How is body and mind one?

[coberst]

How is body and mind one?

“It is our organic flesh and blood, our structural bones, the ancient rhythms of our internal organs, and the pulsating flow of our emotions that give us whatever meaning we can find and that shape our very thinking.”

Our Western philosophical culture and our Christian religion deny this very obvious fact. We try desperately to think of our selves as gods with minds that float above our body with its nasty old anus.

Descartes, one of the first philosophers that the young philosophy student learns about, informs us that “my essence consists solely in the fact that I am a thinking being…I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, in so far as I am simply a thinking, non-extended thing; and on the other hand I have a distinct idea of body, in so far as this is simply an extended, non-thinking thing.”

Our Christian culture, our Western philosophical tradition, and our naïve common sense perceptions all seem to work in concert to instill this erroneous mind/body dichotomy upon our comprehension of reality. All of these factors lead us to place a positive evaluation upon freeing our self from our body. When we die and our mind/soul/spirit goes to heaven our body decays into dust where it came from. And we are forever free of its unpleasant burden.

SGCS (Second Generation Cognitive Science) challenges this traditional and common sense inherited duality of mind/body. This new paradigm for cognitive science targets the disembodied view of meaning that results from our objectivist philosophy.

Traditionally, meaning is associated with words and sentences. Meaning in this traditional sense is about propositions and words, but SGCS considers this a very limited view of meaning; this disembodied view is far too narrow. “Meaning traffics in patterns, images, qualities, feelings, and eventually concepts and propositions.”

Objectivist philosophy recognizes two fundamentally different kinds of meaning: descriptive and emotive meaning. This is an illusory demarcation that led certain philosophers of language to retain focus upon the conceptual/propositional as the only meaning that mattered and that emotive meaning had no meaning in rigorous testable modes of knowing.

This dream of “freeing oneself from the body” reinforces the erroneous idea that is buried deeply within our psyche by our Western Christian philosophical inheritance the dangerous idea that a person’s “true” self is not of this world but abides in some transcendent kingdom. These kinds of ideas lead us into ignoring our situation on this planet because it is of small consequence when we spend eternity in some heavenly bliss. Such thoughts make it possible for people to strap bombs upon their person and go strolling in the mall on the way to heaven.

SGCS argues “for the central role of emotion in how we make sense of our world. There is no cognition without emotion, even though we are often unaware of the emotional aspects of our thinking.”

Quotes from The Meaning of the Body by Mark Johnson

 

[allanpopa]

Mind/Body dualisms have been prevelant in very many cultures. It seems that intuitively we experience a sense that we are not limited to our physical nature. I tend to gravitate more towards dismantaling those dualisms, yet, I also tend towards a Continental postmodern philosophy of dismantaling the idea of the Self itself. The Self exists always in différance, that is that it is never fully present and always different. It is always defining itself against that which it is not and never fully being able to define itself. As such, the Self does not exist. This is of course not the idea of the Self as Body or Mind, but rather the identity of "Selfness", a philosophical anthropology of the Self. All there is is text, "Il nya pas de hors-texte".

Tell me your thoughts?

Allan

 

[coberst]

I agree. Self is an abstract idea and is identified in reference to some object

Physicists began in the early twentieth century to study the inner world of the atom. This world, they quickly discovered, is nothing like our world. Mechanics is the study of effect of force on bodies; this new physics is called Quantum Mechanics. It deals with the effect of forces on the bodies within the world of the atom.

Newtonian Mechanics deals with force acting on bodies. In our world bodies follow a continuous course when acted on by force whereas in the atom world bodies change position in increments rather than continuously. Bodies in the world of the atom move in quantum leaps and do not occupy positions in an analog manner.

Physicists are unable to see directly the forces and the bodies within the atom but they have nevertheless developed the knowledge about these matters to the extent that they can very accurately predict the ongoing actions within this atomic world.

The study of consciousness might be compared with QM. The world of consciousness is directly ‘seen’ only to a very small extent by the subject itself and only very indirectly by the scientists studying consciousness. Nevertheless this subjective world can be studied scientifically just as the world of the atom.

Antonio Damasio is a scientist who has set out to organize a scientific study of human consciousness. Damasio utilizes a rather unique method that involves careful observation of individuals who have been deprived of some aspects of consciousness because of brain lesions caused by accidents. He studies brain dysfunction caused by such things as strokes and accidents.

Damasio wrote “Descartes’ Error” in which he focused on brain-injured patients in an effort to comprehend human consciousness. These partially dysfunctional patients help him to locate the area of the brain in which certain elements of consciousness are centered and to observe the patients performance without that particular function. One primary patient observed was Phinaes Gage, a Vermont railway foreman, who suffered sever brain damage in an accident.

Damasio uses the performance of an orchestra piece whose score is being created during its performance to give us an idea of his theory of the human as a living organism. He speaks of several parallel lines of performance unfolding in time. “Wakefulness, background emotion, and low-level attention will be there continuously; they are present from the moment of awakening to the moment when you fall asleep.”