This is the first post in a series leading up to the 16th annual International Forum on Consciousness, taking place in Madison this May, hosted by the BTC Institute, Promega and Usona Institute. The Forum gathers scientists, philosophers, and practitioners from dozens of different fields to investigate the nature of the mind. This year’s theme, “Unspoken Intelligence,” explores forms of perception and knowing that fall outside conventional cognition.

There’s a quote that travels well in some intellectual circles:

You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

There’s something genuinely relieving about that idea. It locates the real you somewhere above the fray, untouched by the body’s demands and indignities, the consciousness that thinks and persists while the body handles the inconvenient work of being hungry and tired and sick. The thinking part is what counts.

Plato thought something similar. So did Augustine. As did Descartes. Kant, too. The idea that the thinking self is separate from and superior to the body is Western civilization’s default setting.

It sounds like wisdom. It is also, I’ve come to think, exactly the wrong way to understand what we are.

Here’s a different text, one most millennials can recite from memory. In the opening verse of “Lose Yourself,” Eminem rattles off a visceral catalog of physical symptoms: sweaty palms, weak knees, heavy arms, vomiting. The body staging a complete revolt while the mind tries to execute a plan, until the moment on stage when the mouth opens and nothing comes out. The mind wanted to perform, but the body said no.

Nobody who has memorized those lyrics thinks of them as a description of embodied cognition. They file it under music, or nostalgia, or just a song they played too loud in a car they didn’t own. But the nervous system doesn’t care what you call it, because the body doesn’t catalogue in words.

This is the thing the soul-body quote gets wrong: the body isn’t a vehicle the self rides around in. It’s already thinking, already keeping score, already running a process the mind is only partially aware of. The question is what to do about that.

Continue reading “The Body Already Knows”