I think that when we use phrases like "my body", it's mostly indexical, and doesn't ned to have much metaphysical import. A reference mechanism to this body, the one which is typing this post, is what "my body" is, regardless of how I otherwise conceive it. — fdrake
I think this is very true. There are plenty of ways that every person is which are not just bodily or minded, even though the body and mind are involved. Anything the body does is somehow more than the body, but the body is not just a substantive part of the act - the body is not a "substance" of walking.
The person may also be identified with a role they play, irrespective of their body's nature - a barista, a lawyer, a cook. It is the person which is those things, and not the body. — fdrake
I noticed that you have a strong interest in the work of Ayn Rand. — Joshs
I noticed that you have a strong interest in the work of Ayn Rand.
— Joshs
what — SophistiCat
For many years I wrote very few essays, but instead made thousands of pages of notes on things I noticed about ideas, other human beings, and art. I studied Ayn Rand's essays, and they meant a lot to me.
By the same token, a person is bodily. Here "is" does not indicate identity, but rather serves to relate a predicate to the subject, as in "Socrates is a man." — SophistiCat
Although MP's statement is, in my opinion, a necessary corrective, I still think it falls short. I would say that I am a person. I am conscious and bodily to be sure, but I am not a mind or a body, and I don't have a body.
While we're at it, I am not a soul, and I am not my brain. I am a whole, conscious, physical unit.
It depends on the level of specificity you want in an answer. Corpses are human bodies, no? Do corpses have minds or experiences? It would appear not. So, the one can exist without the other.
Likewise, it is at least conceivable that one's consciousness could exist outside the body, or be transferred to other bodies. Personally, I think that conceivability is a very weak standard for possibility, since we can often conceive the impossible as possible due to not understanding what we are talking about, but at the very least the two don't seem as essentially linked as say, a triangle and its lines.
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Anyhow, I think the better arguments for the existence of incorporeal souls' existence outside the body tend to rely on a very particular metaphysics, and presenting them in a coherent manner is going to require extremely large detours into concepts like vertical reality, the nature of being/God, Logos/logoi, etc. But when people try to copy these arguments into the context of prevailing contemporary metaphysical assumptions I think they almost always fall incredibly flat, and I don't think they can be justified as part of a philosophy of nature. — Count Timothy von Icarus
It's complex, but I'll be as simple as I can.While we're at it, I am not a soul, and I am not my brain. I am a whole, conscious, physical unit. — Kurt Keefner
I agree, except that, if the soul part--call it, also, the 'mental'--is not real, but only perceived (for several reasons) to be real; if the mental is 'actually' a system of codes to which the body responds with feelings and action (and only the latter is real, albeit not in a form we are familiar with, i.e., not narrative, and so, necessarilyoverlookedby the narrative); if the narrative form of that code, the part to which we desperately attach, is not real, then it can be acknowledged as 'other' than the body, to exist, and still, it can be eliminated from that category we think of as 'real.' — ENOAH
I am not a soul, and I am not my brain. I am a whole, conscious, physical unit. — Kurt Keefner
Either mind is part of body, or body is part of mind. The point is the distinction needs to be made as to what the difference between these two are - IF it can be stated. — Manuel
1. Are mental and soul different? How are they different?
2. What do you mean by "we think of as real"? What is real? — Corvus
. Because #2 is an illusion. The make-believe constructed and projected over/as history, moves on its own, with its own laws and mechanics. It has displaced our organic and [really] Real consciousness so that experience (our day to day "reality") has replaced nature, but ultimately it is empty projections of the imagination and not "what we think of as" ultimately Real.I am my mind and my body is intrinsically different from me. — Kurt Keefner
asking am I my body is problematic. — Manuel
I don't quite see how mind could be "more fictional" than body. — Manuel
We have become accustomed, through the influence of the Cartesian
tradition, to disengage from the object: the reflective attitude simultaneously purifies the common notions of body and soul by defining
the body as the sum of its parts with no interior, and the soul as a being
wholly present to itself without distance. These definitions make matters perfectly clear both within and outside ourselves: we have the
transparency of an object with no secret recesses, the transparency of a
subject which is nothing but what it thinks it is. The object is an object
through and through, and consciousness a consciousness through and
through. There are two senses, and two only, of the word ‘exist’: one
exists as a thing or else one exists as a consciousness. The experience of
our own body, on the other hand, reveals to us an ambiguous mode of
existing. If I try to think of it as a cluster of third person processes—
‘sight’, ‘motility’, ‘sexuality’—I observe that these ‘functions’ cannot
be interrelated, and related to the external world, by causal connections, they are all obscurely drawn together and mutually implied in a
unique drama. Therefore the body is not an object. For the same reason, my awareness of it is not a thought, that is to say, I cannot take it to
pieces and reform it to make a clear idea. Its unity is always implicit and
vague. It is always something other than what it is, always sexuality and
at the same time freedom, rooted in nature at the very moment when it
is transformed by cultural influences, never hermetically sealed and
never left behind. Whether it is a question of another’s body or my
own, I have no means of knowing the human body other than that of
living it, which means taking up on my own account the drama which
is being played out in it, and losing myself in it. I am my body, at least
wholly to the extent that I possess experience, and yet at the same time
my body is as it were a ‘natural’ subject, a provisional sketch of my total
being. Thus experience of one’s own body runs counter to the reflective procedure which detaches subject and object from each other, and
which gives us only the thought about the body, or the body as an idea,
and not the experience of the body or the body in reality. Descartes was
well aware of this, since a famous letter of his to Elizabeth draws the
distinction between the body as it is conceived through use in living
and the body as it is conceived by the understanding.40 But in Descartes
this peculiar knowledge of our body, which we enjoy from the mere
fact that we are a body, remains subordinated to our knowledge of it
through the medium of ideas, because, behind man as he in fact is,
stands God as the rational author of our de facto situation. On the basis of
this transcendent guarantee, Descartes can bllandly accept our irrational
condition: it is not we who are required to bear the responsibility for
reason and, once we have recognized it at the basis of things, it remains
for us only to act and think in the world.41 But if our union with the
body is substantial, how is it possible for us to experience in ourselves a
pure soul from which to accede to an absolute Spirit? Before asking this
question, let us look closely at what is implied in the rediscovery of our
own body. It is not merely one object among the rest which has the
peculiarity of resisting reflection and remaining, so to speak, stuck to
the subject. Obscurity spreads to the perceived world in its entirety. — MMP Phenomenology of Perception, end of chapter 6
On the (admittedly weak; but ultimately, all we've got) prima facie presumption (which has been mistakenly rejected) that what we sense is a real world.
I would submit that it is our constructions which have seduced us into thinking our senses cannot deliver reality. We are not born with any 'reasons' to doubt that they do. It is our perceptions which displace/distort our senses; our emotions which d/d our feelings; our ideas which d/d our [intuitive] imaginations, etc — ENOAH
Even so, I don't follow what you are saying about mind or self being more fictional than body. — Manuel
I am understanding virtually everything uniquely experienced by humans to be only experienced in the first place because over millenia (generationally transmitted) our once simply organic sense 'organ', imagination, overproduced and the images 'intended' to be used for conditioning responses, e.g. a roar means run, evolved, eventually into language, and out of that, or around the same time, human Mind. — ENOAH
The triggered feelings and actions, and effects on the body and nature are real; but the coding, Mind, and the so called experiences, really just empty structures having evolved into the linear form, Narrative, requiring a Subject, a dialectic, the illusion of truth, for what is just a structure, belief, one of the neverending settlements of dialectic, these are what I call fiction--maybe exagerratedly out of an overzealousness about the understanding (not invented, found in/ constructed out of everything heading its way)--the point is this. — ENOAH
Reality, the feelings and actions, the sensations unfiltered, and drives, including bonding, are not [meant to be: meaning is exactly what is constructed, hence the brackets] experienced that way, fictionally, in linear narrative form attaching to the Subject. The body, Reality, is not in knowing, the becoming narrative, a fiction, but in being [the] body. — ENOAH
At some vague length of time, that real natural process evolved into an autonomously moving system, with its own laws etc., not just admittedly already mediated sensation, but sensensatiin displaced by a working world, a system of triggers and responses, by nature empty fiction; though displacing everything, including primitive sensations and feelings. — ENOAH
where does body stop and mind begin? — ENOAH
From my pespective:
1. They are the same, there is no real duality. We have used soul and spirit to identify that which we have misperceived to be a being distinct from the body. — ENOAH
we don't know what a body is — Manuel
From very simple perceptual mental state of the simple living animals to more complex mental states of the social animals, and then highly complicated and sophisticated mental states of humans, — Corvus
Yes. That's in line with 'my' point. [because knowing is make-believe]. We cannot know what body is We can only be the body is-ing. — ENOAH
I would only consider the third to be mind (a thing unique to humans). The first two, shared with animals, forms organic consciousness and provides the organic infrastructure for human mind. Within the latter you might find stages/states but we just make those up as part of the processes of its operating. — ENOAH
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