The Brain Is In Experience

0:00Hi there, just to say this is a short snippet from this week's main episode, which was published on Wednesday, as always. If you want the full episode, you can find it just below this one. Now here's the big kicker in all of this. And this is where I really think that your understanding of this topic can become really um, go to a new level. Listen, usually what we say is that the brain is responsible for our experience. You know, that is the experience in our sight, sounds, our touches, our mental images, our sounds, our whole human experience is basically caused by the brain. But we're talking about the brain here. What actually is the brain? You know, what do we know of the brain? Well, as I've said, you can, you can, all we have of our brain is what we see of it. You know, we either see a brain lying before us, like the squidgy lump of tissue

1:07before us, or we see brain activity on a screen, or we see images of a brain like in a book or on an internet or something. We have our sight, you know, we have, um, yeah, we have our visual experience of the brain, right? And that visual experience of the brain, again, is just that is what it is. It is the visual experience that is, it's the appearance of the brain, and it is second-hand measurement of brain activity. That's all we have of the brain. Most of us actually have never seen a brain in person. I've never seen a brain. I don't know if you've ever seen one. Perhaps, um, in like a lab or something, or if you work and if you're a surgeon or something, you've seen a brain, right? But listen, most of us have probably never seen a brain, and no one will ever

2:07see their own brain. I mean, that might have happened at some point in human history. I don't know, but, um, I doubt, I doubt anyone has seen their own brain. I'm not sure about that. I really doubt that. All that is so literally that is all we have. And we have our visual experience of the brain as like the appearance of it or second-hand measurement of it. And most of us have never seen our own brain and never will, right? So what I'm basically saying is that literally the brain is part of our experience. The brain is part of our experience. All we know of the brain is what is our experience of the brain. That is all we know of it. Now, this is like the entire paradigm turned upside down because our usual paradigm is, well, the brain is responsible for experience. But what I'm saying is that the brain arises in experience.

3:09All we know of the brain, and I remind you, all we know of the brain is, like images we've seen off on the internet or on a book or something, or seeing it, like seeing it in front of us, like if we're a surgeon or if we dissect a human head or something, or an animal, or we have indirect measurement of brain activity, that is literally all we have of it. We have nothing else. Never in human history, we had anything else other than that of the brain. So all we know of the brain is our experience of it. And we want to say that our experience is caused by the brain. You see the very circular problem here. It's kind of like the eyeball trying to see itself. I cannot see itself, right? Other than in a mirror, you've never seen your own eye, right? So we use our experience to try and understand the source of our experience, and we pin it to something that only arises within our experience. You see the problem?

4:16Now I don't know what the solution to this is. My solution is simply that our experience is primary, and that there is no, we cannot pin it to the brain. All we can say is that, yes, the brain, our brain experience may well codulate with it, but we cannot pin it down to the brain. Our experience just is, right? Our experience is primary. Hi there, just to say this is a short snippet from this week's main episode, which was published on Wednesday, as always. If you want to fill episode, you can find it just for all this one.