A more puzzling philosophical problem could be said to be a physical extension existing without a mental psychic experiential sky-view from the perspective of many types of idealism and panpsychism...

According to Kant, a being unlimited to finite, physical existence would be something like God: "IV. In natural theology, where one conceives of an object that is not only not an object of intuition for us but cannot even be an object of sensible intuition for itself, one is careful to remove the conditions of time and space from all of its intuition . . . – for as conditions of all existence in general they would also have to be conditions of the existence of God." Critique, B 71 (my emphasis).

The mind being contained to our brains is supported by every piece of empirical evidence, and a lack of any strong indication of anything existing beyond the observable world. The mind existing outside of that is supported by what generally boils down to "it kinda feels like it" (but it's not clear what that feels like and it doesn't feel like that for others) and "you can't disprove it" (but that's not a good reason to accept something as true). Or people go the idealism route via solipsism, but that has poor explanatory power. Or they derive it from unjustified assumptions.

I'm not sure whether the pointed-to question is the one this is a duplicate of. But it certainly seems to be a duplicate of much of the discussion here about physicalism/dualism/etc., and there are certainly philosophers expressing varied points of view on the subject. Personally, I understand how a mind can occupy a brain, and the attempts to explain how it could be anything else have struck me as cloud castles, structurally pretty but never grounded on testable reality.

Seeking references about an immaterial soul that exists even when the brain is gone makes no sense. There just is too much religious writing about this. One would need to specifically ask about property dualism instead. But that would include the answer.

@NotThatGuy, "a lack of any strong indication of anything existing beyond the observable world." Science tells us that the observable world [universe] is merely 4-5% of all that there is.

@MichaelHall 4-5% of all that there is, which is material

Not sure what you meant by that Syed...

@MichaelHall I think he just meant anything existing beyond the physical world

I think they meant observable, because that's what they said.

@MichaelHall beyond the physical universe. Obviously, things that haven’t been observed can exist

@MichaelHall "the observable world" doesn't mean "everything we've directly observed", it means the world in which our observations happen. The only reason we know about e.g. dark matter, is because of reliable observations suggesting that it exists (although it is a placeholder). I could also have used "physical world" or "material world", but people get hung up on those terms, even though they ultimately boil down to (theoretical and direct or indirect) observability.

Point is that there's a whole lot of unobservable, (perhaps other dimensional) material and energy out there that could account for multiple phenomena that we don't yet understand. The idea that a mind can only be contained within a 1.3 kilogram lump of tissue is very limiting. (Open your mind!) ;)

@MichaelHall We know about dark matter/energy because of observation. Not fully understanding isn't very surprising, we're talking about things we can only observe by watching far away objects do things on a timescale way beyond human lives. That's hard to study. Also, your argument seems to go back to the "well you cant disprove it" argument that NotThatGuy already mentioned in the original comment.

@JMac, we know about it only because of observation/calculation of its macro gravitation effects, otherwise we know very little to nothing. It has been suggested (by scientists!) that it exists invisibly all around, and even within us. IMO there is tremendous explanatory potential in it WRT Syed's ongoing material mind dilemma...

@MichaelHall Dark matter has next to no explanatory power at this point - it's functionally just a gap in our models, to account for observations that don't otherwise fit into our models. Hopefully one day we'll be able to fill that gap with whatever is responsible for those observations, and maybe we'll find it to be responsible for additional observations. But until that day comes, it's not justified to attribute properties or observations to it, beyond the limited observations scientists have attributed to it.

@NotThatGuy, I said explanatory potential, not power, and I purposely avoided attributing any specific properties to it... "Si nescis quid sit, nescis quid non sit."

@MichaelHall So what's the point of your comment, then? The "potential" that our understanding of the world will change at some point is always there - no-one is denying that. But our current understanding is our current understanding, and the potential of our understanding changing doesn't mean much with regard to our current understanding (except that we should have at least some sliver of doubt about whether we're correct about that) - you don't seem to be disagreeing with that.

Do you not appreciate contemplating the great unknown? Afterall, isn't that what ultimately fuels philosophical thought? It seems rather dry, boring, and pointless to rephash only that which we are absolutely certain of, isn't it? What's the point of your comments?

@MichaelHall There is little absolute certainty. If we're going to contemplate things detached from reality, fiction does a much more interesting job of that than philosophy. My goal with philosophy is to figure out what's true and what's moral, and to convince others of that (which is more productive than contemplation detached from reality).