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Here's an off-beat philosophical question. When you think, I'd bet you would say your thoughts physically come from your head, since obviously that's the organ that creates them.
But if you ask many Hunter-Gatherer people from various tribes around the globe, they would tell you thoughts come from your heart.
So, how would your belief in the source of yourself affect your understanding of the world?
Is it natural to divide your mind from your body, or is it cultural?
Can you really, honestly feel your thoughts happening in your head, or do you feel that way because your culture says that's where thoughts come from?
The old Tabula Rasa debate? Nature vs. Nurture? This is long been debated, my friend. I'd have to say it goes neither way exclusively. We rely on instinct, but we rely even more so on waht we are taught. DNA is our first textbooks; what we have to learn from that is what you may call nature. But we cannot function without being taught things not immediately provided by DNA.
I mean really, do you acknowledge the existence of DNA? Do you acknowledge that schooling really does make you think? If so, there's your answer: both!
June is thinking that your querie is hardly "off beat" as it is vaguely reminscent of Descartes. (Wasn't it Descarte who queried the separation between mind/body/soul? --Help me out here, Mystic, it's been a looonnggg day at work!)
You remember correctly, June . . . Rene is a mind/body Dualist.
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From June's standpoint, it's something of a "no brainer" (pun intended) that without our physical brains, we would not have self perception, let alone the capacity to ask ourselves the very question the OP asks. However, June is of the opinion that it is both mind (psyche) in conjunction with culture. Cultural perspective lends a lot. Had we all been raised in Tibet, even our conception of ourselves, and the very question posed in the OP would be dramatically different.
The need for the production facility (brain) is indisputable . . . but the locus and nature of the product (psyche/mind/soul) is what is in dispute.
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Then again, it would be difficult at best to account for what it is in mankind that compels him to ask --down through the ages-- just what it is that the "source of ourselves" really is....Brahman? Christ? Vishnu? Or, in June's case, Freud? (j/k~!)
It is the same source that accounts for all that we call "instincts" built into the design (DNA) of the brain.
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Originally Posted by Konraden
Oxytocin is one such famous one. The "love drug" is what causes those emotions, those feelings.
June respectfully disagrees with that ^^ one. The opiate merely provides the illusion of something other than what it is...
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Originally Posted by Konraden
Are you saying that oxytocin provides the illusion of "love" when there isn't one?
She's saying that it only provides an illusion. Of love, of one's "real self" or however you wish to categorize it.
-Just ask her patients that she's referred to long term rehab...
The discovery of the chemical processes that are invoked by the brain when the psyche responds to a potential love object does not mean the chemical is the cause of the love. Without the psyche already reacting to activate the chemical there would not be the chemical reaction . . . chicken/egg. Materialist reductionists always get the cause/effect reversed once they identify something as related to a chemical process in the brain. They seem to conveniently forget that it is the psyche that activates the chemicals in response to something first. The ability to externally activate the chemical reactions in no way means that there is nothing "real" that activates them "naturally."
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~It just warms the coddles of June's "just June" heart when warring factions get along, and greet the morning together! She would have repped ya both, if she could!!!
*sigh*
We try, dear.
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This is long been debated, my friend. I'd have to say it goes neither way exclusively. We rely on instinct, but we rely even more so on waht we are taught. DNA is our first textbooks; what we have to learn from that is what you may call nature. But we cannot function without being taught things not immediately provided by DNA.
(j/k~!)
