There's a neuron that connects to your forearm muscle. When you want to flex your forearm muscle, this neuron fires action potentials and releases chemicals at the forearm neuromuscular junction and then your forearm muscle flexes. It's just as if you pointed your remote control at your TV an hit the power button.
The neuron that stimulated the muscle is connected to other neurons upstream. So when the neuron told your muscle to flex, it was doing so because it was told to tell your muscle to flex. It was a little robot passing on information that it received just like a cell phone that converts radio frequency radiation into audio from a speaker.
Each neuron in your brain (there's about a hundred billion of them) is connected to tens of thousands of other neurons in complex pathways. But every place (synapse) along the way, what you have are two neurons connected. One releases chemicals because of the way it is designed to function and because it was stimulated by other neurons and the other responds to the released chemicals.
This is the way every single component of your brain works. A doctor can open your head and scoop out parts of your personality, motor control, etc. A single neuron has been recorded from that fires in response to bill clinton and no other object/concept.
A doctor can open your skull up and give little zaps to parts of your brain and cause physical behaviors, memories, emotions, sensory experience, etc. He uses a crude big old zapper. But when your brain is zapped by a doctor and your right arm lifts, you are not in control of your body.. The doctor is pulling the strings. When your head is closed up and you're walking around, instead of one big stimulus from the doctor's hand held stimulator, you are receiving tens of millions of stimuli from the outside world in exactly the same fashion through your sensory neurons (i.e. temperature sensors, photoreceptors, odor receptors, mechanical receptors for touch/sound, etc).
The notion that you and I are different processes is just a convention that we use in order to behave the way that we do. But just because my skin doesn't enfold your neurons doesn't mean that you and I are ultimately something separate.
Just as your motorneuron tells your forearm muscle to flex, this text is hitting your eyes and stimulating your photo-receptors. The connection between us is more transient than your neuromuscular junction, but there is nothing fundamentally different about it.
__________________
Vi veri veniversum vivus vici. (By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe)
The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships
You & I, no distinction. - Tat Tvam Asi
Become Who You Are |