It is complicated design created by god....still always as mystery for us.....

An age-old question, isn't it? Monism, dualism, spiritualism, solipsism, determinism, free will etc. There are stout monists (either materialists or objective/subjective idealists), but there are determined dualists as well (Popper/Eccles the Self and its Brain), within dualism there are several directions as interactionism, pre-determined harmony, occasionalism etc. There are the Eastern approaches (Watts Psychotherapy East and West) which consider our Western dualism a mistake and so on. In my opinion the main question is as follows: do we  consdier oursleves as a product of processes (in this case there is no "self" in the final analysis, we "happen" rather than "exist") or do we consider the core of purselves as an existing "substance" or "actor"? It cannot be decided purely on empirical basis - but we all decide one way or the other. If two people are on the opposite sides of this dilemma, there is little chance for meaningful discussion. This is demonstrated by several endless dicussions on this subject - even here on Research Get.

Gyorgy,

My position is none of these. To the above question, my answer is the second, the body can extend itself and can fuse with other bodies in common action.  I am a bodily-interactionist.  

Stefan,

So I take from your answer that you think that our body is limited by our skin.

Maybe this text may change your mind:

Consciousness in Action

By Susan L. Hurley

‘’We tend to think of perception and action as buffer zones mediating between mind and world. We tend to think of perception as input from world to mind and action s output from mind to world. This Input-Output picture of perception and action may hold in place traditional worries about the mind’s place in the world, as well as more specific philosophical assumptions. If perception is input from the world to the mind and action is output from the mind to the world, then the mind as distinct from the world is what the input is to and what the output is from. So, despite the web of causal relations between organisms and environments, we suppose the mind must be in a separate place, within some boundary that sets it apart from the world.

In trying to understand the mind’s place in the world, we thus study the function from input to output, especially the way central nervous systems process and transform inputs to human organisms. We argue about whether central cognitive processes must have a language-like structure that explains the conceptual structure of thought. But we tend to ignore the function from output back to input, and the way environments, including linguistic environments, transform and reflect outputs from the human organism. The two functions are not only of comparable complexity, but are causally continuous. To understand the mind’s place in the world, we should study these complex dynamic processes as a system, not just the truncated internal portion of them.

People and other animals with minds can be seen at one level as dynamic singularities: structural singularities in the field of causal flows characterized through time by a tangle of multiple feedback loops of varying orbits. Consider the circus performer who puts the handle of a dagger in her mouth, tips her head back, balances a sword by its point on the point of the dagger, and with the whole kit balanced above her head magisterially climbs a ladder, swings her legs over the top rung, and climbs back down the other side of the ladder. Each move she makes is both the source of and exquisitely dependent on multiple internal and external channels of sensory and motor-signal feedback, the complex calibrations of which have been honed by years of practice. An only slightly less intricate structure of dynamic feedback relations knits the nervous system of a normally active organism into its environment. This is what the contents of the creature’s interdependent perceptions and intentions both depend on. The whole complex dynamic feedback system includes not just functions from input to output, but also feedback functions from output to input, some internal to the organism, others passing through the environment before returning. As a result, external states can be needed to explain patterns of activity at the body surface, even if what is to be explained is not identified in terms of external states. The dynamic singularity is centred on the organism and moves through environments with the organism, but itself has no sharp boundaries.’’

Stefan,

We extend our body/instrument to include the external instrument when we master our new extended body through a lot of practice.  An accomplished violonist has managed to include the violont.  If I take a violont in my hands, it is not automatically within my body.  It needs a lot of nervous system transformations.

Your child is part of you in an intimated way. It is not just a metaphor. Hurley said:

'' To understand the mind’s place in the world, we should study these complex dynamic processes as a system, not just the truncated internal portion of them.''

The nervous system of a violonist is about the whole playing body which includes the violont.

The expert bowman has learned to extend his body to the bow and arrow so that that the arrow is his body and through his body's arrow he can actually touch and kill the dear.  All martial art master of the past or present have sense of their weapon being part of them and making one with it. Metaphors feel true when they convey something true. The hard part with metaphor is to explicitly find out what exactly they are pointing at.

Filippo,

You are right to say that there is no sharp dichotomy of control and so there is a fuzzy body control boundary.  I consider my body as my interacting interface.  For a physical body  exterior to my physical body to be considered as part of my interacting interface, control is not the only condition, control for the purpose of interface, forthe purpose of interacting is the condition for it to be considered part of my interfacing body.  Yes the interfacing body is not fixed and is malleable, we can express it by saying that we are polymorph.  The whole reason for me to explore this question is to understand better the evolution of primate to humans as a transition of minimal polymorphism to full fledge polymorphism.  Humans are distinguished from primates by a long series of landmark behaviors and it is important to try to explain how these have evolved.  So we have to try to explain their relations with each other in such a way that the road from the primates to us is kind of logical and not totally unlikely.   In the polymorphism hypothesis that I am trying to develop , tool making, tool using are subsume under body interface extension.  The evolution of language would be subsumed under body interface merging/coupling for communal emotional control in the participation to communal singing dancing performance.  Mithen in the book the Singing Neanthertal elaborate part of this.  I see this as the very beginning of the primate human transition because I see the fast evolution of the capacity of body interface polymorphism stemming from this first communal activity.  It is our first language and our first religion and our first art.  This participation would have promote a quick genetic evolution through the Baldwin effect, an evolutionary crane as f Daniel Dennett called it.  It is the first time in my life I agree with an opinion of Dennett.  Amazing!

Thanks for contributing to this thread.

Regards,

Thank you Filippo and Stefan for the tip about mereology and mereotopolgy.  I had no idea that such a field exist and maybe I can get some interesting idea from there.

I am not an externalist, or at least I do not think I am one.  Maybe I am one without knowing it. 

Stefan,

Lets do a thought experiment.  You and your young daughter is in a public place and someone is running in your direction with a knife.  Your pulse get higher and you realise that your daughter cannot run fast enough with you for escaping the attack.  What do you do?  Both your life are at risk.  My guess is that you will think of finding a wathever to be use as weapon and stand between your daughter and the attacker and put your physical body at risk in order to save primary your daughter physical body and hopefully your body as well.  You would have behaved as if your daughter body was the most important of your own body.  Your nervous system have reacted as if both of you form a single body but a part more at risk was the physical body of your daughter.

Your nervous system seems to consider your daughter as part of itself.

Dear Sir, I will go withe second option "It is what we control or participate in" Thanks and Regards.

Fillippo,

Yes it is called empathy.  Yes there is an evolved instinct in all mammals to protect one's offspring.  We can describe these realities using different languages. Here I tries to describe these realities in the language of the extension and coupling of bodies.  It would be a sterile exercice if no new insights is provided and if no economy of expression is provided.  And here I expect you either that you try to play the game of describing reality in this language, or provided connection with similar approaches, or provided important limitations of such language.  I am coupling my body to yours and together as group body is much more able to takle this problem.  I see two basic type of physical body relations:

1. body extension where the body learned  using an external object for the performance of skills .  Example of the violonist, a car driver, a biker, scientific and mathematical learning are of this nature but more explanation will be necessary to explain this

2. body coupling or body merging or the creation of composed body or group body.  Example: the orchestra, hunting group, corporation, nation, institution, army, religious group, etc...

These two modes correspond to the two side of our theory of mind.  Our rationality, our mathematical language, our sciences only make use of the object side, i.e. body extension with inanimate artefact  and our natural language, our arts, our religous tradition make use of our coupling side of our theory of mind.  That side of the theory of mind is based on the know thyself in order to coupling with other (human and animals).

Fillippo,

My objective is to come up with a real scientific theory of the body.  And I have a lot of tools up my sleeve to make it so but I have not presented here up front because I believe into our capacity to go deep into reality using a vague metaphorical language. I am guided by a lot of thing up my sleeve.  The only way to see the forest is not to concentrate on the details.  Philosophers of all ages could go deep with the science of their era and the major problem of our era is that we have lost the respect for the value of the vague and deep insight.  Many do not see any hope in the possiblity of integration of all our human knowledge and do not even care and keep busy with finding new details as if looking at the forest is not important.  Obviously I will only convince those already convince and totally be unconvincing for those thinking otherwise.  I am trying to convince only stating the way I experience things.  

I agree with you that metaphorical language is not a scientific language.  But I think of scientific writing as scientific artwork and I do not art to be equal with the artwork.  Yes for me doing science is an artistic process like all other artistic process.  The only difference is that the artwork have to be scientific artwork but the process itself is totally artistic and metaphical language express in pre-scientific way the maturation of the scientific artistic process in the internal gestation of the scientific artwork.

Comforting a child can be achieved in many ways. "Stroking the physical body of the child" is just one of them. On a longer time-scale, making sure that you are yourself happy and strong does actually comfort your child. On the long run, stroking your child will start to be a nuisance for the child (as in: not letting the child 'go', using the emotional contact with your child as a stand-in for something you are missing in yourself).

My general point is: the reactions to the suggestion that my child is part of me, are themselves far to simplistic. They only consider the biological, physical body.

I think the example of the bow-man and the deer is very smart. But again, it is to narrowly considering the issue. Nobody says that the 'air molecules' physically located around my skin are part of me. That is not the point, so you can shoot arrows through that and they won't affect me and that is perfectly true. Take away *all* oxygen, however, and I die. Or look the other way, what if you take out my liver and I don't die. Does that mean the liver is not part of my body either? You could destroy crucial element's in the deer's habitat, for instance, disturb it's way of living in such a way it cannot be a 'deer' anymore. I think we have already 'killed' many animals that way: we go and see them fade away in our Zoos. They are no longer that, what we take them to be, despite the nice story on the plaquete next to the cage. In the same way: make a human being into a slave, or put him in a concentration camp, and you killed that human even if 'his body' (the physical, medical body) is 'alive'.  Take away a carpenter's tools and he is no longer a carpenter. He will not die, but you will indeed destroy large parts of 'him'. The question concerning the body is not just about 'whether the heart keeps beeting if you pierce it with an arrow', it is about whether it maintains its integrity, which is a more subtle concept than just 'alive' or 'dead' - indeed autopoiesis was originally a purely biological theory, but see Varela's later writings on the embodiment of mind.

Filippo,

I totally agree with you. It is a work in progress.

Jelle,

It is a strange coincidence that 2 or 3 hrs ago, I was thinking along the lines of your post.  I thought about a lion.  What is the lion?  Is this this Lion's body?  I think that it is lioning or acting as a lion.   So instead of defining an organism by its body we should define the organism by its growing interaction.  The organism's body is into a functional cycle.  

=============== A few definitions from b von Uexkull :

 The Umgebung (environment) is the part of the world to which the body is exposed (thus including radiowaves and neutrinos). It is reality as

known from the outside;

The Merkwelt is the part of the world that causes changes of state in the

body’s sensitive surface;

The Wirkwelt is the part of the world (including the body itself!) that the

body is ably to change;

The Umwelt (lifeworld) includes the Merkwelt and the Wirkwelt, including

their Funktionskreisen (interrelations)

The Innenwelt is the lifeworld from the perspective of awareness, that is

to say, it is reality as experienced from the inside.

==================

The Umwelt is the interaction (as described from outside) and it is this totality we should consider when thinking of an organism.  If I think of a Lion, we should think of the lioning ,   Although we are told that in our biological classes in high school and in our ecology classes.  It simply do not enter our head.  The reason why it does not enter our head is that the language is structure with another object mindset.  I complained about Heidegger having a difficult language but he had  to change the language.  The language we use is not dynamic.  It points at objects (nouns) and the verb animate these objects and relate them to other objects.  But we should be verb  ( I Seem to Be a Verb,  R. Buckminster Fuller ), not noun.  Language make us object and the verb tries to animate these objects.  A few thousand years of living in city and being brain wash to obey has transformed our language to make us obedient.  

We are interactions.  All organisms are interactions.  Growing interaction with growing bodies , growing  Merkwelt , growing  Wirkwelt .  

''I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of Universe.''

- R. Buckminser Fuller

Hello Louis and  all

along with the references to von Uexkull, Varela, Hurley, et al, I would add a couple by Evan Thompson which I think are valuable - if you do not know them -

Sensorimotor subjectivity and the enactive approach to experience

The Mind-Body-Body Problem (Hanna and Thompson)

SP

Hello Simon,

I read both papers and really need to re-read them because a lot seems to escape me.  I think that I disagree with Thompson on splitting the world into the mental and body.  

I agree with him that the traditional mind-body problem is not well formulated because the body problem is not well formulated. We have a naive conception of physics that tend to make us believe that the physical world is like the mathematical world or like a game of mechano where we put pieces together.  The mathematical worlds is build that way. Basic definition of entities are provided and all other entities are logically build on top of those.  But there is not a single physical entities that physic described.  Physics and the sciences provices models b ut these model are relational models and do not defined the entities that they explicitly put into relations.  Physics does not explain what are its most basic entities, it just specifies relations. So the sciences and physics in particular  has never discover the essences of reality, but only some of its limitations.  Models are liminations.  Physics does not specifies nor defined a physical world but provides some limitations to the world.  It is far from defining a world.  Talking about the physical world is a abuse of langue sudgesing that physics specifies such a world like a mechano building blocs.  Then posing the question how can the mental arise in the physical world is forgetting that physics does not really defined a physical world and so the question is flawed.  Physics like all other science assumes the world, like us in our daily life and just investigate some of its limitations.  How to build a mind out of these limitations is not going to work because the limitations are not building blocks but only limitations.

Physics is a science that discovered the limitation of so-called physical interactions.  Humans like all animals are growing interaction and our world of interaction appears as our phenomenal world.  It is the lived world of the type of body we have.  I do not see a duality between my lived world and the physical world.  There is no such physical world.  There is only one world but all kind of interactions forming this world.  The limit of the physical interactions are studied by physics.  Some of this limit applies to our lived world such as relation between mass and acceleration and force.  We can experience that it is true in our experience.  I refuse to split the wold between the different method we have to interogate it.  Each science interogate the world with its method and concepts.  But in science we are forced to adopt an external view by the method.  The model has to be expressed withing the existing defined concepts and we have to have external pointer to reality in these models whose relations we can empirically test.  This is science.  Now this is not reality but a mode of interrogation of reality.  We act in reality and are part of it.  This cannot be expressed scientifically because it is not a business of relations among concepts, of limitations.  We for sure are bound by all the limits discovered by all the sciences in our action and by much more.  But I really do not see a dual world, one of bodies and one of my mental.  My mental is my interaction world, it is the world as it appears within the nexus of this interaction.  

The second paper is a good review.  Nowhere I see a grounding in the mammalian evolution.  And nowhere I see the sensorymotor approach taking on which for me is the most important aspects: cross-modal integration by self-enactment and what  constitutes  the core mammalian imagination.

I think that under the influence of language of denoting bodies by nouns and denoting what they do with verbs we end up thinking of organisms as bodies and then we add their interactions with their environment.  But we should define organism dynamically and in the totallity of their interaction.  So maybe we should define an organism as a self constructed growing interaction.  The body itself which began with a single cell is all along he stabilized part of the self contructed growing interaction.  The notion of extended cognition is built-in in this definition of an organism.  A self constructed growing interaction is necessarily in interaction with inanimate part of the environment and with other interactions and this lead necessarily to the stabilisation of higher organisational scales interactions which at some point might find the path of autonomy and gain the status of self constructed grwoing interactions.  In fact global interactional dynamic should favor the emergence of such higher level organisms, their closure to external causality.  Any self-constructed grwoing interaction has to have a nexus of growth.  This can be observed externally and I hold the hypothesis that it  phenomenally correspond to the center of attention, it is what consciousness is for any organism at any stage of its ontogeny.  The nexus of growth is what we feel to be ourself, it is where the self-construction take place and stabilize into the body. Grosso modo it is were I am at in my thinking and in my nexus of growth.  What I have not made clear in the previous picture is the functional role of the historicity of the self-construct growing interaction. I will also need to add the construction history of the mammalian imagination, its current state in the primate and the fundamental change of attention in the transition to humans.  

The question intended to extend the notion of body to the interaction.  But I now revise the idea, I leave the body to what is under the skin but I define the organism as the interaction and the body being the stabilized part of the interaction that is under the skin.

Historical Re-enactment according to Collingwood:

http://www2.education.ualberta.ca/css/css_38_2/ARhistorical_imagination_collingwood.htm

In order for historians to use their sources as evidence to help them imagine and thereby come to know something about the past, they engage in a process that Collingwood called 're-enactment'. Collingwood argued that to understand and imagine past human actions and thought, we must think ourselves into the situation - that is, we re-think the thoughts of the persons engaged in the situation. The process of re-enactment involves reading documents related to an event, envisaging the situation discussed in the documents as the author(s) of the document envisaged it, and thinking for yourself what the author(s) thought about the situation and about various possible ways of dealing with it (Collingwood, 1946/1994, 213 & 215). In presenting themselves with the same data or the same situation that was presented to the historical character involved in the past event, historians draw the same conclusions or offer the same solutions that had been offered by the original thinker. In this way historians are able to think the same thoughts as the human beings who created the document or relic.''

http://www2.education.ualberta.ca/css/css_38_2/ARhistorical_imagination_collingwood.htm

It is exactly what the mammalian imagination at the level of the primate is able to do while observing others.  It re-enact them using the self-enactment used for perception. 

I have a concrete question. I have made a system of interactive lights. (It is not hypothetical we actually built it and are testing it with autistic patients). The lights can be programmed each evening. The next day, lights in my living space will go on and off depending on how I programmed them. They correspond to tasks that I wanted to do. So for example a light may go on in the kitchen at 9 o clock. I have programmed that to mean: Jelle, you should no go and do the dishes. The lights do not tell me that it is dishes I should do, and they also do not demand me to do them, they are just subtle hints, cues in the environment that already assume that I myself am doing something meaningful and will interpret the lights on the basis of that activity. so, because I programmed it in the kitchen, and because I already planned myself on doing the dishes, (but perhaps in the hectic of the moment I forgot), I will understand what the light means. It is like a knot in the handkerchief, but then situated in the space around me, which may help me if I am a bit chaotic and easily distracted from tasks.

I want to interpret this light as being connected to, or becoming part of, my "lifeworld": my everyday environment that is full of other people and artefacts and spatial properties and that guides me in my daily business of being-me: my absorbed coping as Dreyfus calls it. Just let us assume that we can interpret it thus (of course there are many problems of really making this work, and that is my design-based research about - it is easy to have philosophical ideas, the hard part is to really create something that makes it true in practice). So let's see this project as a longterm attempt - this is just step one. Many changes can be made.

Anyway

Now my question: as for the idea of embodiment, and 'embodied cognition' - the lights are part of the physical space outside of me, they do not move with me in physical space, but they guide my attention and focus and because I program them myself they become part of my habitual routines. Could one then state that the lights have become 'an extension of me' - in the same way as the hammer becomes and extension of the carpenter? Or would that require that the lights should 'literally' be attached to my 'physical' body? Phenomenologically speaking I would say the latter is not required.

But phenomenology also speaks about the 'background' - perhaps the lights can better be seen as having become part of the background? And is the lifeworld the same as the body, or does the body require or live "in" a lifeworld? I like Heidegger's discussion of "in". He explicitly contrasts the conventional meaning of 'in' (a chair is "in" a room, a broach is 'in' a jewelbox) with the meaning he is intending when he says that we are 'in' the world. The being-in of Dasein (that's us) is an involved, active, interactive form of 'in'. But that almost seems to suggest that the world is the body is dasein and that there is no difference. Or, as the distributed cognition/extended mind people say, people can flexibly 'incorporate' part of the environment: that suggest that the environment was first not 'part of us' but then at some point 'becomes' part of us.

Either way: could *anything* become part of my body, even a system of lights that do not move along with my own legs?

And if something is part of the lifeworld does that mean it also became part of my body: is there a difference between the body (and I mean the lived body not the physical body) and the lifeworld, or are they the same thing looked at 'from the other side'?

Jelle,

Our physical environments are not on an equal footing. They are those we are very familiar with because we spend a lot of time interacting and they are those that we do not know in great details and with which we do not interact as intimatly as the former. Those that we have interact a lot have created into us specialized interacting capacities which make them much more rooted in our lifeworld.  The house and neibhborhood and city I was borned and which I spent the first 22 years of my life is today 5 thousand km from my current home but there is not one day that I am not there.  If I search the west looking at the south, I immediatly picture myself on the balcony of my old house in front of the saguenay river looking at the sunset over the river.  

I see your control of the lights as a form of writing in the environment. It remove the need for your to remember looking at a book since here the book is the environment.  It is efficient way to be remembered of something.  

An anecdote:  My wife is a kindergarten teacher.  At the beginning of the school year the minimal disciple is not yet establish nor her leadership.  One of a good trick to get the attention of the kids and to retake control is to close the lights and to wait for them to quite down before re-opening the lights.  It is very efficient method better than a loud voice.

In your example of the control of the light and in the example of my wife controling the light in both case the environment is controled by a person will and reflect it and is that and not only a passive environment.

Thanks Louis - nice example from the kindergarten

In ''Karl Marx and Wilhelm Dilthey on the socio-historical conceptualization of the mind'' (  http://www.yorku.ca/tteo/teach/Teo2001.htm ) Thomas Teo compared the respective conception of Marx and Dilthey in the socio-historical embedding/constructing of indivisual minds in sociteies practices and cultures.  

The author   summarizes in a clear ways the ideas of these authors. They both focus on human actors in real life in their societies. 

'' If we take the arguments of Dilthey and Marx seriously, then it seems logical to suggest - in the service of knowledge - that an understanding of the mind is limited as long as the objective dimension (expressed in culture , art, economic relations,etc)  of the mind is not recognized. ''

These psychological ideas formulated prior to the creation of the science of psychology were not only embedded but historically embedded and both of them were not naive enough that psychology could be a natural science because the whole notion of science exclude subjectivity and history by definition of what science is.

Body is the interface between invisible things like the spiritual - soul - mind - emotions on one side and then to the outer world with everything you see and feel or even not.

 Thomas,

If by ''soul'' ''mind'' you mean the center of what we are, then it would be hard to phenomenally separate this from our body but at the same time we perceive what is out there which including our the outer skin of our body.  So our body is both in our mind and out there.  But some tools or musical instruments which we have learned to use skillfully gradually get phenomenally included in our body.  Somehow the human nervous system is very special in being able to extend what it consider its body.   So we are a kind of shape shifter , i.e. we have a capacity to control all kind of extended bodies through all kind of artificial interfaces.

By near-death experiences of thousands of people through all ages we know, that the body and the functioning of the brain is not necessary for thinking and experiencing things. This is what i am referring to. If you need literature, just tell me.

And we have enough hints to consider others and much quicker systems we can use than only the nervous siystem...

To return to the original question - and to apologise for my absence in this conversation - 

We use instruments as an extension of our hands and they may serve also as an extension of our senses. We assimilate them to our body by pouring ourselves into them. And we must realize then also that our own body has a specia place in the universe: we never attend our body as an object in itself. Our body is always in use as the basic instrument of our intellectual and practical control over our surrondings.

What is our body? Is it what is within our skin? Or is it what we control or participate in?

There are several parts to this interesting quote from Polanyi. One part that has not been named explicitly here is the phenomenon of the prosthetic extension. Merleau Ponty, Bateson etc reflect on the blind man's stick. And we know something about our ability to extemporaneously extend our sense of self into material artifacts - a hammer or saw, a bicycle, a car. Neurophysiologically, we temporarily extend our homunculus  in such a way that certain aspects of our finger tip is now 150cm away, dragging on the ground. This is truly remarkable and speaks of neural plasticity. But what of our identification with the computer cursor, or our avatar in second life? I have no control over the arrow once it has left the bow, but I have control over the avatar, immaterial as it is. So this sense of ownership, of control, of bodily identification, is a result of, as Varela, Thompson and Rosch might say - temporal coupling.

Thomas,

I read the wikipedia entry on NDE.  I guess that the fascination about NDE would be to have a proof that there is life after death or that we can experience without a body.  I did not see such evidences.  I found the experiment of  Sam Parnia very interesting because it is scientifically well design.  But so far nobody have seen the hidden targets in the NDE.  If someone can produce hard scientific evidences of that nature it would be something.  Personnally I am not a reductionist materialist but I believe that all that exist is natural but since our science is so primitive, nobody has a clue about what it means to say ''all that exist is natural''.  So I am open mind but it seems necessary to use eyes to really see.  I had a few lucid dreams in my youth, even two psychotic hallucinations and it feel real and we do not need eyes for such hallucinating experiences.

Simon,

Polanyi also frequently used the blind man stick in his model of tacit knowledge.  The expression he used ''pouring ourselves'' betray the influence of Lipps empathic/Einfühlung aesthetic theories.  This capacity of extension of our body where the full body , i.e., that what is controled by my nervous system = prosthetic/instrument/interface + biological body and its connection with the anthropomorphic imitative capacity, the pouring into capacity which was first conceived to explain aesthetic experience by pouring ourself through an object of art is of greatest interest to me.  

Full body (biological body + external extension) plasticity thus require sensory-motor plasticity.  This theme of the centrality of plasticity to the centrality of what it is to be human was the central thesis of Pico Della Mirandola: Oration On the Dignity Of Man (15th CCE http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/world_civ/worldcivreader/world_civ_reader_1/pico.html

At this point I cannot resist re-posting one of my favorite quote of Susan Hurley:

Consciousness in Action

By Susan L. Hurley

‘’We tend to think of perception and action as buffer zones mediating between mind and world. We tend to think of perception as input from world to mind and action s output from mind to world. This Input-Output picture of perception and action may hold in place traditional worries about the mind’s place in the world, as well as more specific philosophical assumptions. If perception is input from the world to the mind and action is output from the mind to the world, then the mind as distinct from the world is what the input is to and what the output is from. So, despite the web of causal relations between organisms and environments, we suppose the mind must be in a separate place, within some boundary that sets it apart from the world.

In trying to understand the mind’s place in the world, we thus study the function from input to output, especially the way central nervous systems process and transform inputs to human organisms. We argue about whether central cognitive processes must have a language-like structure that explains the conceptual structure of thought. But we tend to ignore the function from output back to input, and the way environments, including linguistic environments, transform and reflect outputs from the human organism. The two functions are not only of comparable complexity, but are causally continuous. To understand the mind’s place in the world, we should study these complex dynamic processes as a system, not just the truncated internal portion of them.

People and other animals with minds can be seen at one level as dynamic singularities: structural singularities in the field of causal flows characterized through time by a tangle of multiple feedback loops of varying orbits. Consider the circus performer who puts the handle of a dagger in her mouth, tips her head back, balances a sword by its point on the point of the dagger, and with the whole kit balanced above her head magisterially climbs a ladder, swings her legs over the top rung, and climbs back down the other side of the ladder. Each move she makes is both the source of and exquisitely dependent on multiple internal and external channels of sensory and motor-signal feedback, the complex calibrations of which have been honed by years of practice. An only slightly less intricate structure of dynamic feedback relations knits the nervous system of a normally active organism into its environment. This is what the contents of the creature’s interdependent perceptions and intentions both depend on. The whole complex dynamic feedback system includes not just functions from input to output, but also feedback functions from output to input, some internal to the organism, others passing through the environment before returning. As a result, external states can be needed to explain patterns of activity at the body surface, even if what is to be explained is not identified in terms of external states. The dynamic singularity is centred on the organism and moves through environments with the organism, but itself has no sharp boundaries.’’

Dear Thomas,

Here is something that might interest you.  It is about out of body experience.

WHEN “ALTERED” STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS BECOME FUNDAMENTAL (A review of Evan Thompson's book "Waking, dreaming, being"

By Michel Bitbol

https://www.academia.edu/17341681/WHEN_ALTERED_STATES_OF_CONSCIOUSNESS_BECOME_FUNDAMENTAL_A_review_of_Evan_Thompsons_book_Waking_dreaming_being_

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Really a tough question!

I think the 'body' of a human being is the phenomenal and existential being of the person. More than the flesh under the skin, it is the entire aura of a person's presence.

Regards

Dear Mohammad,

Your biological body is  in Uttar Pradesh and my biological body is in Vancouver.  They are far away from each other but we are currently in the presence of each other by the fact that we are communicating.  So you are also here with me and me with you.  So I am not totally in Vancouver and you in Uttar Pradesh.

Dear Louis

I am in perfect agreement with you. I tried to say the same thing in my post. 

WE ARE AN INSEPARABLE PART OF THE BODY HUMANITY.

With best regards

Our body is a god s'given gift .At the time of our birth on this earth first vision of holy earth ,we know our identity through our parents who are our creator .With the arrival of our birth it is also equally certain that we have also to due this life our surrounding & world as our death is equally certain not in our hand & we are also equally not aware the time passage which we are on this earth . This is what we call our destiny which is controlling us though our mind,brain & our heart .

In the line of above ,this is a physical body should not be evaluated with the skin ,bones &,blood .The same are mean for our existence but our existence rests with our HEAD ,MIND,& inner source of breathing which is the temple of divinity what we call our SOUL ,which never leaves us as after our departure our soul joins with our new life bringing with us the storage of our action with the result positive or negative for which we are to join in our next life & what sort of human beings we remain by virtue of our earlier action of our life.

Where thinking of controlling the life of human beings although we are born equal but while so much deviation so much change in the temperament ,attitude ,& unfortunately even cruelty observe by us in quite good human beings in the world .

With this we should value our body both from outside & also from within so as to make us a worthy human beings to make our surrounding & society with the rosy fragrance .

This is personal opinion 

Dear Louis !!!

What brilliant question. Thank you.

My first immediate comment would be, as I learnt from early childhood, that:

My body is a temple of God. I should take care of it as best as I can, to keep it pure and clean.

This said, and as I keep this religious premise as sacred, through my adult life, I must say that in my Medical profession, I am accustomed to try and follow that too. 

What is our body? Is it what is within our skin? Or is it what we control or participate in?

Think our body refers to the physical flesh that is tangible & visible.  Besides the body, we also have soul that encompasses our emotion & cognition capabilities.  Think our soul helps us to control / participate in thought provoking discussion etc.  Our body is analogous to computer hardware, we need software (our soul) to instruct / control what the hardware to perform.

Maria Bettencourt Pires,

Yes .  Taking care of ourself demand a respect of our organic body. Do you consider yourself as this organic body, what is within your skin as your whole body or do you consider yourself to be extending physically beyond your skin.  Consider the relation of the mother to her child.  The child was first within her body and then it was born and is out of her body.  Is in a certain way the mother still feeling that her child is part of her, not her organic body, but the whole her?  And look at all the taking care of the child body as if it was the most precious part of her body.  What do you think?

Han Ping Fung,

You said ''Besides the body, we also have soul''.  Note that I do not limited my body to my organic body but also include in it what you refer to as the soul.  Along with Merleau-Ponty,  I identified myself to my living body  and this living body is experience phenomenally (the soul) in two modes of revelations or type of experience. In the first type of experience , I am controling my body, I am attending and paying attention to what is around and deciding what to do and engage in task and think etc.  In the second type of experience, I look at what is outside, I experience outside object and I can even look at my organic body and it is experience in two way as in the one looking (the first mode) and as what is seen like the every other object out there.   

It is totally different than a mind body cartesian distinction between body and as two substance.    Two mode of revelation but not two substances.  The analogy of the soul as the software of the hardware does not work for living animal because we do not download learning in animal, learning built the animal and can only take place in living experience.

It is complicated design created by god....still always as mystery for us.....