Chapter 3 - Minds, Bodies, and Experience Envisioning a Unified Self

1. Chapter 3 - Minds, Bodies, and Experience Envisioning a Unified Self What is it like to be you? What is it like to be an experiencing person in the world?

2. You Are Part of the World. • Process philosophers would agree that we are fully a part of that larger whole, like a drop of water is part of the ocean. Whatever composes the world composes us, too. • The task is to understand better the relationship between individuality and interconnectedness, between the one and the many. • So it is true both that your individuality is one of the touchstones of reality and that all of reality is a single woven whole.

3. Strangers in a Strange Land?. • It is common to think of God as having first created the physical world with one set of principles and rules—natural law—and then creating us with a supernatural soul that is in this world but not of it, making us strangers in a strange land. We are just too wonderful, it is said, for us to be part of the muck and mire of the rest of the world. • everything else in the world is…composed of atoms (like tiny billiard balls) moving in a void, totally determined by natural law, while the human soul is supernatural and free of those laws.

4. In the world of nature, nothing had experience • In that world of early modern science, human beings were sometimes seen as the only ones in this world having any experience at all. • It was only supernatural, divinely created human souls that could have experience. • There is one other important reason why people have insisted on a dualism of minds and bodies. Most people fear death, so the desire that we and our loved ones should live forever makes a dualistic worldview attractive, whether or not it is true.

5. How shall we speak of the experiencing self? • Self may focus too much on our sense of identity…perhaps the term psyche is useful • So you will find me arguing that the mind/soul/self/psyche is the flow of the body’s experience or feeling. • Since we will be focusing on what we share in common with other experiencers in this world, the flow of felt emotion will emerge as the great ocean on which the thin layer of rationality precariously floats.

6. We Are Examples, Not Exceptions • …we are part of the natural world, that we are completely interwoven with everything. We are unique in some ways, but not in others, and our uniqueness is a matter of degree rather than of kind. We are part of the same causal web of interconnections as everything else that exists. • …by looking at our own existence, we can learn something about the rules that apply to everything that exists. We are examples of those rules, not exceptions to them.

7. We Are Examples, Not Exceptions • …we must beware of anthropomorphism, of… making the world look like us in a self-centered way. But it is the reverse of anthropomorphism to acknowledge that we are simply instances of how everything else in the universe works, that we are not supernatural exceptions. • What if human minds are not the only ones to have experience?

8. Does Your Body Experience? • Perhaps it is only your mind that has experience. That, of course, was René Descartes’ main line of thought. He saw all physical bodies as having two opposing properties: They do not think, and they exist in space. • Is that what it is really like to be you? Do you really live as a purely intellectual, purely rational mind within a body that has no experience at all? • There are some obvious problems:

9. Does Your Body Experience? • Lift a hand, wiggle a toe, or just blink your eyes. How did you do that? • Your mind is not in space, so it could not push on your brain or nerves to move your hand, toe, or eyelid. Nor could your mind send your body a thought, like “Move your toe.” • …your body cannot think, so it cannot receive any thoughts or feelings from your mind. Similarly, your body cannot send any experiences to your mind because the body has no experience to send. Nor can it push on the mind because the mind is not in space.

10. Does Your Body Experience? • Touch something and feel the sensation on your skin. What is it like to be you? Does your body have experience? • Of course, we know that without our brains we would not be able to have conscious experiences of such feelings. • We experience with our bodies…we see with our eyes, Remove our eyes and we cannot see…we hear with our eardrums.

11. Does Your Body Experience? • The same is true of all our sense organs. We smell with our nose, taste with our tongues, feel with our skin. In every case, we also feel with our nervous system and our brain. Remove any vital part and we stop having that experience. • It is true that if you lose an arm or a leg you can still think. You have lost the power to experience with that arm or leg. • We experience with our bodies—including our brains—which means that our bodies experience.

12. So What? • Affirming ourselves as fully embodied creatures can have powerful consequences… the insistence that our souls are super-natural—hence, not of this world…has had terrible consequences in religion. If we are really strangers in this world, then it does not matter very much…what happens in this world. • …demands we take seriously the embodiment of children and of all living creatures. Hunger, abuse, disease, and poverty matter to our whole being, not just to a body to which we are accidentally attached…in the Hebrew Bible, which also affirmed that people are fully embodied persons, there was a powerful sense of social justice…

13. So What? • Acknowledging our full embodiment does not mean denying all of the wonderful range of experiences that we usually think of as spiritual. • Rather, it means broadening our vision of the spiritual to include the physical and to see value where we have not seen it before. • So, what is it like to be you? • You experience with your body, which means that your body has experience.