>>17897155
>The self isnt real, try smashing your frontal lobe and see what part of you is retained

The brain is still a physical organ made up of empty atoms, electrical impulses, fluids and it only functions within a living body, supported by a nervous, hormonal, and cardiac system. The brain alone is useless. It is not transplantable. Unlike the heart, the first organ to form in a fetus, which can be donated and continues beating outside the body, the brain only functions in synchronicity with the whole. This already dismantles the idea that the mind/self is limited to the brain. Consciousness is broader, more integrated, and directly dependent on other parts of the body that express and mediate our senses, the eyes for sight, the nose for smell, the mouth for taste, the skin for touch, and the ears for hearing. Without these channels, the brain doesn't "know" what to process. In other words, conscious experience emerges from the complex interaction between body and mind and, by all indications, is not limited to deterministic brain function.

Furthermore, consciousness is not evenly distributed throughout the brain. We know that experiences such as self-awareness, intuition, aesthetic emotion, compassion, etc., involve specific and highly integrated areas. Behavioural psychology is actually scientific and proven to work, look up Skinner and Pavlov.

Near-death experiences challenge the thesis that consciousness depends exclusively on brain activity. There are documented cases in which patients have lucid, structured experiences while clinically dead, with no measurable electrical activity in the brain. And even scientifically speaking, we don't use 100% of our brain's capacity. This isn't a myth: even if it is "active," we don't fully access the neural potential for altered states, deep intuition, spiritual cognition, etc. In other words, not even the ultimate material reality you idolize is fully accessed.