I feel independent from my body, as if I could exist without it. Indeed I can lose bits and pieces of my body and still consider myself the same person.

I may be the same person (or maybe I'm not, the self might merely be a conventional truth), but I am not the same organism if I lose parts of my body. My body (or perhaps me?) has undergone a change. Depending on your views on composition and persistence, my body (I?) may or may not continue to exist.

The "I" which my body produces forgets its own origination and believes itself to be the owner of the body - when it is really the body which owns the self, or more precisely, the body which owns itself.

So I take it that "I", in the phenomenological sense, is an integral part of a biological system. "I" may not identify with "my" body, but "my" body is the rest of the biological system, all doing their parts for better or for worse.

Indeed the apparent authority I have over my body is placed into doubt when at the emergency room, whether that be by disease, injury or old age. If I had control over my body, I should be able to stop these things from happening. Alas, I do not, because I cannot. The body has enslaved itself, through a reflexive and recursive phenomenon known as the Self, held in check and ultimately shaped by various transparent constraints.

It's kind of disorienting to this about the body this way. You might have certain wishes, but your body has others. It's like a weight, you want to think you're independent from it but it nevertheless gets in the way and drags you down. It's no surprise that the great, historic people are either those who managed to seclude themselves in such a way as to minimize their friction with their own body, or who were able and willing to embrace their bodily needs and operate akin to a well-oiled machine in harmonious repetition, not thinking too much but thinking enough to ensure survival and procreation.

Or, is your body a package which is discardable without loss of “YOU” — Bitter Crank

I believe this is how souls are supposed to function. The body is a hunk of meat the soul inhabits and controls, then discards it when it dies. Descartes also thought something along these lines with his dualism.

Thing is though, intellectually, you can imagine yourself as existing in the same way as when you die in a shooter video game like counterstrike, and then you get to fly around the map without a body. But if someone bashes your skull in, then well there goes your intellect. Descartes, intellectually, imagined himself as a thinking thing which interacts with the body. But his thoughts were in the form of language, and language isn't something given - it must be learned. One starts off as a squirming screaming rugrat, who must watch, and hear, and learn a language from the people around him. Those people being human bodies. You only survive as a baby because your mother feeds you, either from her body or using her body. She teaches you how to speak using her mouth and voice - through showing you how to do it, using her body.

Take the problem of other minds. It's not called the problem of other bodies. In our everyday life we walk around, talk to people, drive, eat, drink water - we are always embodied, everything we do is done bodily. Yet when we do philosophy all this goes out the window, and we start talking about being an ego or a mind. And then we get stuck in these thought loops, struggling with doubts about our epistemic access to the world, and whether other minds exist transcendentally, or even not at all. But then we get hungry, walk to the kitchen, make some food using our hands, and eat it with our mouths and ingest it into our stomachs. And inevitably someone will want some and you'll end up sharing, and chatting. Minds don't urinate.

Hell right at this moment I'm doing philosophy, using my fingers.

Are you your body, or are you something apart from your body? — Bitter Crank

I think, before we answer this question, we need to be explicit about what we actually mean by body. Otherwise everyone will probably end up talking past each other.

What is a body? A body, at least an alive body, is unlike ordinary objects in the world. For example, you can't misplace your body, but you can your keys. And our bodies can perceive, and be perceived. When you touch your face, your face feels your fingers and your fingers feel your face. Ordinary objects can only be perceived.

This scientific description of the body - as a collection of physiological processes and systems, an amalgamation of cells - or even a collection of atoms, or sub-atomic forces - completely misses the point, which is that the body is something which we live in the world, as.

What actually is a body?

I can imagine a Buddhist might describe the body as a sort of vehicle of suffering, a Christian might say it's a lump of flesh that the soul inhabits, a biologist might describe a body as a collection of physiological systems, a physicist might describe a body in terms of mass and gravity. A dancer might describe the body as a tool for movement and expression.

How would a philosopher describe a body?

Yuck!

I read a bit about 'embodied cognition' but stopped to wonder: that very phrase implies that the body is some sort of wrapper.

My body makes me, the 'me' others address as 'you' or 'him'. But the 'I', as db says, resists incorporation. Wittgenstein says some key things, early and late, distinguishing the I from LW.

Now my body is crumbling I catch myself thinking: This creature is going to die.

For some reason such thoughts plunge me deeper into bodyness. Flesh. It's interesting how much work has gone into creating thinking systems, and how little into creating flesh. In the Enlightenment we mistook ourselves, perhaps, and we haven't yet drunk deeply enough of Darwin, who seems to me to say: We are a population of bodily creatures, evolved thus far - that's all folks.

I read a bit about 'embodied cognition' but stopped to wonder: that very phrase implies that the body is some sort of wrapper. — mcdoodle

I don't think it does.

Is your body YOU? — Bitter Crank

Yes.

If only all questions were that easy to answer.

I don't think it does. — jamalrob

Go on, tell me :) 'To give a bodily form to, to incarnate...' Doesn't that make the body a wrapper?

We are bodies. Usually not perfect, sometimes quite deformed. Our capacities are spread wide, from profound deafness to very acute hearing; blindness at birth to poor vision onto excellent vision (but never as good as some animals).

...

Most of us are not severely impaired, but very few possess perfect bodies. — Bitter Crank

You imply that there is such a thing as the perfect body. You also speak of our capacities. I assume that the perfect body would in some way have perfect capacities. Since you seem to think that there is such a thing as the perfect body, how would you describe it, omnipotent?

I read a bit about 'embodied cognition' but stopped to wonder: that very phrase implies that the body is some sort of wrapper. — mcdoodle

I think that the op intends that the body is some sort of rapper.

Are you your body, or are you something apart from your body? — Bitter Crank

I'm my body, and embodied cognition is largely correct, but ...

The cells of a nematode worm have been fully mapped, including its nervous system. That mapping has been emulated in a Lego Mindstorm robot, which is able to move around a room and avoid obstacles, just based on the emulated worm nervous system, with however they did the feedback from the robot sensors.

IOW, the robot wasn't programmed to move about or avoid walls and what not. That's the worm neural connection doing that. The people involved in the project even said they don't understand how the connectome works.

Which raises the question of whether if a few decades from now, when we have enormous computing power available, and if and when the human brain is fully mapped, can we do the same for a person?

What then?

Go on, tell me :) 'To give a bodily form to, to incarnate...' Doesn't that make the body a wrapper? — mcdoodle

I don't think it implies any kind of containment, no.

If the sensors are adequate (i.e: interdependence, microbiome influence, the way cells with specific functions contribute to an organism as a single entity, etc.) it would probably boil down to an ethical debate concerning which emotions would be vital to simulate a human but could potentially be harmful to actual humans, not too mention the capacity to suffer that would probably go along with it.

That's my guess anyway...

The body is either all apples, all oranges or mixed fruit basket.

It's full of impolite disinterest and poop.

It's full of impolite disinterest and poop. — Nils Loc

Strictly speaking, a human body is big tube and the poop is in the bottom of the tube. The whole digestive track is basically open to the outside world. So as you graze along, the tube gets thicker. If you're starving, the tube gets thinner. Many people long for a thin tube and so they restrict their grazing and run around meaninglessly.

you can't misplace your body — dukkha

Mercifully, one cannot. But one can lose one's mind.

I read a bit about 'embodied cognition' but stopped to wonder: that very phrase implies that the body is some sort of wrapper.
— mcdoodle

I think that the op intends that the body is some sort of rapper. — Metaphysician Undercover

More rapper than wrapper.

You imply that there is such a thing as the perfect body. You also speak of our capacities. I assume that the perfect body would in some way have perfect capacities. Since you seem to think that there is such a thing as the perfect body, how would you describe it, omnipotent? — Metaphysician Undercover

Survival of the fittest, but fittest for what? Perfect body for what role? In proposing that there is a a 'perfect body' out there at the end of the normal distribution, I am proposing only that that body would have optimal characteristics of the human species as we know it now (not as we might know it millennia from now).

Any "perfect body" would only have as much capacity as the species could have -- and that is not remotely close to "omnipotent". We all know people who have better bodies than most: that is, they have excellent sensory capacity; they have a CNS with at least normal capacity; their skeletal frame, musculature, skin, and internal organs are all proportional, healthy, they have a properly functioning immune system. They can pass a stress test appropriate to their age (hooked up to an EKG, breathing into monitors, running on a treadmill to exhaustion). They are emotionally balanced and can think clearly and have a good memory.

A 'perfect specimen" of humanity could still be a jerk or a bitch, and would not be impervious to skilled manipulation, clever viruses, speeding bullets, bombs, or bimbos.

"Perfect bodies" would not be Super Man or Wonder Woman. What they would be is winners at the Westminster Dog Show, so to speak.

Survival of the fittest, but fittest for what? Perfect body for what role? In proposing that there is a a 'perfect body' out there at the end of the normal distribution, I am proposing only that that body would have optimal characteristics of the human species as we know it now (not as we might know it millennia from now). — Bitter Crank

I'm hesitant to equate survival of the fittest to survival of the perfect. In reality, survival of the fitter is what goes on in the world. Perhaps it is true that people take the transhumanist approach to Darwin's theory and really do think there is an attainable bodily perfection, but I don't buy it.

I find this topic rather amusing, because we were just joking about the Borg in another thread. There's a reason why Gene Roddenberry helped cultivate what the Borg represented, because at some point humanity will have to ask themselves why they're doing what they're doing.

What then? — Marchesk

The Lego Nematode connectome is small enough to be copied, but what Caenorhabditis Elegans Legoii is missing are the 959 somatic cells that compose its real body. It's somatic cells are part of C. Elegans that the Lego version is missing and can not supply. Drop the dry-land lego round worm into the river and it will soon be DOA. Drop the real C. Elegans into the river and it will go on to a brilliant career in round wormery.

If one could download the captured map of a particular human connectome, Marchesk's, for example, it could occupy a silicon brain. Connect the computer to a very good robot, and the robot could say the kind of things Marchesk says, at least for a while. But cool, dry Silicon Marchesk would be missing a huge part of the warm, wet Marchesk: his body. Note: part of, not container of. Marchesk's warm wet body includes the warm wet brain, and all that warm wetness is a piece of the critical wholeness.

Who the brain makes us out to be is dependent on the body that we are.

A child body that is "normal" or a mix of normal and above normal features, will have a significantly different experience than a child body that is a mix of normal and below normal features. Lets say the child is normal except for poor hearing in both ears. Ideally, poor hearing can be compensated. In the real world, however, it probably won't receive ideal compensation (not talking about financial compensation here: I'm talking about cochlear implants, special schooling, very supportive family, understanding peers, sign language from an early age, membership in a deaf community, and so on.)

In the real world, the child with typically compensated deficient hearing will experience a lack of some important social signals that will become part of who he is. Some parts of "normal" human life will be difficult for him to access from early on.

Conversely, consider the above average child. He hears, sees, smells, tastes, and feels as well as everybody else. He might be a 2 or 3 inches taller than the average male, maybe 6'3" or 190.5 cm. He has a mesomorphic (musculature) body an a solid frame, has thick blond hair, blue eyes, and a handsome face.

Lets give the 5'8" hearing impaired child and the 6'3" child with normal sensory faculties the same above average intelligence. Which one will probably most succeed in life, over the long run? The taller child with normal hearing will almost certainly succeed, overall, more than the shorter, hearing impaired child.

Why?

Because the kind of body we are influences the type of social skills and confidence we are likely to have in our abilities, and how robust our expectations are likely to be. Social signals--bodies signaling bodies--many of which the hearing impaired child missed, are important. Taller bodies receive more positive social signals from other bodies than shorter bodies do. (I don't know why, exactly, but they do.)

I am proposing only that that body would have optimal characteristics of the human species as we know it now (not as we might know it millennia from now). — Bitter Crank

But what determines optimal characteristics of the species? The characteristics of the species seem to be defined by a sort of average, what is normal. When someone has a body which escapes the range of normal, is this automatically bad, or is it sometimes good to be outside the norm? How could one determine whether a certain instance of outside the norm is good or bad?

Because the kind of body we are influences the type of social skills and confidence we are likely to have in our abilities, and how robust our expectations are likely to be. — Bitter Crank

So for instance, when I was young, my eyesight wasn't quite up to normal standards. I never knew this though, until it worsened in my teenage years. Because my eyesight was a little off from normal, I developed social skills in a slightly different way. As an example, when approaching others, the other would know who I was before I knew who the other was. I think that this type of thing, along with being not so sure about things as others were, because I could not see them as well as others, had a significant influence on my development, and who I am now.

The point, is that being deficient in one way, may influence one to become more efficient in other ways. So if we are to judge the optimum body for the human species, how can we account for the fact that some minor deficiencies can inspire some individuals to become much stronger in other ways?

Is your body YOU? — Bitter Crank

No

Or, is your body a package which is discardable without loss of “YOU”? — Bitter Crank

Neither this

Is a kind of intellectual disembodiment a sin against others? — Bitter Crank

Nor this

Are you your body, or are you something apart from your body? — Bitter Crank

No you are not your body, nor are you (in the only sense of existence we can understand [which we equate with the possibility of experience as illustrated by Berkeley]) something apart from your body. You stand in the same relationship to your body that the sub-program operating the actions, doings and will of a video-game character stands to the pixelated body of the said character that appears on-screen and relates with other pixelated bodies. If the game is the equivalent of life, then when the pixelated body disappears from the screen, the sub-program operating it ceases to function. But the sub-program is never deleted by the death of the body, it merely terminates. God - the machine running the game - still has access to the sub-program, and could re-enact it by necessarily giving it stewardship over another pixelated body. And thus bodily death is the termination of you (in the world), but not your eradication. And what lies on the other side of experience, experience itself cannot tell us, and therefore silence is our final resort.

I'm hesitant to equate survival of the fittest to survival of the perfect. In reality, survival of the fitter is what goes on in the world. Perhaps it is true that people take the transhumanist approach to Darwin's theory and really do think there is an attainable bodily perfection, but I don't buy it. — Heister Eggcart

I have zero interest in perfect beings, their existence or their survival. The 'perfect being' is a theological or philosophical concept, and even Jesus didn't want to get nailed with the label "perfect". "Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone." he said.

I'm not interested in "perfect specimens" either. The 'perfect specimen' is an imaginary body out there on the far tail end of the normal distribution. He doesn't exist either, and even if he did, he wouldn't be a 'perfect being'. The perfect specimen would be fully human and as such fully capable of human folly--maybe more so. He wouldn't be superman.

"Fittest to survive" for human beings requires some fairly difficult traits, most of them socially oriented, like "being able to get along with each other" -- something that we are hardly perfect at doing. It means "being able to live within one's means" which as a species we seem to be flunking, and certainly lots of individuals are flunking too. the list is long...

All that is fine and dandy as long as you have a god to arrange the affairs of deceased subroutines and pixilated persons.

Body....and Soul....and Spirit...baby!

So for instance, when I was young, my eyesight wasn't quite up to normal standards. I never knew this though, until it worsened in my teenage years. — Metaphysician Undercover

My vision was very poor from birth. It had numerous adverse consequences. Favorable compensations? A greater reliance on analyzing speech in place of visual signals, I suppose. People frequently reference the eyes as windows into the soul. Other people's eyes are not clearly visible to me, unless I am very close to someone's face. I have no idea how to evaluate others' eyes. I don't know what a "twinkling eye" is.

The point, is that being deficient in one way, may influence one to become more efficient in other ways. So if we are to judge the optimum body for the human species, how can we account for the fact that some minor deficiencies can inspire some individuals to become much stronger in other ways? — Metaphysician Undercover

All that is true.

What is optimum for a given individual varies. Very tall muscular people are not well suited to working in low--ceiling mines, for example. Low ceiling mines used to be a critical resource. Very tall people have more difficulty pulling weeds by hand. Better to be short for that work. Neither are very fat people suited to work in tight spaces. Very thin people, on the other hand, have no margin when it comes to famine. They are likely to be the first to go. People with excellent hearing are poorly suited to a lifetime of frequent attendance at extremely loud music venues. You might as well be deaf to start with. Very smart --even reasonably intelligent people have to put up with morons all the time. It might be better to be an idiot.

The point I am interested in with physical differences, sub-par to optimal, is that whatever one is physically, it is part and parcel of who we are as persons.

Body....and Soul....and Spirit...baby! — John

I sold all my stock in souls and spirits. Christians should remember that what they profess to believe is "resurrection of the body". Knowing what happens to the alleged spirit when the presumed soul and definite body parts is way above my pay grade.

Faerie nuff...but remember it is believed to be a resurrection of body, soul and spirit; all perfected. Personally, I have no clear idea, but just a vague intuition, of what that might mean.

The point I am interested in with physical differences, sub-par to optimal, is that whatever one is physically, it is part and parcel of who we are as persons. — Bitter Crank

Like how I'm tall and have a big nose? How does that matter to who I am really? Is being 6'2'' part and parcel of my character as an individual?

Like how I'm tall and have a big nose? How does that matter to who I am really? Is being 6'2'' part and parcel of my character as an individual? — Heister Eggcart

Sorry to tell you mate... But yes, it does matter to who you are >:O (joking)