And So the Philosopher and the Scientist Meet and Shake Hands

There is just something magnificent and yet unsettling about watching a living being peel back the layers of muscles in a cadaver, exposing the winding paths of veins and arteries, demonstrating how a muscle works by tugging on its point of origin and making the appropriate body part shift accordingly (uncontrolled by its owner), poking fingers pulsing with their lifeblood into the caverns and nooks of the body of what used to be a person. When my mind begins to wander as I watch this take place or as I learn more and more about how the body works, in all its amazing and mind-boggling intricacies, I find the philosopher in me sneaking its way into my musings and speculating about the mind-body relationship.

It's strange and spooky, seeing a human being reduced down to exposed muscles, arteries, flesh peeled back, nothing more than a shell. Where does, where did, the person reside in there? There's been so much debate as to where the "person" (the "soul") exist within the body--is it in the heart? Is it in the brain (as Peter Singer points out in some of his discussions, perhaps the medical community believes that this must be the case as the medical definition of death has come to include "brain death")? The bowels? Where are we amidst the mix of flesh and bone? Where in this weird-shaped mass of organic and inorganic materials that I tote around everyday, where in that is my "self" located?

And the more I think about how thought/action are produced in the body, so much of it able to be pinned down to synaptic firings or nerve impulses shuttling this way and that, it leaves me also wondering--are we truly in control of our daily functionings as we drag ourselves through life? Or are we deluding ourselves into thinking that we are autonomic beings? (Strange the word choice here even: "autonomic" alternatively means "self-directed, self-regulated, independent" while also referring to "the autonomic nervous system, which controls bodily functions that are not under conscious control (eg, heartbeat, breathing, sweating)"--do we have autonomy, or are even the things we believe to be under our control (thought, for example) in their own way, just a mechanism of the body's functioning physical and chemical properties--just a byproduct of the body functioning the way it is "programmed" to function? (Dreams always weird me out in this regard as well--we are not consciously directing ourselves to be thinking/remembering/etc., and yet we are *BECAUSE OF SYNAPSES FIRING AWAY IN OUR LITTLE BRAINS*. Where is the autonomy in dreaming?) Who's more in charge of what--the body bossing around what you will think/say/do, or the "self" in you bossing around the body and the brain? Is there some sort of "mind" involved in our daily functioning or does the *illusion* of the mind stand-in for what is nothing more than a physical body functioning the way it is programmed to do so? Where is the mind in the body? Where is the person in the body? Where is "the soul" in the body?

*Mind aswirl with wonderings*

Strange because the more you think about these things, the more you are met with the paradox that despite the fact that science has come so far--that thoughts/sensations/movements can be traced to their very basic scientific processes--there are so many ephemeral wonderings that can't be pinpointed and probably never will--like the question of the "soul," or where the person is located in the body, or why the body has developed in certain ways (sometimes answerable, sometimes not).

The body is wondrous.

But when I get too caught up on that fact and it sends me barreling into all this weird philosophical mamma jamma, all I need to do to shuttle myself back to the more immediate is think of my A&P instructor telling us this week about how having to adjust a person's coccyx often causes them to shit all over the place, "like popping the cork on a bottle of champagne."

Then my wonderment sure as shit dissipates, and all's I wanna do is shed my defecating sack of human-parts as quickly as possible and run far far away from this philosophical dilemma that is human existence.