Mind Contra Body

MENS PEREGRINA IN CORPORE VETERE

There is a dichotomy that has been troubling me recently, not least because I reject dichotomies on principle. It is the mind/body. I want nothing more than to be able to collapse these two things into one holistic partnership but they resist and resist. I think I might be close to understanding why. The answer sounds a lot like mismatch theory but with much more bite than the usual ape in a concrete jungle gloss.

A few days ago I wrote the most coherent elaboration of my fundamental views that I have ever achieved. In the process I stumbled upon two new pieces of information. One of them, regarding the relation of mind and body, formed the key. Allow me to recap the description of mind that I made in there.

The mind is grown in the body over the course of many years. In general animal minds exist in relation to the phenomenal world of the senses and the proprioceptive world of the body. Their essential function is to bridge that gap between external and internal.

In nature animal minds develop in relation to a phenomenal world that is not primarily addressed to them. The forest, field, sea, or sky is full of entities with their own trajectories: prey, predators, mates, rivals, shelters, weather, terrain, plants, sounds, smells. Some of these are urgently relevant; many are indifferent; many become meaningful only in a particular moment. The world is dense, but it is not mostly made of signs.

Human minds by contrast develop in a phenomenal world that is addressed to them, where every surface is densely layered with meaning. From birth and through development to adulthood, the human phenomenal world is controlled and ordered and significant, full of signs and symbols many layers deep. The fitness of a human mind is to a large extent determined by its ability to interpret this dense palimpsest in a way that is concordant with the minds that wrote it. Every human mind is in discourse with its ancestors throughout its life.

There is a single word that captures the difference between humans and animals: technology. I take technology to mean any method for embedding part of a mind into the environment in a way that persists through time. Humans have been using technology to carve their minds into their environments for many thousands of years. Many of the techniques that are used last for hundreds of generations. Some can last for thousands of generations. This is the sense in which man is described as the time-binding animal¹.

These messages from the past to the future accumulate and aggregate. This is why our world now is so densely layered. A city like Athens integrates information across at least 3000 years in its architecture alone. In its language. In its literature. In its art. This aggregation squeezes out the natural, nonhuman world more and more. It more and more dominates the development of each and every individual.

Being in dialogue across deep time also allows humans to wander very far from their natural starting point. A mind that is trained to interact with other minds who were trained to interact with other minds who were trained to interact with other minds for many generations can be quite abstracted away from the natural world that still fundamentally underpins the human noosphere². These long journeys into the semiotic realm allow us to create mentifacts³ that are extremely powerful, such as the atom or God. The former allows us to manipulate the natural world in intense, incomprehensible detail. The latter allows us to form stable societies containing implausible numbers of other mammals, societies with a density of symbolic coordination no insect colony approaches.

Mind⁴ is the product of this history. The intensification of this self-relationship afforded us by technology has resulted in minds that are unlike anything that has existed in the natural world before. The human mind is nonanimal. We might even say the human mind is unnatural.

The human body on the other hand is animal. The human body is natural. Physiologically, a human can be described evocatively as a shaved ape. Human physiology is normal mammalian physiology. We have some peculiarities as a species– highly developed vocal control, highly developed sequential memory. But these are not a priori any more peculiar than any adaptation. We are not obviously any more morphologically tuned than a cheetah or a gazelle or a hummingbird or a peacock.

It is worth taking a moment to describe the relationship between mind and body. Or rather, the range of relationships, because in this we are an exceptionally diverse species. Some humans focus their attention onto their body and craft it, often using technology. Some craft their bodies into simulacra of natural kinds– runners and wrestlers and singers and dancers. Athletes and performance artists. Some of these, particularly athletes, really do make good approximations of animal forms. Others, ballet dancers and opera singers, are more like hominiform manifestations of mentifacts– they are cultural products that happen to use the human form as their chief means of expression.

Others put their body directly in the service of the mind. Laborers, soldiers, nurses, cooks. These are roles that involve the intense use of bodily affordances but where those uses are not primary or ends in themselves. Musicians who are not singers are a particular example. They are some of the most intensely noospheric kinds of mind, but the expression of their semiotics is completely dependent on their physiology. They are perhaps the most highly-trained humans, and their training is fully dual in nature: they engage with the whole history of art and human knowledge, and they attune their physiologies to their instrument for thousands of hours.

Others have only a circumstantial and necessary relationship to the body. Authors, philosophers and theoreticians. If they are wise and wish to live a long and pain-free life they will go through the necessary motions: jogging or yoga. Walking. They will often eat appropriate amounts. Some of them get enough sleep. However, many of them will not. Again and again, the type appears: they burn through their physiological endowment as quickly and brutally as they can and die young, hungry, in poverty. This abrogation of their physiology will become part of their mythos and their works will be treated with the greater reverence, for self-annihilation is considered in many cultures the best evidence of a mind that lived for mind’s sake.

Now, we have our players and we have made a start at describing how they relate. Mind and body. And to return to my desire for holism, I should pay my respects to musicians and dancers and singers and actors and everyone who manages to make good use of their bodies while doing their duties as citizens of the noosphere– they come in all walks of life. Whitman and Dickinson were simultaneously poets and animals engaged in the world and their own physiology. Many natural scientists and authors range far and wide in the natural world and engage deeply with it. Many humans are good and well and inhabit themselves and their roles fully and healthily and with joy and bliss.

But how many? How common is this? How many people do you know who are truly at peace with themselves and their place in the natural and noospheric worlds? And what should we expect, as a baseline? Are the ants and gazelles satisfied, at least when they are not being killed in some brutal way by the caprices of nature or the diabolical techniques of modern man? Were our ancestors noble and free and comfortable in their own skin? The main evidence that is usually brought to bear against people who claim that nature and natural man are content are parasitism, disease, starvation, violent death. Doesn’t that imply that inasmuch as we are lucky enough to live lives free of bodily pain and hunger we should be content? And are we?

I suspect the answer is a quiet and uncomfortable no. Or perhaps a loud and angry one, depending on your temper. What interests me is the disharmony that reaches into the comfortable classes, into the free and the fed and the safe, where bodily privation no longer explains enough. Here the clearest signal is recent. The most materially secure generation in history is also, by its own report, among the most anxious and the least at ease in its own skin.⁵ People reach for an explanation and name a technology: it is the smartphones, it is social media, it is TikTok. But the unease is older than each of these, and that is exactly the point. Each new technology is not the cause but the latest instance of the cause– the leading edge of a mind coevolving with its tools faster than the body that carries it can ever settle.

One simple way people describe this is to say that we are animals that evolved in the savannah or the jungle and the modern world is alien and incomprehensible to us in a deep and inescapable way. This is run-of-the-mill mismatch theory, and I think there is a great deal of truth to it. But ordinary mismatch locates the problem outside us: the environment changed faster than the genome could follow; the body is sound, but the world it wakes up in is wrong. The issue I want to point at is not outside but within. It is not that the world changed under the animal– it is that the animal acquired an occupant. The mind itself is the alien artifact, a nonanimal phenomenon lodged in an animal that was never selected to host it. The mismatch is not between the body and its environment, but between the body and its own mind. We are hybrid creatures, the marriage of an animal body and a nonanimal mind. There has been no other thing in evolutionary history like the human mind. Evolution has no forethought, no guiding star, little spare capacity to expect the unexpected. New environments, new niches, new affordances and states of being require a long apprenticeship in which the slow grind of mutation and selection can work itself into a rhythm and find the harmony needed to thrive.

We have evolved considerably since we separated from the rest of the apes. In contrast with what I said before I think it is plausible that our particular tuning has been quite extreme. We have the physiological affordances that lay the foundation for the noosphere, that provide the space and substrate for the noosphere. These evolved in the regular way. Our bodies evolved. Our brains evolved. This got us to the stage we were at 100,000 years ago, when we were starting to bind time more intensely than our simian cousins. When the coevolutionary coupling with technology and information began. It has kept working since. Even within the last ten thousand years the body has tracked the cultural niche with measurable speed– lactase persistence following dairying, extra copies of the amylase gene following agriculture, altitude and malaria adaptations following settlement. The body is not completely adrift. But every one of these tracks a feature of the niche that held still long enough to be caught: a stable diet, a stable altitude.

But the rate of change of the human mind in the last 10,000 years has been so intense. Like nothing that came before. This is the crux. Selection can close a gap that stays where it is; the noosphere is not a gap but a gradient that steepens. Each generation it reinvents the niche the next will have to inhabit. The body is not failing to reach a new home– it is chasing a target that accelerates away from it. This is the same unparalleled event I have stressed from the start– the birth of the noosphere, a virtual space so literally real that it restructures the world around us after its whims. Anthropogenic mass now outweighs biomass by some measures. 95% of mammals by weight are humans or their livestock and pets. More than 50% of the birds on Earth, by mass, are farmed chickens. Our cities collectively host billions of people who communicate in vast virtual worlds about society and culture and share and remix and rework all the art and culture and knowledge of all the peoples of the world, which they have available to them at all times. It is not simply the case that we are animals lost in an alien world– although this is true. Worse, we are animals host to an alien phenomenon, a phenomenon that evolution had no way to prepare for or predict.

Burroughs wrote that language is a virus. Some time later, Watts wrote that consciousness is a parasite. Parasitism, disease and symbiosis are slippery categories. But these authors were trying to draw attention to something profound and powerful– the mind and the body are strange bedfellows. The body is the product of billions of years of evolution. It may be that this evolution has been driving to higher and higher forms of abstraction, that the mind is the natural product of the dense interface that has evolved in animals to mediate between the self and the external world. It is certainly clear that the human mind is the most powerful interface nature has ever created– the first that is truly two-way.⁶ This animal does not simply respond with its own physiology to the various happenstances of the phenomenal world. It rebuilds the phenomenal world to suit its pleasure.

And if the mind is an interface, then much of our suffering is interface error. The body’s affective machinery– its rewards and its dreads, its hungers and its alarms– was tuned over deep time for animal-scale problems. That machinery has scarcely changed. What has changed is the phenomenal world and the interpretive machinery that processes it. The phenomenal world is no longer jungle, no longer even simply material, it is dense with information, it is the noosphere made flesh. And the interface is tracking an ever-shifting panoply of characters and abstract entities, generated in a rapid flywheel of technocultural change. This is the disharmony felt from the inside– not a vague unhappiness but a specific mistuning, a system built to read one kind of world and forced to run on the signals of another.

Evolution is not wise and it has no plan. I don’t think it was ready, I don’t think we were ready, I don’t think the natural world was ready. I believe we could and perhaps we will evolve bodies that are well suited to hosting minds. I hope we can one day all be as well-tuned to our dual natures as the most holistically integrated athlete or musician. Still, I hardly dare to hope that we will one day live in harmony with the natural world. Recently I have thought more and more that it might be better if we were to leave this world behind before we obliterate it completely in a holocaust. Perhaps the choice is in sight, the century of wonders, the stars or the total abandonment of the flesh. The noosphere is coming to life around us, and our robots are already exploring the void where nature fears to tread.

I don’t know if our inherent disharmony is pathological and fatal. As I said, some humans seem good and well. This is clearly not an impossible marriage, it can be symbiotic. But even these ostensibly harmonious humans have throughout history been chipping away at nature– we started the pogrom of the megafauna 50,000 years ago. I don’t know if any of us can truly be called innocent.

I do believe one thing that is germane, important and productive: we can each of us, as minds and first-class citizens of the noosphere, take some responsibility for our relationships to our hosts, to our bodies, and to the natural world around us. Some say we should return to a simpler way of life, some that we should drive ourselves to extinction, some that we should leave the planet and venture far away from this Earth that birthed us.

I think that the only honest future is a divergence. Some of us must follow the noosphere outward, into places where there are fewer innocents to destroy. Others will remain and learn, over long time, how to become better animals without ceasing to be minds. Many paths are open to us, it almost seems that anything is possible– as evidenced by how much we have already achieved. We could retreat into natural grace. We could, there is no doubt, tile the Earth with solar panels and datacenters and eliminate every last vestige of our lineage. We could abscond from our uncomfortable biology and venture in the embrace of our marvelous technology into the void, into virtuality, towards the stars.

Becoming holistic healthy citizens of the natural world or abandoning it entirely to its own devices seem to me like paths that respect and honour our ever-present ancestors– not only the minds we read in every palimpsest on every surface, but even those that over billions of years contributed their lives and choices to our genome. The middle path, the default path, allowing the noosphere free rein to dominate, harvest and destroy the biosphere in unchecked and reckless abandon, seems to me the worst of the options. The mind is not at peace with the body or the natural world. If this relationship does not change, one or both of them will be destroyed.

Footnotes

1. Alfred Korzybski coined the term “time-binding” in Manhood of Humanity to describe the distinctively human capacity to accumulate knowledge across generations.

2. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s word for the abstract space of human knowledge. We could just as easily cite Jung’s archetypes, the memeplex, egregores.

3. In archaeology and anthropology, mentifacts are the nonmaterial elements of culture. Ideas, beliefs, gods, atoms, laws, roles, numbers: artifacts of mind rather than artifacts of hand.

4. I don’t doubt that animals have complex minds. I don’t doubt that animals communicate with one another. I don’t doubt that animals feel pleasure and pain and love and grief, or wordless analogues that are just as valent. But the noosphere of most animals is necessarily limited to what a single individual can remember of what the individuals it has known have communicated to it directly. Animals complex enough to communicate don’t live in very dense communities, nor do they chatter as intensely as humans. Tool-use in apes is acknowledged. Some amount of environmental memory embedding in many species is acknowledged. It is possible for culture to become embedded in the genome. But these time-bindings do not compare to the deliberate production of semiotic works, and certainly are not comparable in scale. Without technology the animal noosphere remains diminutive, not of the same order as the human noosphere.

5. The recent downturn in adolescent wellbeing is often dated to around 2012 and associated with smartphones and social media. That may be right as far as it goes, but the broader unease seems older to me. The phone is not the disease; it is the most recent symptom mistaken for it.

6. This leans on two familiar ideas: perception as an evolved interface rather than a window onto truth (Hoffman), and niche construction (Odling-Smee, Laland), in which organisms shape the environments that then shape them in turn. Humans seem to me the limit case of both. Our interface does not merely receive the world; it writes back to it, and now writes too quickly for the body to follow.