Mind-Body Problems
"I found there were no roots more intimate than those between a mind and body that have decided to be whole." ― Rupi Kaur
Meat Sack v. Mind Games
The mind-body problem is a big-deal philosophical question that some very smart people have been arguing about for centuries. Since both the mind and the body are necessary for the act of living, the question is roughly: Are human-beings bodies that have minds? or are we minds that have bodies? or…what’s the deal?
I don’t know the answer, there probably isn’t one—and it’s hard to even ask the question(s) properly without a specialized vocabulary—but because I am an individually existing human-person with both a body and a mind, I do experience the mind-body problem in my daily life.
My personal mind-body problem is basically this: I like my mind. I loathe my body.1
My body is the carrier of weight and responsibility, while my mind is full of freedom. My body is what it already is, while my mind can evolve and change itself. My body is where pain and discomfort are felt, and my mind would rather not deal with those things. My body needs so many things from me, and my mind resents it.
My body is confined and confining. It has requirements. It needs food, water, warmth, sleep, exercise. It breaks down and needs maintenance or medicine. Providing all these things requires my mind to do a lot of work: analyze needs and available resources, make decisions about priorities, strategize ways to exploit the environment, modulate activity based on changing circumstances, etc. My body is a helpless, fragile, bawling baby for which my mind is primary caregiver…and I never wanted kids.
My mind fantasizes about how its experience might continue after death. It imagines that, while my body is being used as a crash-test dummy or for surgery practice,2 my mind will be free-floating through the cosmos, observing the secrets of the universe and testing my grand speculations against living history as time itself unravels before me. My mind will be omniscient and omnipresent and integrated directly into the system of universal knowledge. My mind fantasizes that this will be its eventual reward for taking care of my body for however fucking long it manages to survive.
What side am ‘I’ on?
It’s worth noting, that when I write “my mind” I’m usually thinking of myself, of the proverbial ‘I.’ But when I write “my body” I’m thinking of this icky meat-sack in which ‘I’ am imprisoned. Clearly, as ‘I’ experience things, my mind has a body problem.
This default lens of mine—where my mind has a body problem—comes with consequences3 that shape my behavior and the way ‘I’ live my life. Let’s imagine (totally hypothetically, of course) that I’m a picky eater and I hate to cook, so feeding myself is pretty annoying. Maybe I opt to just...not feed myself a lot of the time. Or if I do feed myself, it’s something that sounds good to my mind…like potato chips, or a jar of frosting.4 Maybe I don’t really exercise, because I hate to suffer for no reason and “so my body will be healthy” is not a good enough reason; it’s just an icky meat-sack preventing me from achieving omniscience.
So does my mind really have a body problem? Or is the problem that my mind acts like my body’s abusive partner, and my proverbial ‘I’ takes its side?
Locked up tight.
Maybe my mind should learn to appreciate my body a little more.
After all, my body does a lot of stuff for my mind. My body carries around my mind’s burdens. Work stress? My body keeps that in my right shoulder, underneath where the scapula meets the ribs. Some days, that lump of concrete gets too heavy for me to sit straight, but it pays the bills.
My mind’s Fear is stored in the muscles of my face and jaw and throat—the muscles required to reject tears. These muscles must animate to show emotion, so they should also be able to conceal it, even from myself, by staying perfectly still. My mind believes this, and is fully prepared to ignore the resulting tension headaches suffered by my body.
Every angry word my mind has deemed too risky to say aloud is kept contained behind my body’s chronically contracted abdominal wall. Sometimes, a few angry words get squeezed out and run rampant around my mind—reverberating until I forget they were originally meant for someone else. My mind thinks: for being a prison, the body sure does a shitty job of keeping things locked up.
But my mind forgets that it created the ineffectual policies that are responsible for this body-prison-overcrowding in the first place (don’t say angry words, don’t show fear, work is your primary source of value…). And my mind refuses to make upgrades to the facilities or to do any basic maintenance at all (exercise, vitamins). Maybe my body is really being kept imprisoned by my mind!
Or maybe prison is the wrong metaphor entirely.
I, System.
Maybe ‘I’ am a library—with a ‘body’ section and a ‘mind’ section5—where a wealth of knowledge and experience is kept secure and accessible to my greater whole.
The tiny joints of my feet, for instance, retain memories of beach sand, roller skates, stubbed toes, and wet socks. The respirating tissues of my lungs and diaphragm contain, in tandem, memories of hearty laughter and of heaving aloneness. The very pupils of my eyes contain decades of expansion and contraction according to my surroundings and circumstances. To say nothing at all of the aeons of ancestral experience distilled and encoded into my DNA.
But a library is still a tool whose use must be learned; it is a system, not a shelter.
If my mind sees my body simply as a difficult-to-maintain shelter rather than as the page upon which all of its experiences are written (as well as the pen—and hand—that does the writing) then of course the mind will be blind to the greater importance of its role as the body’s caretaker. And if the body is continually disrespected and ignored by the mind, of course it will stop offering up instinctive suggestions or intuitive understanding to the mind’s conscious awareness.
Maybe the task ahead of me then, is to learn my mind-body system—how does my mind affect my body and vice versa? What has my body been trying to tell my mind this whole time, if my mind had only been listening? How can my body help my mind manifest itself most effectively out in physical reality? How can my mind and body both relax into a mutually trusting symbiosis?
These are big questions, but using the hands of my body to write them down here seems like a good place to start looking for the answers my mind needs.
Perhaps, in the end, ‘I’ will discover that my mind is in fact already integrated directly into the system of universal knowledge—via my body.
I think there is probably an entire spectrum of human love-hate relationships with our minds and bodies.
I plan to donate my body to science, even if it means it gets abused for some weird industrial or capitalistic purpose—I still think that’s more useful than rotting in the ground. This plan of mine, though, upsets my husband on a level I cannot seem to comprehend, and I think this is one of the most illustrative anecdotes of the difference between his and my lived experience of the mind-body problem.
Or, more likely, the body-problem lens is itself a consequence of self-reinforcing life experiences.
As a modern American adult, I feel strongly that being able to choose potato chips and frosting for dinner is the best consolation prize for having to put up with U.S. politics. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
And probably many other sections besides…