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What`s happening when amputees feel not only pain from a severed limb, but a sense of 'wholeness'? IOW they 'feel' the limb to still be there. Is there a harddrive in the brain playing back pain sensations as well an aura of an intact body from before the operation, or do they still sense new input from a phantom limb?
This, to me, sounds a lot like problems you get on networks. I sawe a prog just a little while ago on the way the brain works, and they covered this in an interesting way. They had a man who had lost a hand, but felt cramp, as if his hand were permanently clenched in a fist. So they gave him a mirror set up so as to make his remaining hand look like his missing hand, and then he was able to "unclench" the missing hand by opening it in the mirror. This is one of the things that contributes to me viewing the body as very mechanical - but IME, we have so far not included information science into what we mean by "mechanical".