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

Agreed, "my" in "my body" is indexical and could be replaced with "this body" in the same context. It would still make sense to say "I have a body," meaning that a body is a part of me, rather than being some external possession of mine.

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

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."

I noticed that you have a strong interest in the work of Ayn Rand. — Joshs

what

I noticed that you have a strong interest in the work of Ayn Rand.
— Joshs

what — SophistiCat

This is from his public webpage:

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

I agree. The predicate "is bodily", maybe even "involves this person's body" or "is embodied" generically apply to anything the person does. But seemingly not to all things they are involved in. Compare signing a contract to being bound by it. The former is an act done with the body, the latter commits the person to specified acts in specified conditions. The former is bodily because signing is, the latter is not bodily it is institutional or social or normative.

We perhaps could even say that signing a contract does not commit a body to any specific action, just a specific type of action. You can write your signature in a variety of slightly different ways, all that matters is that you have done an act which counts as signing in the appropriate way. Even if it's the body's hand that moves, it's the person that the contract binds upon the dotted line.

In that regard, the person partakes in actions which are not individuated by their bodily movements, they are individuated by the broader context of the body and the world we're in. The body must also, therefore, be able to incorporate, act upon and modify this context and its world (in a circumscribed fashion).

If I should wish to include legal personhood, institutional roles and other social functions as part of personhood, I believe it would be necessary to say that each person is not "just" their body. But perhaps that their body has several privileged roles in determining who and how they are. It has the job of functioning in accordance with roles in other registers - social rather than ambulatory, normative rather than sensory - by coordinating itself to count as according with them.

Which is to say, a body generates its personhood but is not coextensive with it.

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.

Fair point. We are our consciousnesses, and we do not experience consciousness without a body (at least in this life). We are not "just brains," although many writers try to frame things in this way. Brains never produce experiences without bodies. We could imagine some sort of incredibly advanced sci-fi situation where our brains might be transferred into some sort of synthetic body and "go on experiencing," but this is:

A. To elevate potency over act in our analysis, such that we trying to define things in nature in terms of science-fiction technology bordering on magic, rather than how things actually are; and

B. Still supposing that some other system essentially mimics what our body does for us.

Thus, it's still the case that brains don't produce experiences without bodies (synthetic or otherwise).

Nor do bodies produce experiences without an environment. There are no truly isolated systems, and a human body could not produce experiences if it existed in one. Even something like human body suspended in a vacuum in a heatless environment is going to produce a corpse, not an experiencing person.

Nor is the environment irrelevant. A human body will produce no experiences in most of the environments that exist in the cosmos or on Earth. Were a healthy body teleported onto the surface of a star, the bottom of the ocean, the surfaces of most of the planets we know of, inside the Earth's core or mantel, etc. experience would cease essentially instantly.

Consciousness is produced by brains in bodies in a select range of environments. You need all of these, not just a body. And you need a body where activity is in a very narrow range, since there are far, far more ways for the body to be arranged such that it is dead or unconscious than alive.

Hence, being a person, or any organism, is a continuous activity to preserve form. As Sachs translates Aristotle's entelecheia, "being-at-work-staying-itself."



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.

I think Rand might agree with MP in a very general way. He says "I am my body," but he means a conscious body. Rand says that a human is an indivisible being with two attributes: matter and consciousness. She never talks about brains in a metaphysical way, only epistemologically, e.g. the brain integrates sensations into percepts automatically.

In her journals she flirts with vitalism and some kind of spirit, but this never makes it into her published work. She did not like doing armchair science, and in a sense, this would be science.

She does say that the concept of consciousness presupposes a self that is conscious. Consciousness is not a "primary object" unto itself. The self in question she identifies as an animal. (This is before AI got to be a big thing.) So that suggests that she means more than just a brain, but she never offered a definite opinion on the subject.

I am working on an essay to be called "I am not my brain." In other words, I am the whole bodily, conscious person. Just what a person seems to be. I am not appealing to the idea of a soul.

I have very strong intuitions on this subject. I am aware of the arguments on the other side, but I think maybe I can address them.

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

The corpse example does not say much. I mean, if the body is dead then the mind is dead too. You would have to show how a mind can exist outside a corpse, which is crucial evidence that is missing. That would be a very strong indication that mind and body are different categories.

Conceivable, yes. But very weak, as you say.

You could attempt to give a naturalistic account of mind being separate from body, without going into Platonic metaphysics. You could say that the laws or habits of mind are, in principle, different from the laws of physics and heavenly bodies. Maybe that's true. Maybe not.

But I don't think we know nearly enough about body to say that the mind cannot be a body modified in a specific way.

I limit myself to monism, and I call it "materialism", but it can be called "naturalism" or "mentalism", it doesn't matter much. I very much admire the Platonic tradition, and I think it has a lot of value, but it also needs to be modernized a bit.

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

It's complex, but I'll be as simple as I can.
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.'

It is in that sense that I agree with and understand MP's Hypothesis. In fact, I think his side notes on the mental unwittingly cling to what his Hypothesis rightly resists. I mean he doesn't go far enough in dismissing the mental as, though effective, ultimately nothing.