Thread by @deontologistics

Here's a late night thought. I'm a computationalist who quite openly opposes the 'embodiment paradigm' (cf. thephilosopher1923.org/interview-wolf…). A common response to my objections is that I'm somehow disconnected from my body, and reconnecting with it would reveal to me my errors.

Allow me to refute this charge with prejudice.

I am sensitive to the signals my body sends me in a vast range of ways I wasn't when I was a care free 18 year old. I have a wide range of dietary restrictions, and must manage my food intake quite precisely, paying attention to signals from my stomach and signs of blood sugar.

I have a chronic pain condition centred on place where my spine meets my skull. If I sit in the wrong position too long, or put too much pressure on the sub-occiptal region, this can result in pain radiating through both occiptal and trigeminal nerves, plus cervicogenic vertigo.

At its most extreme, I get partial facial paralysis that looks a little bit like Bell's palsy, but it's not that. I once ran to catch a bus and the result was numbness down one side of my face to my upper lip and jaw. That was an afternoon in the RVI with a shrug and a discharge.

Add all this onto the bipolar disorder, and I have a very intimately cybernetic relationship with my body. I have to steer this mess of failing homeostatic systems on a narrow path between a variety of very unpleasant failure modes on a day to day basis. I'm used to it now.

I would happily give up all this hard earned familiarity with the signals my body sends me and what they mean to be able to do the things I could when I was 18. To eat, drink, and move in the ways I could then, without a care in the world. I'd rather enjoy my body than know it.

I love Spinoza, but the oft paraphrased line that "we do not yet know what a body can do" has an effortless optimism that all too easily disguises the opposite "we do no yet know what a body can't do". I have learned some hard lessons about what my body can't do.

I'd happily unlearn them by unpicking the knots they've left in my flesh. I'd gleefully disconnect the feedback signals and rewire the relevant drives. This tight sensation in my scalp signalling I've been staring down at my laptop too long would be the first up against the wall.

There's the disturbing tendency in the embodiment paradigm to act as if all this sensory noise is in fact richness: an essential ambience, a somatic je ne sai quois, without which we simply couldn't be anything resembling the creatures we are. I call bullshit.

The usual question that I ask people obsessed with the cognitive role of sensorimotor volition is this: do you think Jean-Dominique Bauby suddenly stopped *thinking* when a stroke locked him in his body, leaving only an eyelid channel to the external world? A brain in a meat vat?

(cf. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Domi…; there are plenty of other cases of locked in syndrome to consider: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in…)

How important was the residual sense of his body to composing and communicating The Diving Bell and the Butterfly through that tiny communicative channel? Might he have given up those sensations to widen it, just a tad? Cut away the meat in favour of a more convenient vat?

I won't bore you by litigating this and other examples. There are things to be said about the cognitive scaffolding provided by sensorimotor capacities, the parameters of semantic externalism, and the links between words and world. But they do not dissolve the central problem.

No brain is an island, and even the most seasoned fantasist cannot subsist on self-stimulus. Yet the size, shape, and content of the sensorimotor channels we need to keep the interactive processes constitutive of cognition going are surprisingly flexible. Plastic, even.

If I were to build my own body without organs, I've a list of subsystems I'd substitute for simpler ones I'd rather not spend my time managing. Give me an encapsulated digestive tract the rest of my body can interact with well enough without needing the old error signals.

I'm not saying I'd eliminate pain, exactly, but I'd happily eliminate ache. I'd love to see just what a body can do when we really commit to designing opportunities for interesting joy and eliminating opportunities for sorrow. Storm the heavens. Conquer death. All the good stuff.

I'm used to such Prometheanism being dismissed as delusional hubris. I can accept this to some extent. I doubt I'll ever be able to redesign my corporeal platform in the way I'd like, brutally flensing sources of miserable noise and fine tuning sources of interesting signal.

There are all sorts of unintended consequences of the technologies required to do these things, and there are many who are understandably cautious about them, even if too cautious in my opinion. But I will never abide being told I'm defined by these capacities for suffering.

Suffering is to be centred only insofar as it is our duty to eliminate it on demand. I refuse to let it or its somatic conditions of possibility define who I am in any way. I will cope with it as a constraint, using these unpleasant sensitivities, but I will not identify with it.

This isn't hubris, it's personal choice. Some will always portray such choices as the pride preceding every echo of the fall, but they're as often pushing us towards the edge as they are prophesying our plummet over it. I fight for the right to make choices I may never have.

Time to turn off the senses, power down the soul, and await what dreams may come. Catch you all on the other side sleep.🖖