Where the body is, the mind is. The mind is not an independent entity or a separate realm but an emergent process of the body’s material existence. Thoughts, emotions, and awareness are grounded in the physical processes of the brain and nervous system, which are inseparable from the body. To speak of the mind apart from the body is to misunderstand its nature. The mind is always embodied, and its experiences are situated where the body is, in space and time. Recognizing this eliminates the disorientation caused by dualistic separations and firmly roots the mind in material reality.
Tag: embodied mind
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The self (this mind, this consciousness, this spirit, this soul, this ego) is a very good illusion. The others (those minds, those, consciousnesses, those spirits, those, souls, those egos) are also a very good illusion.
But there is nothing illusionary about this body, and those objects.
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I do not need to know every detail of a car in order to utilize it. As long as I know it needs petrol, steering, acceleration, and braking controls, I can use it.
This applies to everything else, including the body I inhabit. It may well be a mistake (I tend to think it is) to say inhabit as though there are separate objects – a body and a mind. The mind may be a very good illusion.
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I am an experiential thing. But before I am an experiential thing, I am simply a thing. The initial “pure” experience is without awareness of self, which leads to the mistake of thinking of the experience as the self, when in fact the experiential thing is the self. I am not an experience, but I am an experiential thing.
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Referent is what goes on in the physical world. Concept is what goes on in the head. Symbol is what goes on in language. Both concept and symbol go on in physical world as processes.
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Interesting and insightful that Descartes leaves material as the last to be understood in his meditations.
Indeed, there is nothing a priori about experience. We have to go through it (experience it) to reach a conclusion about what thinking is or what does thinking. For Descartes he decided by the second meditation that it was the mind. I also had thought it was the mind. Jeffrey Kaplan thought we have inherited this belief from Descartes and have continued to run with it as common sense. But common sense it is not.
Some time later I have come to believe this is wrong, that I am not a mind, but a body with mind processes (thinking). The thinking thing is not the mind but the body.
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The body causes the mind.
Without the body there is no underlying mind action. The process of thinking is like any bodily process such as walking, sitting, sleeping.
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The experience of reality is, first and foremost, of objects, space, and time. The experience of the mind or consciousness is always an embodied experience. The internal experience is always within a body within the external world, never outside or apart from it.
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Reality is three or four dimensional. When you are dealing with fewer dimensions you are making an abstraction. It is a selected representation of the reality. It is a conceptualization of what the speaker wants to highlight of the reality.
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All along we are stuck in the paradigm where the mind owns the body, where the mind is seen as whole and the body part.
When we have a body owner paradigm the body is whole and the mind is part.
By flipping the paradigm many problems dissolve. What once were hard problems become easy ones.
theoria 