Famously, René Descartes needed to find a link between the material body and the conscious mind, and he located it in the one structure in the brain that is not bilateral: the pineal gland. That is, there’s only one such part in the brain, located in the midline of the brain. It escaped his notice that animals also had pineal glands, which, should have undercut his claim that animals were insensitive automata. Even his contemporaries rejected this though,
Daniel Dennett, in his book Consciousness Explained (1991) argued that the dualist philosophy required that there was a “Cartesian theatre” a point of view from which the conscious self experiences things. This, he argues, is a holdover of the Cartesian philosophy. Instead, he proposes that “mind” is extended, and that there is no unique location or time of experience. Nevertheless, we have a general location in space and time. I have no conscious location before age around three that I can recall, and I will have no location or possibility of conscious experience in around twenty years or more if I am lucky. My conscious experiences occur in the places (mostly Australia) that my body inhabits. In short, I have a perspective on the world, however circumscribed it is.
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