The Brain Without the Body? Virtual Reality, Neuroscience and the Living Flesh
Angles May 20, 2025 Marion Roussel 1 citation
Immersing oneself in a digitally reconstructed brain, as in Marcos Novak's AlloBrain@AlloSphere virtual reality environment, provokes an uncanny feeling because the displayed interior is a bare, fleshless brain devoid of subjective interiority. The experience confronts viewers with a "naked brain" that resists identification with their own lived, embodied consciousness. This suggests that the phenomenal "I"—the first-person experience of body and world—cannot be captured by digitization, challenging the notion that uploading a mind to a machine would preserve personal identity.