Lugging a Body Through the World
Why do we have bodies? We lug over a hundred pounds of meat and water with us everywhere we go. Wouldn’t life be better if that weren’t necessary?
Our minds are connected to our bodies and therefore to the world, but how, and why? If you dissect a brain, you see only gray and white tissue. You find no words, songs, pictures, memories, or colors. Where did the mind go? There must be a connection.
If you’ve wondered why your body doesn’t always do what you’d like, or why you have this thought rather than that thought, you’ll enjoy being made dizzy by the ideas in this book. A radical re-think of the connection between mind and body leads to some strange insights about how the mind affects the body and what the body is good for. It suggests new approaches to learning, medicine, body-image, sex, evolution, and death. It recasts intuition, thinking, feeling, empathy, belief and culture.
I’ve worked on the puzzle of the mind and the body in the world for fifty years. The outline of a solution came to me in the 1970s but I couldn’t articulate it until the 1990s and that effort was close to word salad. This essay expresses and elaborates the original vision. It’s the third volume in a series of monographs in philosophical psychology. The first, Scientific Introspection, described a special way of thinking about the mind without getting too confused. The second volume, Mind Without Brain, presented my analysis of the mind using the method of Scientific Introspection. And now, with Mind, Body, World, I connect the structure of the mind to experience of the body, and once you have physical feet on the ground, you’re in the world.
My solution can be dizzying to consider, but so is quantum mechanics, so that doesn’t make it wrong. It’s actually kind of fun to see the world through new eyes.
Mind, Body, World, is released May 1, 2021.
Kindle: ISBN: 978-1-7355412-8-0
Paperback: ISBN: 978-1-7355412-9-7 (133 pages).
Smashwords Epub: ISBN: 978-1-7355412-7-3
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1077666
Ebook: $2.99
Paper: $6.99
See all my books at www.psifibooks.com