Which part of the brain is conscious?

[Steve Johnson <***>]

This is not exactly a deep thought for people on this list but I just realized that my reading of the various Rosen writings and related materials helped clear up a confusion I had a for a while.

 

The collapse of the quantum wave function and the role of the conscious observer in it have always prompted me to wonder which part of the brain is actually concious. Clearly if we replace a blind person's eyes with video cameras feeding into the optic nerve he would still count as a conscious observer. You can continue this thought experiment ad infinitum replacing various parts and at each step the "observer" still seems conscious.

 

This always seemed like a legitimate paradox to me, whereas now it seems pretty obvious that the concious mind is not "contained" in any part of the brain no matter which part you replace. As you continue replacing you will at some point destroy the emergent organization and "lose" the mind much like Rosen always argues that a dead organism is a poor surragate for a living one even though it seems to have the same parts.

 

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