Alien hand is not reflexes. Most reflexes are relatively simple algorithmic nervous responses processed almost entirely in the spinal cord.
Rather, it is a collection of motor patterns. We have many complex motor patterns that have the ability to be almost entirely autonomous, things like brushing your teeth or your hair, manipulating a steering wheel, wiping your ass. You don't really think about the movements involved, the position and motion of your limbs, you just command your body to do it, like pressing a macro.
Damage to specific areas of the brain can remove executive (conscious) control over these motor patterns, as we see with alien hand. I think the more interesting phenomenon is complete severance of the corpus callosum, connecting the left and right hemispheres, resulting in a human body where the left hand and right hand can be doing two completely different tasks with no awareness of what the other is doing, like two individuals living in one body.
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Originally Posted by magnetaress
Where does conciousness and awareness begin? Are we really separate individuals? I no longer believe so. The idea of an ego and an identity apart from our world and universe is a fallacy. Someone built the screen you are reading. People created and standardized the words we are communicating. They are as much a part of you as the salt in your blood that came from the sea and the birth of the world. We are one in the same. All of this is contained within "you" as you are contained within it. Without there would never have been a "you". The very moon in the sky is integral to who you are and how you behave! It's all you!
What truly are you?
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Originally Posted by Alan Watts
LetÂ’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could for example have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.
And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say “Well that was pretty great”. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it's gonna be.
And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?”. Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.
That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have. Of playing that you weren't god, because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he is not. So in this idea then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality, not god in a politically kingly sense, but god in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you are all that, only you are pretending you are not.
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Of course once you start digging into any possible reason it would be this way you realize, it doesn't make any fucking sense, because it relies on projecting human thoughts and motivations onto the Godhead, namely that
something is missing from God that motivates him to partake in this. That 75 years of dreams of total pleasure, or whatever extradimensional transtemporal existence lies outside this reality, somehow has something so bereft about it, so distasteful, that inventing a reality where children get their eyeballs eaten by worms was a worthy endeavor. I'll never understand. Cool that me and the Mexican Cartel-guy peeling my face off while I look in the mirror are fundamentally the same, though.
Maybe this is the hardcore solo self-found reality and it earns our souls mad street cred, or something