I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self
— Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself ”
Some years ago, I had a colonoscopy without being fully anesthetized and was able to watch on a computer screen the shifting views of the insides of my colon. I was dismayed. There, revealed in digital detail, was the deep interior of my body, a realm I had always considered as mysterious, a forbidden temple, fragile and secretive as it went about its profound business of keeping me alive. Surely that mystical place was separate from the world of tables and chairs, and gratefully hidden from the direct gaze of my eyes and my mind. But here it was, with no illusions. I was shocked to see ordinary flesh. I was shocked to see gelatinous membranes like quivering jelly, pinkish in color, with bumps and ridges and turns. I felt like a trespasser in my own body.
For some fifty years, I had never seen the deep insides of my body. Was that fleshy coil on the screen part of me? Was I part of it? And who, or what, was the “I” thinking such thoughts?
I know practically nothing about the insides of my body. Not only can I not see my insides, except with special procedures like my digitized colonoscopy. I am totally unaware of the zillions of biochemical processes taking place. I do not feel them. I do not hear them. I could not describe them in any detail. My liver alone has about 250 billion cells, and each of those cells is orchestrating about 10 million biochemical reactions per second. There isn’t remotely enough storage room in my brain to monitor that much information. And equally, I am unaware of what’s going on in my pancreas, my heart, my lungs, my legs, my arms.
I am like the mayor of a large city. I can stand at the top of the tallest building and gaze out at my domain. I employ deputy mayors (eyes, nose, ears, skin), who make general reports of what is going on in my city.
But I have no clue of the torrent of activity taking place in each office building, each apartment, each shop, each street corner. Each little neighborhood operates according to its own rules and procedures, invisibly. Being in charge or even aware of anything beyond the general reports is an illusion.
Am I master of my body? Do I own my body? Is my body simply a machine to carry my head around and maintain it? And what is my Self, my “I,” the location of Me?
The sense of disconnection between “me” and my body is related to the so-called “mind-body problem,” which has been debated by philosophers and others for centuries. Is the mind simply another name for the activities of the brain – a material thing situated in our skulls? Or is it some nonmaterial substance, some subtle essence, a different category from flesh and blood altogether? After all, the experience of thinking and self awareness is so different from anything else, so compelling, so exquisite, so hard to describe, that it is hard to believe it can be anchored in the three pounds of grey matter in our skulls. Or, in modern terms, that it is the result of the electrical and chemical flows within material neurons.
The view that mind and body are totally separate kinds of substance is most closely associated with the French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650). In mathematics, Descartes developed methods for combining algebra and geometry, which previously had been two completely separate fields. In physics, he contributed to optics, among other fields, and showed why the bending angle of rainbows is 42 degrees. But Descartes is most known for his philosophical work Meditations of First Philosophy (1641), which is still a standard work in most university philosophy departments.
In the Meditations, Descartes argues that the mind and the body are totally different kinds of substances, a concept called “dualism.”
What am I? . . . I am not a collection of members which we call the human body: I am not a subtle air distributed through these members, I am not a wind, a fire, a vapour, a breath, nor anything at all which I can imagine or conceive . . . But what am I then? A thing which thinks. What is thing which thinks? It is a thing which doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels.
The mind-body problem is part of a long debate in biology – and one not completely settled in some quarters even today: – Does living matter have some special quality not present in nonliving matter, some nonmaterial essence or spirit that is associated with life, especially intelligent life. The two sides of the debate have been called the “vitalists” and the “mechanists.” Mechanists believe that a living creature is just so many microscopic pulleys and levers, chemicals and currents – all subject to the known laws of chemistry and physics and biology. Vitalists, on the other hand, argue that there is a special quality of life – some immaterial or spiritual or transcendent force – that enables a jumble of tissues and chemicals to vibrate with life. That transcendent force would be beyond physical explanation. Some call it the soul. If it exists, it would be related to Descartes’ “mind.”
The ancient Greek and Roman “atomists” such as Democritus and Lucretius – proponents of the notion that everything was composed of atoms and only atoms – were of course mechanists. Spinoza was a mechanist. Plato and Aristotle were vitalists. They believed that an idealized “final cause,” more spirit than matter, impelled a germ cell to develop towards an adult form. Descartes was a vitalist.
For many vitalists, the nonmaterial essence, although invisible, was responsible for supplying the energy needs of the body. And here, the vitalists found themselves unavoidably afoot in the land of the physical. Energy is physical. And since the mid nineteenth century, the notion of energy has been owned by science. Science knows how to quantify the energy of motion, the energy of heat, the energy of gravity, the energy of molecules and chemical bonds, and the energy of everything else in the physical world. Science knows how to tally up on a ruled accounting sheet the numbers for each swing of the arm, each inhale and exhale, each bead of sweat.
In the late nineteenth century, two German physiologists, Adolf Eugen Fick and Max Rubner, did just that for the human body. They tabulated the energies required for body heat, muscle contractions, digestion, and other physical activities and compared against the chemical energy stored in food. Each gram of fat, carbohydrate, and protein is worth so many units of energy. After doing the arithmetic, the physiologists put away their sharp pencils and announced that the energy used by a living creature exactly equals the energy consumed in food – a victory not only for the mechanists but also for the law of the conservation of energy.
Today, almost all biologists are mechanists. And almost all believe that the “mind” is just another name for the brain. In the view of modern science, we are all material. We are made of atoms and molecules and nothing more.
But I haven’t quite answered my two major questions. What is the “I” that I feel so compellingly? And, whatever the “I” turns out to be, how could it be that the body below my neck is part of “me,” when “I” have so little conception of what that body is doing or how it works?
The question “What is the ‘I?’” is closely related to the question: “What is consciousness?” That is an almost impossibly difficult question, both for neuroscientists and philosophers. In his wonderful book The Mysterious Flame, the British philosopher Colin McGinn, who has taught at Oxford and at University College London, says that we can never understand consciousness because we can never get outside of our own consciousness (or minds) to examine it. The way that I think of McGinn’s viewpoint is with this analogy: We can never see the back of our heads with a single mirror. It is physically impossible.
Robert Desimone, a distinguished neuroscientist at MIT, has a different point of view. “Years ago,” he once told me, “we were satisfied to know which areas of the brain light up under various stimuli. Now, we want to know mechanisms.” Desimone is particularly interested in how the brain pays attention to some stimuli and not to others. Every moment, our brains are bombarded with information, from without and within. The eyes alone convey more than one hundred billion signals to the brain every second. The ears receive another avalanche of sounds. Much of this data is random and meaningless. Indeed, for us to function, much of it must be ignored. But clearly not all. How do our brains select the relevant data? How do we decide to pay attention to the beep of a smoke alarm and ignore the drip of a leaky faucet? Desimone and his colleagues have found that when we are told to pay attention to a certain kind of thing, such as a new face, the neurons in the part of the brain known to specialize in face recognition begin firing in synchrony, while neurons in other parts are firing randomly.
I asked Desimone about the seemingly strange experience of “consciousness.” How does a gooey mass of blood, bones, and gelatinous tissue become a sentient being? How does it become aware of itself as a thing separate from its surroundings? How does it develop a self, an ego, an “I?” Without hesitation, Desimone replied that the mystery of consciousness was over rated. “As we learn more about the detailed mechanisms in the brain,” he said, “the question of ‘What is consciousness?’ will fade away into irrelevancy and abstraction.” As Desimone sees it, consciousness is just a vague word for the mental experience of attending, which we are slowly dissecting in terms of the electrical and chemical activity of individual neurons. He threw out an analogy. Consider a careening automobile. A person might ask: Where inside that thing is its motion? But the person would no longer ask that particular question after she understood the engine of the car, the manner in which gasoline is ignited by sparkplugs, the movement of cylinders and gears.
Let me come to my second question, which is as unsettling and unfathomable as the first: How could it be that the body below my neck is part of “me,” when “I” have so little conception of what that body is doing or how it works? This is a question that only a more advanced brain could or would ask. Birds and cats and dogs, I’m sure, do not worry that they cannot see into their bodies or have awareness of the billions of chemical reactions going on in their livers every second. They seem to get by just fine without any such concerns. And I wonder: If and when we build a computer complex enough to have “self awareness,” will it question what it is made of and how it works? Will it brood over the fact that it cannot gaze into its innards? Will it consider itself a whole thing, a unity, or a collection of disjointed parts?
I am astounded, and fascinated, that despite the enormous progress made by science in the last fifty years or so, we do not understand the most fundamental aspect of our own minds: our consciousness and the connection between body and mind. Detailed calculations in quantum physics predict that the magnetic strength of the electron, a type of subatomic particle, is 1.159652182. The measured value is 1.159652181. Our gravitational wave detectors are so sensitive that they can measure the change in distance between two hanging mirrors separated by 5 kilometers to an accuracy of 0.00000000000000001 centimeters, equivalent to measuring the distance to a nearby star to an accuracy of less than the width of a human hair. In biology, we have been able to decode and identify the three billion base pairs in a strand of human DNA. Yet, I am shocked to see the inside of my colon. And I don’t know who or what is “I.”
Notes:
“I have said that the soul is not more than the body . . . ” Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (1855) stanza 48, in Leaves of Grass
Each cell undergoing about 10 million chemical reactions per second: See, for example, https://vadim.oversigma.com/MAS862/Project.html
“What am I?. . . ” Meditations on the First Philosophy, Meditation II, René Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T Ross, Great Books of the Western World, volume 31 (Chicago: University of Chicago/Encylopedia Britannica, 1952), pg. 79
“Years ago, we were satisfied to know which areas of the brain light up . . . ” my interview with Desimone, September 17, 2014
What I call the “magnetic strength” of the electron is technically the “electron anomaly” multiplied by 1,000. See Eduardo de Rafael, “Update of the Electron and Muon g-Factors,” Nuclear Physics Proceedings Supplement 234 (2013): 193.
The gravitational wave detector is called LIGO. More information can be found at: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/facts.
With Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man I protest against being called mere mechanism, Mr. Desimone ! Or that the mystery of my consciousness– and unconsciousness and why when how information and emotions pass fluidly back and forth between– as “irrelevancy”! Who is he to call our very selves such
( I am hoping my irony was caught w/out use of the “LOL”!)
It was sometime in my early teenage years when the notion of self became more of a state of inquiry than a state of being. Certainly, it was both. But I had, by then, developed poetic sensibilities and so devoted a lot of time contemplating things that no one else in my age group seemed the least bit concerned with. They usually had to be high in order to listen to me. I don’t believe they derived much benefit at the time.
Once, as I sat alone in the woods, a bird perched on a rock quite close to me. I wish I could say it was an owl or a hawk or some more suitably mysterious sort of bird, but it was just a robin. Our eyes met. Perhaps you know someone who has had a similar experience? Well, anyway… for a moment, I felt as though I were seeing into the bird and that the bird saw into me. We seemed to be connected in some wordless place where there is nothing but being. Connected by a filament, a fiber of being that snapped apart as he flew off.
And I wondered at that.
One might reasonably question why this sort of revelatory experience might not have been experienced with the family dog or cat. I believe that it does. But the experience with the wild creature is the more profound because the primal nature of the encounter is amplified by that wildness.
Now the memory fades and I cannot say how long I remained in the wood that day. Nor can I say how long it took for me to distill this transcendent experience into what has since become a lasting impression. But, if I were pressed to assign a singular point of origin for the thoughts I am about to express; That would be it.
These many years later, in moments of quietude, I find I can divide being, as it occurs in the mind, into three levels. There is the obvious conscious mind, the king of the hill, which interprets, organizes, puts into language, remembers and responds to stimuli when there is time for measured reaction. Then there is the subconscious, like the translator at the UN, which sends the data from the sensory input to the appropriate visual, auditory and physical receptors in the brain, commanding basic survival impulses such as fight or flight and regulating, behind the scenes, the autonomic nervous system. These associations are well known.
However (and this is, I must admit, a purely subjective observation), there seems to be a sort of psychic underlayment, the seat of the self, from which emanates the fundamental aspect of being. Before my subconscious can react and before my conscious can change its mind, I am free as a bird. Just in case no one has yet seen fit to name it, I hereby officially designate it as the “supra-conscious”. This is what we are born with.
On occasion, I have suggested in casual conversation (I rarely have the ear of academics) that if I had died the day I was born, I would have known all that I needed to know. And, as if that weren’t enough to raise an eyebrow, I refer to it as the “wisdom of the stillborn”. For we are born into a world of definition, constrained by language, be it literal or mathematical or, indeed, by the very senses with which we have been endowed to perceive, interpret and survive in the world. All perceptions, whether defined in your calculus or measured in observation, are merely approximations of reality.
I have tried to remember what I was born to forget.
I am not eager to take the most obvious path to that destination, however. So I embrace the quiet moments, leaving myself open to the agencies of inspiration, which seem to have no local address, accepting the gifts as they arrive, molding them into some form of what might loosely be considered poetry or art. I’m here to help. It’s what I do.
Dear Mark,
Thanks you for your beautiful reflections. I would just comment that if you had died the day before you were born,
you would not have had the many experiences you have had in your life.
Thank you for your thoughtful comments.