of his self or being. If he loses all brain function but his body is kept alive, is he still really there? 

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