skylark

something i said elsewhere, late in the day and tired, in response to what might, just for a moment, have been an interesting discussion on an old sophomore year philosophy topic:

Follow up:

i am a pagan materialist.

i think that people too easily conflate "mind" with "spirit."

the mind may not be the body, but it is certainly of the body. mind is a complex state of information, imminent in organic processes.

i've never met anyone whose mind - whose state of mind, whose sense of self - wasn't shaped to a very great extent by the condition of their body. i also think that we are socially conditioned to think of our awareness as "separate" from our body... but too many methods of awareness-training focus on re-connecting exactly that, and the disconnect is not borne out by a cybernetic model of behavior. the mind is more than intellection, abstraction and language.

the mind/body dichotomy has the same status as the nature/nurture dichotomy: it's simply the wrong question. it's not either/or, it's both/and, and i think most people deeply involved with the relevant questions understand that. it's armchair arguments that get trapped in these little whirlpools.

there appears to be an equal tendency toward what we might consider a meta-dichotomy: the belief that something is a dichotomy, or nothing, and that maybe nothing is preferable.