The Purpose of the Body

Mental experience occurs in the context of the physical body and is severely constrained by the body. What is the relationship between the mind, introspectively understood, and its extremely intimate but uncommunicative partner, the body?

This essay proposes that what is taken for granted as the self-existent, biological body is instead a concept, a projection of mentality. The physical body is a mistaken, or at least badly articulated conceptualization, by the linguistic and self-aware Social Self strand of consciousness, of the non-self-aware Sensorimotor Cycle strand of consciousness. From that confusion, the concept of the body is projected outward, away from subjectivity, and reified into a self-existent object.

But what then is the purpose of the body? Mentality needs its projection of embodiment to guarantee its psychological individuality, and thus its very survival. Is there any way this new thesis can be reconciled with the theory of evolution? Some suggestions are offered. Consequences of re-thinking the relationship of mind and body include a reconsideration of cognitive information processing, death, and metaphysics.

ISBN 978-0-9837177-3-7 Approx. pages: 65.

TOC and Preface

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The Three-In-One Mind

The Three-In-One Mind proposes that the normal, adult, human mind includes three different streams of concurrent consciousness. “The mind” then, is not a single mental process but a concert of three. It’s a disturbing thought. One’s instinctive reaction is to reject the idea of the three-in-one mind. Yet the single-process model of mind has a lot to answer for.

We don’t understand our own motivation, especially its sources. We can’t really understand embodiment, nor why the body doesn’t always do what it is told, nor why it does things on its own, like get sick, fall down, sleep, and die. We don’t know what intuition is, or where creativity comes from. We can’t really explain memory, attention, or learning, or why we say things we don’t mean. Personality is a mystery. We don’t know what love is, how to get it, or why it goes wrong. We don’t even know why we do the things we do half the time.

Despite the initial impulse to reject the concept of the three-in-one mind, if that schema promises to clarify psychological life, it is prudent for us to remain “open-minded.” There have been other three-way architectures of mind. Plato had one. So did Freud. This one provides a level of detail that avoids both supernaturalism and biological reductionism, and offers useful innovations that plausibly resolve many perplexing problems of psychology.

ISBN 978-0-9837177-1-3 Approx. pages: 89.

TOC and Preface

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