I love the body. It's wretched and beautiful. To identify with something physical that has actually endured the years that you claim to your name is something that is nothing short of profound. It is proof. It is the manifestation of all the ideas, all the poetry, all the lusting, all the hatred, and all the love. It is physical and cannot be denied or accepted, except by another in physical form.
Without it we'd be left to an existence, well, not far from the internet and The Matrix, whoa. As cool and anonymous and free and unattached and fun as that may sound, there's nothing to hold onto. And honestly, it actually would be a little different than the internet we have now. Because here, we have something to hide. I have a physical incarnation you are denied in experiencing me through this medium. I have two eyes you will not meet. If we all were just bodiless voices drifting around a void talking and musing and posting and friending and liking and responding, then we'd be meeting each other in full. I'm meeting you in a percentage. Here, I'm only part of what I really am.
But getting back to that grip hold. I cling to my physical existence. I pull my hair when thinking. I scratch my ever-growing, never-stopping scruff. I cover my mouth with my hand when looking at things and don't know why. I fidget and function and twitch and watch and track and listen and hover and follow and jump and sleep. I am a jukebox and a Richter scale machine. These things may seem rudimentary or dull, but they are the key to my being outside of my mind.
It's not my mind that knows the touch of a loved one. And it's not my mind that can smell their scent. My mind can't chase after them. It can't speak to them, and it can't receive their words. It is my hand that knows their touch, my nose that finds them in the dark, my voice and ears that lets them enter my psyche with ease, and my eyes that I overvalue but still take for granted while watching them walk toward me. We are assembled with every gadget and device and yet we still insist on muting our senses in favor of something spoon-fed to our minds (no offense internet blogs).
The extension of the physical form out from our minds is truly a gift, and there will never be enough dancing, singing, and sex to celebrate this.
Now that that is there. I will say that our head can turn against our bodies. Not that this should be news to anyone. After preaching the glory of the corpus, I can't pretend that I don't worry about flab lapping up against my hips, threatening to trigger the beer gut in a matter of months/years. And if I couldn't control it in time, there goes my health and my life span and my potential fatherhood, let alone years to play chess with other old crotchety men in a park as a balding, gray-haired ol' man. These are the threats on the table. We can take them and fear, or we can leave them and live.
Perhaps that's too simple, but really, what is it all but atoms and molecules and compounds and bullshit. We grow, we shrink, we scar, and we heal, or try to. I intend to try and push myself to stay healthy, but in the end I'm going to end up battered and beat-up anyway, so it's not like I'm trying to preserve myself for some pristine natural history collection. I'm using this shell, this thing, until I can't any more. It's going down with me and I'm going down with it. And in the meantime, I'll put it to rest.
I don't know how to create a post, so I'll just post it here. I love this months theme and I really wish I had more time to write something thoughtful. Ever since I took a philosophy class about the distinction ( or lack there of) between body and mind, it has been one of my favorite topics of interest. For your enjoyment, here is a TED video that has a little bit to do with the research I was doing this summer. Please watch, i guarantee youll enjoy it.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ted.com/talks/vs_ramachandran_the_neurons_that_shaped_civilization.html
Jake--
ReplyDeleteI'm actually a big fan of Vilayanur Ramachandran (my uncle is a neuroscientist). I've viewed this video previously, and I loved the notion it presents; for instance, not only does the existence of these "empathy" (or "Ghandi," as I preferred) neurons he explains work to support the idea of the mind/body being bound by more than basic anatomy, but it also suggests a grander and more controversial concept that there is, in fact, no distinct separation from one person's consciousness to another's (basically implying that our cognitive (perceived) connectedness moves beyond the physical limitations of the epidermis and the five senses and is actually linked directly to this "mirror neuron system"). Pretty mind-blowing information to absorb. (Also, have you seen this? http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind.html)... I'd love to hear more about the research you did regarding these topics, because this month could honestly branch out in so many directions as to certainly include neurological discoveries.
Daniel--
A lot can be said for this post, though I've said nothing thus far... (sorry). Perhaps it's because you basically reached the anticipated culmination of what I was hoping this month would eventually reach, albeit very early on in the process. I expected several anecdotes regarding basic concepts of the human body and our relationships to it before reaching this level of depth. Shame on you for really "going there" and writing so deeply so quickly! Haha, kidding, of course.
I definitely loved this line: "The extension of the physical form out from our minds is truly a gift, and there will never be enough dancing, singing, and sex to celebrate this."..... though, it worries me that Jake's research and Ramachandran's findings do more to negate that idea than support it (asserting that it IS, in fact, our minds that our in control of what we "feel").... I'd love to hear your thoughts on this apparent paradox....
Good posts and comments. I am of the mindset that there is no difference between the "mind" and the body. What is the mind but the human brain? And the brain is clearly the (most important?) part of the body. I've never really understood why people separate them. We have a body, but it is pretty pointless to us without this vital organ--the brain. If we didn't have a brain, we wouldn't even be aware of the rest of our body, and, despite what Daniel wrote, we would have no idea what our loved one feels or smells like without the cells in our skin or nose firing neurons to our brain. Smells, physical sensations, sounds--all of these are nothing but what our brain makes of an astonishingly complex process of chemical reactions that occurs every time our sensory systems are stimulated. I think the brain is far more important than the rest of the body. As Descartes said, "Cogito ergo sum" ("I think; therefore, I am"). We can't be positive of 99.99% of what we sense (what we see, what we smell, what we taste, etc.) around us. For all we know, everything around us could be an illusion. The one thing we can positively make out is that we can think. We are thinking these thoughts as we read this statement, ponder its meaning. You know you are because you have a mind. Even though an amputated patient can feel something that isn't there, our body could never feel ANYTHING without a brain. Though the brain is merely a part of the body, everything that has to do with CONSCIOUSNESS is related to the brain. For all intents and purposes, we are nothing without our brains.
ReplyDeleteI liked Jake's video. I unfortunately haven't watched Bethany's yet (23 minutes, anyone?!). I like the idea of this "mirror neuron system" that links together everyone as part of a collective consciousness, a la Eastern philosophy, and I see a lot of the truth in what he says. But that doesn't prove that there is a single grand consciousness for me. We still all have our own individual consciousnesses. He pointed out that we can "empathize" with a touch given to someone else. I agree with this part, and I do feel that there can be a collective empathetic consciousness for all of mankind. But I do not take this to mean that there can ever be a total consciousness for our race, since, as he described, neurons still shoot back to our brains indicating, "Don't worry, you're not being touched" (to use Ramachandran's words). I agree that this sense of empathetic science is a great way to bridge the gap between the humanities/religion and science, but there will always be room for individual consciousnesses, because we each have our own bodies, and especially because we each have our own brains. He said that they are so complex that there is room for a greater variety of processes to occur in them then there are elementary particles in the universe (how anyone would fucking measure this is beyond me...and I suspect they sometimes just make up measurements like that), so I think that me having a different brain from Daniel, Bethany, or Jake's means that, despite the similarities of our bodies because we are in the same species, we have COMPLETELY different consciousnesses. We can empathize through mirror neurons, but we will never think exactly alike. And thinking (and feeling--the two most important conscious parts of the brain) is what it means to live.
I definitely agree on the mind being inseparable from the body at the core of this as it is what determines how we exist and how we perceive to physically exist. I guess I kind of jumped out the door a little fast and was just considering the projection of the body rather than the projector of the mind if that makes sense. Even though these two things cannot really be separated, they are in our society and apparently in my initial thinking when reading the theme of this month, which raises the question of why there would be any confusion if they are so inherently tied together within the brain?
ReplyDeleteThe physical appearance is definitely a major contributor as the workings of the extremities are all easily visible and in their mechanical and simple machine-like working, while the brain is hidden behind our skulls running the whole show with chemical reactions of which I have very little understanding. That said, I guess I wanted my post to be homage to the mechanical parts and the perceived senses we have that tied in with them. But I will get to watching the videos posted and look more into how the mind and body are one for future comments on this as I've always been really interested in the idea Edward brought up that everything we perceive around us could be just an illusion and even going into how we interact with things beyond what we perceive, outside of the reach of our immediate interaction.
I'm going to guess there is confusion, because for centuries I don't think people understood the connection between the brain and the body that we now understand. They probably thought you felt touch in your skin instead of in your brain, etc.
ReplyDeleteBut in any case, I'VE always felt that there is no distinction--even beyond this idea that neurons shooting to our brains cause us to feel the results of our sensory system's interaction with the outside world--simply because our brain IS part of our body. You can cut it out and eat it and whathaveyou. It can even age just like the rest of our bodies. With time, it loses its cognitive ability, as we have trouble remembering things and solving complex problems.
That being said, and I know I haven't really written this month, it's almost too complex of a topic for us to always talk about the brain, because--let's face it--even scientists don't really understand it. I'm all in favor of keeping this month's theme going into September while possibly doing something interesting for Halloween as well. There is a lot about the body we haven't discussed yet, just because I've felt I haven't had enough time to post. But I would like to.