Last week, I began to attack the notion of Descartes of pure essentialism, which is by no means confined only to Descartes, and asserts there is some essence to a thing that remains unchanged when the physical properties of the things completely alter. To me, and indeed I believe to reality, this unchanging essence is nothing more than the concept of thing we have established through a web of semiotic signs.
Now, having laid the ground work for this critique in the aforementioned piece, I wish to turn our attention to another one of Descartes's staples which has managed to propagate itself through philosophy ever since: mind-body dualism.
For the uninitiated, this simple supposition, that the body is a prison in which the mind is stationed, has not only festered in the bowls of philosophy but has reached out to all corners of culture, in Art and to an extent to psychology, which seems to treat the mind, at times, as something entirely isolated, as if it were not nourished and existent because of the body it supposedly "inhabits".
First, let us return to the truth of our being and of our world, the fact that all can be understood through process, these micro interaxions which weave the tapestry of macro-motion and in themselves interlink endlessly forming no singular foundational block but making up a mega-system encompassing all der Welt. As understood, we, as machines, as a kind of mega-process, always working both for and against ourselves, both willingly and unknowingly.
There is some precedent, as we have seen, to think of the human in this way. But what dualist thinking, especially absolute dualism, fails to recognise is the implication of this form on the actually examined forms of being, or processes.
Let us consider the human. A being. A machine. A mega-process. If we are to break down this, then we notice the immediate fact. The parts of a machine, or a mega-process, are super-processes (what we acknowledged previously as "objects"). The simple revelation here is this: the mind and the body, individually, are super-processes (objects).
The history of humanity has seen a psychological need to anthropomorphise all things, even the full abstract such as time and nature (see father and mother respectively). It should be no surprise then that we see this same form of ascription of characteristics onto common "objects", those of the mind and the body.
From a real psychological perspective, or even better from an anatomical and physiological one, the mind and body are mutual processes; they do not funxion separately. A body without a mind is an object of unmoving, unfeeling, unimportance. A mind without a body is a starving object, with no reality, no tangibility, no purpose. The Cartesian Science Fixion dream of heads floating in test tubes simulating some superior consciousness fails to realise the reality laid out by this own imagine image. In this, the brain forms a new mega-process, a new machine with the mechanical body of the left over system. The test tube or grid of mechanical expansion becomes the new tangible existence within the world and thus it can once again funxion properly as a machine.
Let us turn to systems we form on a daily basis and understand the roots and flaws in the dualist approach. When you get into a car and begin to drive down the road, you are not simply operating a tool (in fact, this is true for all tools, each of them forming systems, but we will return to this), you are creating a system, and by doing so, there becomes no differentiation between parts on a conceptual basis.
Think of the car itself, it is like any machine, like us. The mega-process is made of infinite small super and sub processes which interact with each other both for and against ultimately constituting a single conceptual object: "car." The only time we think of the car in terms of the super-processes which create the totality is when the abstraxion of the concept is broken, such as when the machine is broken and needs repair. We recognise the engine, or alternator or coolant pumps when they fail to funxion, in the same way we recognise the body and mind as separate when our own funxions fail to operate: a kidney is failing, there is tar in my lungs, "I am unable to walk as I once could, I must be trapped within this body!"
When we see a car moving down the road, because it is funxioning as the concept tells us it should, we don't differentiate the parts. It's not a person driving the car, it's a car. The system is complete as a concept, it cannot be abstracted any further.
When you drive a car, it is not only you operating a car, using a tool, it is the fusion of the car and yourself into a single operating system which has a goal, move from one place to another. Once you separate from this system, you regain autonomy as an individual machine, as a separate entity to the conceptual "car" that you previously formed.
This is true of any tool. A hammer is more than a super-process; when used by a machine, it becomes a system. The hammer becomes and extension of yourself and a part of yourself, both working together for a singular goal and both a single entity: "that which is hammering".
If, as we understood in the previous piece, the world is only a complex web of abstract conceptualisation, that means these concepts represent the form in which we see reality, or rather, represent reality (à la Kant and Wittgenstein). And if these concepts represent reality--or at least the means in which we experience reality, and thus the personal reality of each of us--then the concepts "exist" in the same way as anything else.
Not only do you conceptually transform into a human-hammer and human-car when you engage in these systemic fusions, you actually create the reality of these undifferentiated systems. The same is true for the machine of yourself. The symbiotic bond between these interacting processes--the car needs you to move anywhere, you need the car to move--operates in the same biological way as the relationship between corpus and wit. There is no body without the mind and no mind without the body. They form a mutual connexion, a mutual process, and because of its funxion, it cannot be conceptually or literally differentiated, it remains a single entity: "the human".
Often psychological issues will manifest in the physical form of the body (pains, muscle tensions, insomnia) in the same way physical issues (pains, trauma) or experientially issues will manifest in the mind. The simple truth of this is exchange is that there is no sharing at all, both are a single machine and thus share experience.
The farthest reaching idea, both fixionally and in the experimental work of biology, might claim to dispute all of this through head transplants, such as those performed on monkey's. If these were successful, then the mind would exist within a different body, and yes this would be true. For the time when the brain exists outside of the body, moving from one container to another, it conceptually becomes a super-system, an object in itself and removed from its context; but, like the hammer sitting on the work bench, when it's not part of a funxioning whole, it remains inert and irrelevant. Once it returns to being a machine, in a new body or not, it once again becomes subsumed in the totality, no longer to exist as an isolated phenomenon. It is true it may be in a "different" body, but this body still forms the machine which allows the super-process to subsist.
The ontological question this spurs is one similar to the teleportation problem posed by Parfit. In this case, which is the "real person", the body which lost the mind or the mind in a new body? In truth, the answer is contradictory: both and neither. The "real person", that is the entity, the process, the machine which once existed, no longer does. There is no longer a union between the specific super-process of the body and that of the mind, even if the individual parts have formed different connexions and established different machines. The original machine, the one we seek in this question, has ceased to exist. But is this something new? Is this something scary? Does this not happen at ever small immeasurable "moment" of mechanical time?
The brain and the body are never the same. Being super-processes, they are made up of an infinity of small processes, each of them in term divided infinitely into the sub and sub and so on. This means, of course, there is a kind of transplant which must, by necessity, take place within these smaller interaxions at every level of every day. An atom switches with another, an electron falls from one level to the next. A larger process, the liver fails, is this not a transplant of a process within the body? Yes, of course it is. As I have said before (see Character Creation, Lined With Corbomite and Ship of Theseus), the individual, the character, the personality, the machine, the human, all of these things are transitory, only held together, like the wax, by the concept of consistency, the illusion of continuity within ourselves and the web of abstraxion we use to piece together the world. Thus, the transplant of the brain is not an alien experience for us, it's only the macro example of what happens at every interval of time.
We are not MIND and BODY. We are both and neither, in a perfect union forming the concept of our existence.
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