Lit X: A Beginner's introduction

If I *have* this body, then I guess I'm something *other than* this body. When I say "I own my body" I don't mean "This body owns itself" - probably a meaningless claim. Or does everything that no one owns own itself? Does the moon belong to everyone, to no one, or to itself? What can be an owner of anything? I can, and my body is just one of the things I own. In any case, I and my body seem both intemately connected and yet distinct. I am the controller; it is the controlled. Most of the time. [...] (6) // This passage illustrates the difficulty in establishing a relationship between mind and body

The idea that *what you are* is not simply a living body (or a living brain) but also a soul or spirit seems to many people to be unscientific, in spite of its ancient tradition...But not all versions of the idea that you are something distinct from your purely physical body are so vulnerable to ridicule and refutation. Some versions, as we shall see, actually flourish in the garden of science. (7) [...] // This passage shows that pure scientific/biological reductionism does not dismiss the concept of body and soul.

To discern what went on in one's mind one just "looked" --one "introspected" --and the limits of what one thereby found were the very boundaries of the mind. (11) // The true problem.

-The Mind's I

This last quote is the crux of the matter. How can one examine itself fully, if it is limited by the very limitations that it is trying to observe? See the madness quote from Shadow of the Wind in a previous blog. The Mind's I argues that "the mind begins to emerge as a self-designing system of representations, physically embodied in the brain. (15)

Other notes:
Definition of soul: "the perceptually unbreachable gulf between principles and particles...the incompressible core that determines how you are, hence who you are."

"What is it like to be a bat?" Examining self-reference in a different way. We want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat, not for a human to be a bat. This is probably impossible given our limitations.


Much more on this to come...in my Lit X paper. Hopefully you're interested now...and hopefully I have some ideas now.