You know roughly where your body is at all times, but where in it is your “self”?
Your center of mass is around the solar plexus, yet that doesn’t seem to universally be where people feel the center of their self to be. Most people feel they “are” right behind their eyes, probably in the brain.
Sometimes people have out-of-body experiences, completely changing their anchor for a while.
When pointing at themselves, people tend to point a thumb at their chest or face. Do they feel differently about it, or is it just convenience?
Are you a body with a head full of thinking goop and sensors on top, or are you a head sitting on a body?
And wherever you feel you are, have you felt different at any time? Can you change it?
Personally, I can’t separate the feeling of self from my vision, so “I” am directly behind my eyeballs and I can’t change it.
You are mostly your brain, which extends to the rest of your body.
The thing about OOB cases is that the human brain is really good at faking information, or just generating it out of thin air.
In fact it never stops doing that, unless it is allowed to completely die.
If a person is resurrected, the brain generates “filler” information for the duration you were “out”.
For some, that is seeing an “afterlife”.
There is no universally specified “afterlife”, it’s based entirely on culture, and what the person has grown to believe in, even if they don’t believe it anymore.
Username jokes can be low-hanging fruit, but I thought that one was fairly wholesome.
“If a person is resurrected” then they are Jesus, or proof that there is an after-life, and miracles do happen. On the other hand, people are resuscitated all the time by modern medicine.
Oh man, this reminds me of a really cool PBS Nova mini series on the brain and how it’s basically very flawed at perception and how we ingest the world around us. Extremely fascinating.
You have a brain in your head and a “second brain” in your gut, so thinking of yourself behind the eyes and pointing at yourself in the center of mass when you are referring to yourself both have arguably valid reasons behind them.
And then there are the split-brain patients, suggesting that the brain is actually two brains that usually act together, until they don’t
I’m a mind hosted by a brain piloting a bone mecha covered in flesh armor
My brain silently groaned “Ugh, I need more coffee to process something like this so early! Body, take me to the coffee.”
I feel this is an answer to the question.
So, you’re talking about perspective, basically “where it seems someone is looking from”. You can control this, it’s not locked-in to how it normally feels like it functions, even if it normally seems that way.
It just takes significant amounts of practice in directing and controlling your attention instead of letting it control you. There’s a lot of ways to practice, but meditation regimens are probably generally one of the quickest.
Like, your internal dialogue for instance. Just because it’s always on doesn’t mean it has to be. But unless you can turn it off, the constant stream of dialogue through your head is going to make it very difficult to “look from” anywhere else. It’ll always pull you immediately back so long as it is present.
I was trying to keep it separate from perspective, since a person peeking through a telescope for example could change perspective without feeling like they themselves are somewhere else.
