Shall we go into neuroplasticity?
Your brain takes on the configuration your experiences induce in it. What you experience, actively imagine and habitually think, is the shape your brain takes. So add this mutable brain to the rather wide range of chemical shifts a person can experience, and is it easy to say exactly who is doing the thinking? If there is any “who” to identify at all?
Any memory, not frequently recalled, is subject to being co-opted for another association, or deleted to conserve biological resource space, and even if the memory is receiving heavy traffic, it is still subject to rampant cross association, a cross pollination of both emotional value and perceptual experience. Simple shifts in your metabolism or biochemistry can tinge an otherwise preferred experience with negative character. Likewise, the same sort of experience can soften a negative experience, even imparting a strangely positive emotional value, and your visual functions… They say seeing is believing, right?
Your brain has a limited “library” of visual images, and it reuses elements of earlier patterns to construct pictures of newly encountered things. So add something like a stubbed toe to the experience of seeing your mother, and your brain will not only associate pain with the image of your mother, but with the image of anyone displaying a notable similarity to your mother in appearance.
The prevailing theory right now is that dream imagery is the brains way of “practicing” electrochemical signals to preserve and modify neural pathways in your brain. So surrealist artists are just actively using a process the brain naturally reverts to in devising their strange and symbolic imagery.
The definition of life itself is still scientifically fuzzy. The most promising I find is not based on genetics, which has little to recommend it, but on information. Living things are the only “objects” observed to demonstrate a two way flow of information. A rock is acted upon and displays no modifying response when subject to heat, makes no effort to get out of the fire. Any living thing, on the other hand, will do whatever is in its power to avoid, evade or escape from something that threatens its integrity, and will actively seek out those things that foster its well-being or growth, in theory anyway. So taking this information model as a basis for life, then our “personal life” isn’t even physically confined to us, no?
It’s a process of exchange. Yes. If my wife were genetically profiled they would find traces of my genetic code in her own cell tissues, not huge amounts, but it would be enough to be detectable.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~