I’m still working the same problem,
What is a Human Body if the Universe Must be Disembodied?
The cosmic perspective and the conventional use of reassuring illusions
Benjamin Cain
The Paradox of Our Apparent Embodiment | Philosophy TodayIt’s not that we don’t exist as bodies at all. What’s illusory is our presumed importance. What vanishes from an enlightened person’s sight is the all-importance of limited mental frame…
… The universe includes space and time as its dimensions, so it couldn’t be a thing or body unless it were embedded in a larger body, a multiverse, or quantum subspace. We can posit a megaverse or a quantum foam that seeds many universes, including ours. But in that case, we must ask whether the multiverse or the quantum vacuum is a body in the sense of being a physical thing.
Whenever our analysis reaches the most abstract natural container of things, we must infer that that “container” can’t be a body that compares with the bodies it contains.Thus, we must infer that we exist as bodies in something that ultimately isn’t a body at all — and what sort of bodies could ours be in that case? This analysis is the equivalent of pulling the rug out from under us. and so on and so forth . . .
It goes on, read it, it’s interesting in its own way, but still utter comic rubbish. Now look at the world, it’s like nothing was learned since WW2. Science should have brought us closer to appreciating this planet, but business people and their politicians and the lazy people choose to reject it - too boring, not enough profits. Never did we slow down to smell the flowers enough to realize that’s where societies future was - in understanding in caring for Earth. Not preserving, but at least having the balls to honestly look at the flip side of our marvelous modern marvels. To appreciate that everything has a cost and we had better think carefully about it.
This article (like so much that’s out there) is troubling to me, because the author sidesteps our evolutionary/biological origins. It’s too common. And I can’t figure out how to talk to people about it with pissing them off.
But, let try by starting with what I believe is about the most fundamental observation that can be made of our human condition. That being:
The Physical Reality ~ Human Mind divide.
Does that make sense?
Can anyone suggest a better way to pars it?
Cascading from that:
Each of us is an evolved biological thinking creature, a product of Earth’s processes, each of us possessing a half billion years of learning and heritage within our singular bloodline. Think about all that means. For one, your body actually knows a great deal that your consciousness is oblivious to. I myself know that my body takes better care of me than I do of it, and I’ve learn to pay attention, and listen to, my body. It has made for a fit life.
Awareness of self and environment is a prime imperative of biology since cellular life. That where our consciousness started, and it has been getting better ever since. Nothing cosmic, or micro about it, it’s biology unfolding on this particular miracle planet. Most chose to be blind to that. Why?
Theology wants us believing we are unique god given, it is so inbred into our thinking we are blind to it. So we spend all out energy looking for our origins in the cosmos, while harboring some innate unspoken resentment for planet Earth - All it matters to us, is something and consume, it’s in our genes and memes. (sorry I digress, but all of this has a bearing on how we think and see the world.)
The answers are down here on Earth and within the icky gushy uncomfortable wet biological realm.
Neuroscience has made it pretty clear that our consciousness is simply the internal reflection of your body communicating with itself.
My friends tell me that’s too easy an answer for their Hard Problem, but that’s for lack of curiosity. The truth is out there: Solms, Damasio, Sapolsky, Sloan-Wilson, etc.
Consciousness is the biological equivalent of useful electricity - magnet, Iron, motion = electricity. We still don’t fully understand its fine details, why should we expect anything simpler from biology?