OUR BODY IS A QUESTION

I first came upon another person’s naked body in the autopsy theater of Stanford Medical School. We were a group of four first year med students. Over the next many months that body would be ours to know as we could never know another. But it was lifeless. It lacked the quintessence of a human body alive, moving, and aware.

The body, despite it complex architecture, its moving parts, its electrochemical actions, its internal communication systems, only exists when intact and animated.

Our own body, each of ours, is a private mystery.

Though we think of ourselves, we humans, as self-comprehending, as aware of our actions, our social engagements, our planning of our day and our days, moment-to moment, day to day, year in and year out, all manner of human endeavor—we have little real-time comprehension of how our bodies function.

We plan a meal, even collect ingredients and organize them and variously cook them and finally assemble the repast, we cannot organize and execute our digestion. Food is taken in and, though we may know theoretically, the path it follows through our digestive tract and into our blood stream, but we cannot know it and direct it and experience it as it happens.

The changes that occur, including anatomical alterations imposed surgically or haphazardly, mark for us the evidence of our vulnerability, our susceptibility to modification.

Our bodies perform a staggering array of functions, those that the medical world has categorized into systems: circulatory, lymphatic, respiratory, integumentary, endocrine, gastrointestinal (digestive), urinary (excretory), musculoskeletal, nervous, reproductive, and immune. These systems are also interconnected in an almost dizzying pattern of direct and indirect arrangements that allow for the entire body to exist. And these patterns, though malfunctions do occur, none-the-less allow the body to maintain its life through decades of unceasing multiform activities.

Our mind, which we persist in placing its site of action in the brain, is so beset with our highly evolved capacity for thought that we fail to tend to the many functions of our body that we can never actually attend to. Our highly prized and very praiseworthy ability to think, plan, create, invent, and collaborate with others seems to overshadow the highly evolved multiplicities of all those systems operating continuously and autonomously. We think, therefore we are. But we are far more than just our massive thinking. Only everything that occurs in the vast machinery of our bodies cannot be assessed or managed or appreciated by thought. The human mind is mighty within the rather small frame of its container. And even the brain runs its non-artificial intelligence without the possibility of thought intervening.

Evolution, through millions of years of trial and error, operates in every living thing on the principle that survival becomes pre-eminent and is based on sustenance, reproduction, and safekeeping. Eventually our bodies evolved out of that principle. We are equipped with our mind as part of our ability to survive. We spend a lot of human time studying thought, and we call that philosophy.

But our body, despite its myriad active forces, remains mute, unthinking, unavailable for thought and only a dim, partialized awareness.

We of course become aware of malfunctions. We are subject to infections, injuries, system dysfunctions, accidents, and aging.

Indeed, aging is perhaps the corporeal reality that follows us relentlessly through life. The changes that occur, including anatomical alterations imposed surgically or haphazardly, mark for us the evidence of our vulnerability, our susceptibility to modification.

Enveloped in our skin, the great integument that allows us to know the ambience we live in, it joins our great sense organs that flag down vision, sound, smell, taste, touch, and temperature and supply our brain with the electrochemical codes to signal all our awarenesses. And our body provides these instruments to our cognition without allowing us any comprehension how they accomplish all this.

In effect, our body hauls us around for the duration of our life as a living flesh-and-blood robot programmed by the massive and protracted work of evolution. And, thought and cognition and the genius of human creativity—our very mighty mind—cannot control or truly know what the hell is going on there.