I Have A Question, it's A Body

None of these - my body is a vehicle for energy - cosmic monism - the mind IS its experiences & stimuli, thus the mind is to a large degree the body, as well as being other bodies, objects, ideas etc

sorry for brevity but I have a plane to catch. I guess the closest of the first three answers is 'I am my body', but not in an oppressive sense - quite the reverse. I am my body and my body is free.

More sceptical about the idea of 'I' than of 'body' tbh

Do you want the only philosophically viable answer or do you want the answer that most represents the way I feel?

The way YOU feel. I don't mind if you can't philosophically defend it. Your feeling!

(Sorry my Internet has gone again so back on quick iPhone typoing)

when i studied the relevant philosophy i really struggled to relate it to how i felt.

the "i" that thinks my thoughts and my physical body are the same to me; the former is contained in the latter. i can't divorce them from each other because my body is one of the factors affecting what i think; my experiences as a male, gay, mixed-race person. and neither can i conceive of my thoughts as some free-floating id unconnected to this physical shell because the condition of my body has such a huge effect on my spirit. so i would say "i am my body" pretty definitively

But in terms of feeling, I am a dualist (hence 'brain in vat', but honestly even less than that, more 'floating monad'). But dualism is completely defunct, redundant, bullshit. Even epiphenomenalism is stretching it.

xp

I acknowledge that dualism is discredited nonsense, too! I still *feel* like a mind in a meat-locker.

Monism is the new dualism.

xp

Yeah. Interesting that lex felt that the theory didn't match up to his feeling, b/c by the time I studied (I assume later, maybe not) most of the philosophers of identity believed in the primacy of "I am my body" - though with plenty of wriggle room for questioning the nature of consciousness.

although the theory, both Philosophical and Scientific, is really interesting (and certainly up for debate) what I'm primarily interested in getting at is how individuals experience their own body, as related to their sense of "I".

Also, sorry, I must have skimmed this bit because you totally made it clear what you wanted, don't know why I needed to ask.

I don't really have a firm opinion either way tbh. I would swing towards "I have a body" but that's just a recovering dualist (but still anti materialist) speaking, prob wouldn't take a long course of therapy to get me to acknowledge "I am my body". It's not like I ever look at my hands and exclaim "Horreur! What are this disassociated lumps of meat?"

ledge, care to expand? I'm reading it as a comment that says "rejection of dualism is not in fact objective progress but rather one more trend, just as dualism itself was"... about right? I think, though, the matching of science and philosophy here does show actual progress, and certainly is more accurate than Cartesian belief.

xpost ah, okay.

It's not like I ever look at my hands and exclaim "Horreur! What are this disassociated lumps of meat?"

I totally have done this.

Yeah, I have totally done that haha!

i kinda did that when i was high once but i remember thinking, wow i'm wasted but my hands STILL feel like part of my body

P.S. asking is fine. Better to ask than assume.

So frustrating being on an iPhone bcz under normal circumstances I'd google to check that "monism" and "epiphenomenology" and technical terms correspond to the concepts I *think* they do but instead I just have to admit I'm out of my depth - but learning to match terms to experiences while you ppl discuss it will be super helpful!

Was just being flippant tbh, happy to leave the bullshit philosophy to the consciousness thread.

Would be interesting to get some differently abled perspectives, people whose bodies don't work as well as they should or as they used to.

(But also the other way around, because I *totally* have a metaphorical and conceptual cock, but nowhere on my body can I locate a phallus but HEY let's not go down that route again...) ;)

Just an aside, you wouldn't do that hands thing to someone else... "Look at your hands! How can they be part of you?!"

X-post the Ableist aspect would be a very interesting thing to explore! Because I do wonder how much this attitude of mine is related to "having" a mental illness (both in the "I have an illness: I am not "a bipolar"" sense yet at the same time, being aware that I sometimes have experiences of a part of my "mind" that is both "me" in that I am thinking it and "not-me" in that it is something I can recognise, when sane, as "not-me" - a Thoughtworm is definitely "not-me" yet still part of my brain chemistry/make-up/whatevs)

Sorry if there are any x-posts that's to Ledge

You can totally do that to others: "Lookit your cock, haha it's twitching w/o you'd conscious control, how can that be part of you" and also guys who talk repeatedly as if said organ were distinct from them / had a mind if its own"

Sorry for all this cock-talk; still do think it's relevant as it's the organ most frequently... disembodied? Is that the word I'm looking for? Detached from the "mind" or "I".

I have derailed mine own thread! I'm going out now; pls talk among yourselves.

i have a body, i guess.

way i see it, i can only do so much to change my appearance and therefore my body. i was born a certain height, hair colour, complexion etc, but to a greater extent i am arguably more in control of my mind and soul.

It depends on what picture of my body I have in mind. If I'm picturing my body at a microscopic level, then it's practically an alien landscape. There's no way that I can identify with cell clusters and organelles. I even have trouble feeling that they're 'mine', since I have no capacity to exert willpower at that fine a level.

If I move up to a macroscopic level, where I am able to will certain parts to move, then the feeling that 'I have ten fingers', 'I have two feet' is a lot clearer. It's only when I picture my body in motion, as a bundle not just of fleshy parts but of actions and expressions, ways of walking or twiddling my fingers, my body not just inhabiting but constituting a Wittgensteinian form of life, then I have no trouble thinking "Yes, that's me."

I think for me it strongly varies by situation, as a youngish white man in reasonable physical shape I can go long periods thinking of myself as mind rather than body without anything particularly impacting on that feeling, but genuine ~experience~ always feels like a bodily thing or an extended bodily thing, music + dancing etc for obvious reasons but even if it's the immaterial experience of new ideas etc. As the latter is the TRUE thing then my practical-philosophical ideal is for all experiences to be taken as experiences but that's a bit scary.

For obvious reasons it's pretty unsurprising that race and gender theory started picking apart mind-body dualism in a serious way long before lamestream white man philosophy did. Those of us caught up in tending towards the dualism shouldn't feel too bad about ourselves, it's quite hard to get away from a couple of millennia of the construction of the subject.

none of these since i am my body but there's a lot of interesting thinking about how mind may extend beyond that, not as a dualism but as a consequence of elements external to my body being part of "my mind"

The parts of my mind I would like to identify w/ most are also the most relational parts. A lot of the time it feels like a continuation of discourse between different ideas/positions/voices from outside. My body feels like a better thing to identity w/, and there's a strong sense in which I do, esp wrt my face, but I've got internal organs &c. that I wouldn't even recognise. I feel like I am defined relationally, for better or worse. I think it's certain interpersonal, mental&physical interactions that make me feel most like myself.

i.e. I am a process. I love processes.

but as a consequence of elements external to my body being part of "my mind"

Can you expand on this, please?

My quick answer is 'I am my body' but I'd add 'my body is a process'. I'll elucidate and expand tomorrow.

going ghost in the machine

xxp

tools, other people, objects of culture mental and material, all kinds of "external" phenomena seem to form an inseparable part of what i consider to be my mind and therefore me

That's a really interesting idea, NV, that "mind" encompasses elements external to the body. (Or does it just encompass conceptions and memories of those external elements, encoded within neural connections, so we can still keep mind inside the skull?)

Also, I can totally get with the idea of "my body is a process" (life is a vortex through which both matter and energy pass) but that is still not incompatible with "I have a body" thinking.

The thing is, though, that I don't see my continued mind-body dualism necessarily as the product of a couple of millennia of philosophy, though perhaps that just shows how inescapable one's own culture is. I talked on the other thread about the persistent fear that my rejection of my body as the site of "me" might be down to the gendering that others apply to my body, or a reaction to gendered violence that has been done to my body. I will never know.

But, still, interesting answers so far!

true: i think none of the philosophical or scientific attempts to identify what mind is are necessarily relevant to your own experience of yourself. (this parallels with arguments on other threads about free will/determinism and what we feel to be true about same.)

i think it's absolutely reasonable to attribute that sense of dualism, however you describe it, as being causally related to your sense of your gender as being othered, or problematic, or in flux. i can intellectualize that but not really feel it - since i'm the patriarchal default. but that needn't be the only cause. the English language encodes body/mind dualism pretty extensively, as said upthread - my foot, my genitalia, my long-standing sense of my own centrality to the universe etc. look at how infants are taught to name the parts of their own bodies, by pointing towards these things.

I am a brain that lives in a body, I guess. That's how I visualize my self.

but that linguistic dualism might be purely formal. like, we can feel beyond it even when we're using words like "me" to point towards the invisible pilot wrestling with the controls.

and this is making me think of some modern writing about disability, disabled people trying to think about their relationship to their physical presence in ways that move beyond the old "social model/medical model" dichotomy. i know this is kind of tangential but give me a minute

http://www.um.es/discatif/PROYECTO_DISCATIF/Textos_discapacidad/00_Shakespeare2.pdf

this is a really interesting article that explores some of these questions from a different perspective but it's relevant imo

I only really think about being 'in' a body when something about the body 'I' am in means I'm foiled in some way. This only relates to bodily things out of my control. I can't help having large feet, so as a result I can't help but be annoyed to the point of regressing back to petulant teenhood when I'm trainer shopping and I can't find anything that I like in my size. At those moments I become more aware of residing in this shell.

I started thinking about the distinction between "my leg" and "my pair of trousers" but then that just started me thinking about the concept of personal space, in that my awareness of "stuff I think of as mine" extends about 18 inches in each direction around me. That space is definitely not part-of-my-body, yet I view it with almost exactly the same sense of "do not violate this" that I view "do not touch my trousers" and very similar to "do not touch my leg."

x-posts

http://www.headless.org/on-having-no-head.htm

i remember reading Daniel Dennett talking about how you can feel thru things that aren't "your body" - responsiveness of cars and bikes when you're steering them, the feeling of manipulating something with a tool - of course there needs to be a connection with your nervous system but something in our mind seems to project the feeling of feedback beyond the limits of our bodies as such. the same kind of ideas inform Deleuze and Guattari thinking about ourselves as rhizomes, parts of larger structures that we plug into, connect and disconnect and reconnect with

bicycle = cybernetics = "The Man-Machine" = unfortunate use of "Man" there but you get me

late great cool link, that looks like my catnip

yeah it is

There's no clear single answer to this question — or rather, the answer depends on context.

At times, "I" am (my self-aware self is) located within my body, but somewhat separate from it. When my body is injured, I experience pain, but it seems to me that the physical injury has happened not to self-as-me, but to the biological frame my mind-self inhabits and animates. Something similar occurs when I must force my body perform actions that do not come easily. I become explicitly aware of my conscious attempts to precisely control my body's behavior, as though my body were a tool at my mind's disposal.

At other times, there's no sense of separation between mind and body. In typing these words, I'm not conceiving of my fingers as external technology I must manipulate in order to achieve a result. I'm just doing it, typing.

voted "I am my body" because i'm very skeptical of any kind of metaphysics

the idea that the Mind you experience yourself having is as much part of a trans-personal and trans-temporal memetic system (language, numeracy, narrative, ideology, and on and on) as it is just another organ in your body, is something really fascinating and true-seeming to me. but as far as it goes, whatever it is, it's rooted in the specifics of operation of our brain.

but if you cut off your toe it doesn't change your memory, thoughts or feelings ... OR DOES IT?!?

Something similar occurs when I must force my body perform actions that do not come easily. I become explicitly aware of my conscious attempts to precisely control my body's behavior, as though my body were a tool at my mind's disposal.

Tangential maybe, but you could use similar reasoning to drive a wedge between 'mind' and 'self'. Everyone has their own cognitive strengths and weaknesses after all, kinds of mental activity that come more or less easily. I have to force myself to do math -- I can do it, but it's a matter of care and deliberation. In that context I'm using my mind rather than being my mind.

I have to force myself to do math -- I can do it, but it's a matter of care and deliberation. In that context I'm using my mind rather than being my mind.

― jmm, Thursday, December 19, 2013 12:17 PM (1 minute ago)

interesting idea, but it doesn't feel that way, experientially — at least not to me. my mind uses certain conceptual tools (such as theorems, properties and postulates in geometry), but the act of thinking itself cannot be separated, ime, from the act/state of being.

Have, and have only very recently started making peace with & not feeling totally estranged from

c.f. "I have the heart and stomach of a King" (sez this feeble woman)

xp to aimless - it seems almost like the sort of outlandish-generalization-with-an-interesting-kernel-of-truth that marshall mcluhan would have spouted. that sort of thing is right up my alley but i've not come across that idea before per se

mcluhan would have spouted

me irl:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yjj7pgnK9Tk/UkV380DaV_I/AAAAAAAAVFU/MFnfCssufqw/s400/2013_09_26_CDC_1200WW_SiA_1Bp_TRo_1142.jpg

contenderizer, if someone asked you to point to yourself, you'd point to your head not your chest?

or like when gesticulating?

That's a question of language, I think. Gestural language, but still...

It does point out that self-location is context-dependent (my eternal hobbyhorse). Internally, relative to the subjective/objective landscape of my mind/body, I locate my semi-subjective self within my physical body, as occupying a specific space inside that body. Externally, relative to my environment, I locate my self as my body. That's how I locate the selves of others, too: they are their bodies. I recognize that conscious super-selves exist "within" those bodies, but I don't often draw a conscious distinction between mind and body when considering other people.

Pointing is interesting. If I intend to meet and hold the gaze of the person I'm pointing at, I think I most often do point at their eyes. Like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If I don't intend that sort of challenge/engagement, I tend to point to the body more generally & politely, gesturing towards the rough center of the person in question.

Well continuing this line of thinking, when one counts (e.g. persons at a gathering) one counts heads. Unless the gathering is seated, in which case one counts seats.

i count butts

I have a body and it's dope as hell.

I think we're privileging the philosophical over the physiological here. We look in someone's eyes to make sure we have their attention. We admonishingly prod someone in the chest because we're threatening the organ that pumps blood around their body. We count heads in a crowd because they're most visible. The brain and heart are the two absolutely essential organs for life, so they're where we focus emphasis on self; as a first aider I know that stressful, emotional situations literally cause the heart physical problems.

There was an interesting image that got passed around social media a short while ago, which showed how people's self image mapped the experience of different emotions (fear, lust, anger, joy, that sort of thing) onto where in the body they felt like they were located, with each emotion marked in a different colour. I wish I could find it, because they weren't all mapped in the same place - either by emotion or by individual - but they did form general clumps or filaments. Anger generally being experienced in a knot in one place on the body; fear being experienced in a knot on another.

We look in someone's eyes to make sure we have their attention.

there are large categories of people for who this simply isn't true

The brain and heart are the two absolutely essential organs for life, so they're where we focus emphasis on self

there's been a very brief window in history where we've believed this to be the case. also try living without a liver. or skin.

we're privileging the philosophical over the physiological here

false dichotomy.

the factors you mention are factors, sure, but i am unconvinced by any attempt to prove that humans sense of themselves is an inevitable state proceeding from physiology, amongst other reasons because physiology and human experience of the body is very varied, and because our understanding of our own physiology is generally not that of the anatomist or medical student

Primitive concepts attributed great significance to the soul and dictated cannibal behaviours for the possession and eating of the defeated enemy's heart. Mental functions, such as thinking, feeling and mainly those related to affective manifestations, were attributed to the heart and to some other internal organs (liver, diaphragm) from the times of Greek mythology. Philosophy and empirical medicine had underestimated the brain probably because it is a 'silent' organ, contrary to the palpitating heart, with its obvious participations in the emotional reactions. The role of the brain as the mental organ and the seat of emotions has been gradually recognized.

please ignore dick use of the word "Primitive" there

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21302666

and now over to Branwell to cue people in on the origins of "hysteria"

Point v v much taken, but for once can I just not and say I did?

yeah sorry it's the weekend too

Nah, it's nice being acknowledged as "expert" in something but I'm in a low low place right now and don't want to do anything that tends to generate hassle. Perhaps we could talk about which medieval gland was supposed to generate melancholia instead.

oh that led me here:

a classical analysis of melancholy by Aristotle, who used the image of wine to expose the nature of black bile. Black bile, just like the juice of grapes, contains pneuma, which provokes hypochondriac diseases like melancholia. Black bile like wine is prone to ferment and produce an alternation of depression and anger, an alternation of cuthymia and dysthymia (the thymos being the fluid essence of emotion). Fluids are the materialization of mental fluctuations, and this concept of affect remained prevalent down to the nineteenth century. The example of melancholia teaches something of the classical conceptions of relationships between body and mind. It shows, Burton says (L2.5.1), how the body, being material, works upon the immaterial soul, by mediation of humours and spirits, which participate of both, and ill-disposed organs. It illustrates the circle of sympathetic disorders, in which distractions and perturbations of the mind alter the temperature or temperament of the body, which in turn will cause the distemperature of the soul. Therefore, before the advent of Cartesianism, and even later, parallel to the development of intellectualist psychology, there remained an ancient tradition of humoral psychology which is of interest to us, now, in showing us the way to a renewed anthropology of emotions linked to environment, local contexts, climatic factors and dietetic resources.

the thing is, if our current placement of the intellect or the emotions or the soul or the consciousness is a purely rational product of "how it feels" then why on earth did humans with presumably v. similar physiological make-up to us feel so differently?

I imagine that would be down to the confluence of cultural ideas and the placebo/nocebo effect (whereby people often physically experience the... experiences they *expect* to experience, sometimes powerfully) and also the body-mind interface whereby certain emotions *do* have tangible physical effects via nerves, the endocrine system, whatever.

Anger has a tangible physical sensation, whereby the body readies itself for the "fight" part of the "fight or flight" defence system, a tightening of muscles in the chest and upper arms in anticipation of having to e.g. punch someone. Fear has a related but different set of physical sensations, the "flight" part of the "fight or flight" - preparing the energy to flee, or sometimes immobilising the body to hide.

Melancholia is interesting to me, because that black bile sensation is something very familiar to me. It's a combination of rotten anger which has been unable to express itself, and anxiety/fear with its lower gut sensations. But there are other physical sensations to depression - there's depression that takes the form of an emptiness or hollowness in the chest area; there's another physical symptom of heaviness in the same area of the body, but also neck and shoulders. There's a kind of depression that takes the form of a headache or sharp pressure around the front of the head, above the eyes. I wonder how much of this is psychosomatic, of my feeling a heaviness or emptiness because I *expect* to feel heavy or empty at different stages of the depressive cycle - or if there is some physical nervous system cause, where my body-mind is preparing for... *something* ...the same way I know that tightening in my upper arms and fists caused by anger means that my body is physically preparing itself for a fist fight. As someone who experiences ophthalmic migraines on the regular, I've become really super-aware of the strange trips the brain can send the body on, and vice versa.

the thing is, if our current placement of the intellect or the emotions or the soul or the consciousness is a purely rational product of "how it feels" then why on earth did humans with presumably v. similar physiological make-up to us feel so differently?

― the five people you meet in Hedon (Noodle Vague), Saturday, December 21, 2013 1:45 AM (17 minutes ago)

Again, I'm not sure they did. To locate the source of intellection and/or emotion within any particular organ is not necessarily to experientially feel as though one's essential & singular self inhabits that organ. A fine distinction, perhaps, but an important one. I suspect that we locate the self as occupying a vaguely-defined place behind the eyes simply because that's the vantage point implied by the sensory information on which we humans tend most strongly to rely. We locate smells in our noses and taste in our mouths, but most of us (speaking in airy generalities without evidentiary support) seem not to have a similar sense of seeing images in our eyes or hearing sounds in our ears. Instead, the information provided by these organs seems to exist around us, and we to perceive the world roughly from the point where their "data streams" intersect.

I'm speaking speculatively, of course, but am dubious about any argument suggesting that the majority of self-aware humans have ever experienced this much differently. Of the five conventionally identified senses, only touch "comes in" from somewhere other than the head. If, like dogs, our map of the world were more smell-dependent, then I would expect the seat of experiential selfhood to seem a bit lower, perhaps, but remain roughly in place. And if we truly felt, subjectively, that we occupied our chests, then I imagine we would have a corresponding sense that visual and auditory information were being supplied from several feet above us, as though we were seeing (and listening, somehow?) through a periscope. These senses would seem remote from us, the way tactile information supplied by our fingertips does. When I touch something, I know that it and my touching fingers exist "over there" relative to myself. It's hard for me to imagine people conceiving of visual and auditory information this way, as a measure of the world taken from several feet above and then piped down. Which probably illustrates nothing more than the failure of my own imagination.

In terms of oddities of thinking of "having a body" vs "being a body" reminded of a quirk that I only recently realised I inherited directly from my Mum (who says it in such a tone of voice it's quite obvious she inherited it from either my grandmother or her grandmother.)

But, when we are sitting comfortably doing something enjoyable, e.g. drinking tea, eating biscuits and reading poetry to one another, and it becomes obvious that one of us will have to get up and do something such as, walk to the shops to buy more milk and ginger biscuits, it is customary to address one's own legs in the encouraging tone one would normally take with a dog, and command "Up, legs, up! Walk, legs, walk!" and then shake one's head mournfully when the desired effect is not achieved, as if it is the fault of one's *legs* that it is infinitely preferable to be sitting down eating biscuits and reading, instead of walking across the village in the cold, rather than the fault of one's *self*.

So Cartesian dualism is clearly a long-running family trait. Also, laziness.

feet don't fail me now

http://i39.tinypic.com/2d7d8vs.jpg

Germane: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2013/12/30/body-atlas-reveals-where-we-feel-happiness-and-shame/

From above:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/files/2013/12/13-21664-large-1024x771.jpg

The study depended on subjects self-reporting their physical sensations, so make of that what you will.

Yes! That was the study/image that I was referencing above, talking about where emotions were "experienced" in the body.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6-fDHucxbwAC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Never saw this. I am my body (and its many parts)...for now. I contain multitudes.

2 cents: I see flawed Cartesianism in both options, an *I* that can "have" things or "be" things. The "I" in both cases projects an identity that grounds both possibilities. If you give up that identity (the idea that "I" is self-identical) then the question becomes a bit different. To designate either a body or an I is to make a contingent designation that could always be made differently. That I is a non-identity means that there's no objective line to be drawn between it and its body--and vice versa. So you *have* a body in some determined scenarios (say ones that claim you are morally culpable for your actions) and you *are* your body in others (perhaps when visiting the doctor). Neither is a necessary/objective fact, though, because neither I nor my body exists except as a contingent form of organization.

Short answer: I am not my body, you fucker!

Long answer: My "I am not my body" attitude is a reaction to the assumption that 1) a woman's worth is directly correlated to her appearance; and 2) a woman's appearance is a direct result of how much work she's willing to put in on it. ("What, don't you want it badly enough?")

Yeah, really feeling your answer with the righteousness of a thousand suns, j.lu

When you have been told your entire life that your worth is determined by the appearance of your body - and no more - it is a necessary act of defiance to assert "I am more than my goddamn body, you fucker."

the appearance of your body is a mental thing tho, in a lot of ways. to adopt your physicality as a whole is potentially also to reject idealizing gazes i think.

am largely with ryan tho in the sense that body/mind are perspectives too use as necessary

Um, no. But I'd really rather not do this right now.

I am a brain that lives in a body, I guess. That's how I visualize my self
^ This

http://www.queermusicheritage.us/OCT2005/god%20is%20my%20co-pilot-i%20am%20not%20this%20body%201992.jpg

(it is totally not my place to say now bcz cis/het but as a 15-year-old who believed I wasn't I thought Godco must be the best band everrr - slogans, queerness, wilful lo-fi-ness and scrawly zine-aesthetic artwork, Finnish folk songs, Yiddish, etc - and sadly I never found their records to live up to that extra-musical bundle. but hey, "I don't get to" and also I'm only posting it for the title)

(also j.lu otm x a billion)

Haha oh god, see I always saw God Is My Co-Pilot as that terrible skronky support band we had to sit through too many times when we were waiting for whatever avante-noize-drone group to go on. I had no idea what their politics extramusical bundle etc were because they were so annoying musically. LOL, NYC music fans are so spoiled.

i am not a body; i am a soul invested in a body

xp - the drummer from Godco is a super rad dude who played my 35th birthday party

but, not so that is a complete diversion -- one of my musical projects also played said party. And I am far from a spiritual woo-woo person, but there is a certain transcendence you can achieve making music (that happened for me that night), where the brain and body are working together, that is probably one of the most rewarding things for me, personally. Sex is similar, though not as complicated.

Oh, that's so funny! I'm sure they're super-rad ppl, it's just during a certain period they were that inescapable support band.

It's also funny that you mention music as a state of transcendence - it's the original state of transcendence in many ways. But oddly making music - and dancing, proper dancing - are p much the only states where I don't feel like I have a body. Though whether that means I *am* a body, or just a floating consciouslessness, I couldn't tell you. Interesting point, though. Thanks for raising it!

Yeah, I'm not a dancer, but I was gonna say, I bet dancing can produce a similar feeling

I really liked God is My Co-Pilot. ;_;

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Wow, OK, from the discussion on the thread, these are not the results I would have predicted at all! I thought "I am a body" was going to be a landslide but no. Bunch of introverts have mixed feelings about bodies, I guess.

The metaphoric language that enforces mind-body duality pervades our common discourse. It requires genuine effort to even start thinking in any other terms.

These illusions tell us that our sense of self isn’t the fixed, stable, hard-wired sensation that it seems. Instead, our brain uses the information from our senses to continuously construct the feeling that we own our own bodies. Feed the senses with the wrong information, and you can make the brain believe all manner of impossible things.

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/03/11/out-of-body-experiences-make-it-harder-to-encode-memories/

"I think, therefore I am" is the laziest way to self-affirmation ever.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/03/19/researchers_locate_your_subjective_sense_of_self_it_s_in_your_chest.html