The brain is "sentient" in the sense of being the necessary condition for awareness or knowing; but that doesn't mean that anything is aware or knows. There are no experiences during deep sleep. The brain doesn't have an experience of hearing a sound, and then decides to wake you up. There isn't a little homunculus in our mind which is conscious when we are not, any more than your phone is conscious of time passing and deciding to bleep when you set an alarm. When we don't know or are not aware, why would we talk of our brain doing these things? What sort of awareness is it when we are not aware of it?Spiny Norman wrote: ↑Sun Nov 22, 2020 1:15 pm
What's always present is the brain/CNS, a sentient biological process. Nothing mysterious about that.
I looked at the Wiki article on bhavanga, but it seems inconclusive to me - a type of citta?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhavanga
Bhavanga could of course be a mental process, but it's not a conscious one. It's "the knower" being there which is puzzling, not that there are other processes, either mental or physical.