The Things Going on Inside Our Bodies

It repeatedly occurs to me that I have no idea what is going on inside my own body. Each of us consists of many trillions of cells all of them, more or less, doing what they need to do to keep us alive and cognizant. It's been a good run for me, for which I'm grateful to my trillions of cells. At any given moment, though, there could be numerous microscopic battles underway that are potentially matters of life and death. At any given moment, my immune system could be successfully (or not) beating back a viral incursion. Who knows how many times per day my body's cells divide successfully without allowing cancer to take root. How many close calls are there?  How many times per day do my cells identify a pathogen and wipe it out? Every week there might be countless life and death battles going on inside of me, yet I'm utterly oblivious. I don't deserve such high-level service and loyalty from my minions.

Again, these are the kinds of thoughts that sometimes occur to me, and this is also my introduction to a short excerpt from Episode 247 of the "Waking Up" podcast, where Sam Harris interviews neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett (who is among the top 1% most-cited scientists for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience). Here's the excerpt:

Lisa Feldman Barrett: First of all, you need to understand that decision-making is always about action first. It's not like you decide something and then you act. The decision that your brain is making is the decision to DO this or that based on probabilities, So I think that's the first thing. The second thing is that, we're not just unaware of what's been going on in our own brains, right? We're also unaware of what's going on inside our own bodies, for the most part, thank God, because there's a whole drama going on inside you right now.

Sam Harris: Yeah, exactly. It's a horror show.

Lisa Feldman Barrett: All I can say is, if anybody is really is currently aware of all of the drama going on, inside your own body, I have my deep, deep sympathy, because we're not really wired to be intimately aware of all the details . . . That would be what philosophers call tragic embodiment.

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Today’s Reading from The Daily Stoic: Don’t Take the Bait

Ryan Holiday's The Daily Stoic is a constant source of modern wisdom from 2,000 years ago.  The book offers one Stoic quote and commentary for each day of the year. Today's wisdom:

“Who then is invincible? The one who cannot be upset by anything outside their reasoned choice.”

— Epictetus, Discourses , 1.18.21

Holiday's commentary:

Have you ever watched a seasoned pro handle the media? No question is too tough, no tone too pointed or insulting. They parry every blow with humor, poise, and patience. Even when stung or provoked, they choose not to flinch or react. They’re able to do this not only because of training and experience, but because they understand that reacting emotionally will only make the situation worse. The media is waiting for them to slip up or get upset, so to successfully navigate press events they have internalized the importance of keeping themselves under calm control. It’s unlikely you’ll face a horde of probing reporters bombarding you with insensitive questions today. But it might be helpful—whatever stresses or frustrations or overload that do come your way—to picture that image and use it as your model for dealing with them. Our reasoned choice—-our prohairesis, as the Stoics called it—-is a kind of invincibility that we can cultivate. We can shrug off hostile attacks and breeze through pressure or problems.

My own reaction:

More than a few of these Stoic quotes remind us: "Don't take the bait!" We have the ability to let most of the aggravations in our lives past over us and through us. That's true whether it be a a rude motorist, an incompetent worker or an unappreciative person you are actively helping. Truly, just don't take the bait! It's so tempting, but if you take the bait, you will then be handing an aggravating other person precious unreplenishable moments of your life. Why would you ever piss away something so valuable? That's akin to allowing a pickpocket to take your valuables.

This is also a core idea of Buddhism, well illustrated by this fable about two monks and the rude woman. Here is how Harriet Lerner tells the story:

Two traveling monks reached a town where there was a young woman waiting to step out of her sedan chair. The rains had made deep puddles and she couldn’t step across without spoiling her silken robes. She stood there, looking very cross and impatient. She was scolding her attendants. They had nowhere to place the packages they held for her, so they couldn’t help her across the puddle.

The younger monk noticed the woman, said nothing, and walked by. The older monk quickly picked her up and put her on his back, transported her across the water, and put her down on the other side. She didn’t thank the older monk, she just shoved him out of the way and departed.

As they continued on their way, the young monk was brooding and preoccupied. After several hours, unable to hold his silence, he spoke out. “That woman back there was very selfish and rude, but you picked her up on your back and carried her! Then she didn’t even thank you!

“I set the woman down hours ago,” the older monk replied. “Why are you still carrying her?”

I'm not perfect at this technique, but when I'm doing a better job at it, I'm more at peace and I'm better able to tend to things that truly matter to me. I will keep practicing this Stoic/Buddhist technique because it is so freeing. The alternative is to risk that your next of kin might put this on your tombstone: "Spent too much of his scant time on Earth getting perturbed at other people."

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What You Should be Thinking as You Fill Out Your Paperwork at the Doctor’s Office

When you arrive at the doctor's office to check in with the receptionist, you are often handed a small pack of paperwork to fill out. Until that moment, you have probably been focused on your own ailment or your own medical worries. Luckily, for most of us--most of the time--our own health concerns will more or less resolve and life will more or less go on.

For all of us, however, that typical pack of doctor office paperwork contains a magic page that has the power to boost our happiness through the roof, if only we employ the correct frame of gratitude.  I'm referring to the page that looks something like this:

This page gives us the opportunity to breathe a cosmic sigh of relief that we do not have most of those ailments on that list.  That's how I try to see it as I check off all most of those boxes with a "no." Thank goodness I don't have most of those medical problems. And this is merely the beginning of what I'm proposing as a journey of gratitude.

Instead of thinking about my own health problem, instead of being frustrated that my own body is not operating perfectly, the above page is a reminder that my body is an extraordinarily complex adaptive system--lots of little parts have self-organized into something so complicated that it seems miraculous. No humans could possibly make a tongue or an eye or a liver as high functioning or as elegant as the natural versions.

Imagine that humans in the distant future worked very hard and came much closer to making a reasonably functioning robotic human. Then imagine their supervisors sending down a new work order to make sure that this robot is also sentient.  Imaging the groaning you would hear from the engineering team! Then imagine that the supervisors send down another new work order to make sure that this artificial human could also repair itself if it became damaged!  Imaging louder groaning, especially when the supervisors remind the team that this self-repair must respond to hundreds of millions of microscopic threats and do it as well as the human immune system. 

Then imagine that the supervisors send down yet another work order advising the team that they must design their human so that it runs on almost anything that it puts in its mouth.  Even louder groaning.  Mutiny is threatened.

Finally, thousands of years later, when millions more engineers (and their great great great great grand-engineers) have successfully created a passable artificial human, the supervisors call down with one more new request:  Make sure that these artificial humans can create tiny artificial humans the size of a pinpoint that will grow, within the body of one of the robots, into large artificial humans who become wise through their interactions with any of dozens of environments.  Then imagine all the engineers quitting their jobs.

At the doctor's office, our question should not be "Why doesn't my body work perfectly?"  We shouldn't even complain that we sometimes have one or more of those ailments on the long checklist handed to us by the doctor's receptionist. A better question is "How is it possible that the actions of countless individual molecules self-organize into trillions of cells that result in emergent coordinated macroscopic behaviors such as the ability to walk into a doctor's office?"  Even more simply, the first question should always be "How is it possible that human bodies work at all, ever?"

Answer not forthcoming.

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Taking a Moment to Survey this Project of Dangerous Intersection

I recently received an email from a new reader ("Greg") who expressed appreciation for some of the articles he has read at Dangerous Intersection. I decided to share my response to his letter (see the bottom of this post).

This website has been important for me as a tool for me for trying to understand the world around me. It has not been entirely successful, of course, and never will be. The world is a inherently confusing moving target, making the quest to understand an ongoing project. It is also a complex adaptive system that demands multi-layer analysis. It's a big onion that requires exploration involving constant reframings based on both reductionism and emergence. Further complicating things, the tools we can use for understanding, spoken and written language, can only scratched the surface of our world. I have been increasingly expressing my frustration with this mismatch between our language and our quest for understanding by focusing on the "meaning of meaning." It's not that we can't make progress, but we often have to be satisfied (if we are honest) with what Nietzsche refers to in this "five fingers" reference:

Just beyond experience!-- Even great spirits have only their five fingers breadth of experience - just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.

--from Nietzsche's Daybreak, s. 564, R.J. Hollingdale transl

Greg's email served as another reminder to me (this has become a constant topic for me) of the intersection between group dynamics and truth. I would bet that I've written about this intersection on dozens of occasions here at this website, The problem being illustrated by Solomon Asch's classic social science experiment.

Greg, thanks for your email, and welcome to this website. I look forward to your comments, especially when you disagree!

Thanks for reaching out. It delights me when I receive letters like yours. My site started off almost like a personal journal about 15 years ago and I often write about topics as my own personal effort to figure things out rather than to tell other people how to think.  It's also been a good tool for me to help me remember and organize my thoughts. Otherwise, information pores into my head and then seems to leak right back out.

It has long been my belief that Group labels (e.g. "Christian") disguise the fact that within each labeled group there are millions of disparate people, some of them having very little in common with the others, even though it seems like they are all homogenous when you see them together in the pews on Sunday.  In other words, I don't think there's any alternative – we all have to figure it out ourselves in the end.  Good luck to you in your own personal project, and good for you to recognize that there's no substitute for hard work when it comes to figuring out anything important.  Let me know when you finish your book. And yes, that would be good to have a cup of coffee someday once the vaccine starts doing its work in a big way.

I have worked very hard to articulate my own views regarding religion and they have evolved over the years. You might find my series of articles on this topic relevant to your own endeavor. I title these articles "mending fences," and you can find the first of the sequence (of five articles) here: https://dangerousintersection.org/2010/07/11/mending-fences-with-believers-and-moving-on-part-i/

If you choose to take the time to read through these five articles, I would very much be interested in hearing what you think about them.  I don't often see my approach expressed by other people, although more recently I have been increasingly influenced by the writings of David Sloan Wilson, on the coupled topic of religion and evolution.
Again, thanks for reaching out!
Erich

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The Upsides of Death

My family and I are currently working through a sudden death of someone central to all of us.  Anne Octavia Jay, my ex-wife, suddenly died.  For months, she was working through some medical issues that seemed surmountable, but then there was some extra-bad news. Then, about two weeks ago it started pouring bad news. This deluge included a sudden diagnosis of stage four cancer.  On Christmas Eve, she suffered cardiac arrest, which led to forty minutes of CPR. In the ICU we learned what kind of damage can happen to a person's brain after forty minutes of CPR.

On the day after Christmas, my two young adult daughters and I gathered around Anne in the ICU to say our goodbyes. I learned that for a patient who has suffered this sort of damage, the fact that she occasionally opened her eyes means nothing at all.   I learned what "comfort care" means. I am learning what it means to be the only surviving parent.  I am learning how hard it can be to lose a parent.  I am learning the awkwardness of being an ex-spouse who loses one's ex-spouse. What am I to be called?  An "ex-widower"? What is the proper name for a person in my position, someone who still cared deeply for my deceased ex but who feels awkward because our marriage fell apart and we divorced each other?

I don't really have an end in mind for this post. Mostly, I'm emoting, but I wanted to share that I was particularly right about one thing. I've always assumed that one can use most "bad" events as good experiences, not just as good learning experiences. We the survivors have learned a lot together.  I now know how to be a better friend to other people who have lost their loved ones.  I now know better how to appreciate the complexity of the human body.  We shouldn't be surprised when our bodies don't work; rather, we should be more more surprised that they ever actually work, given their mind-boggling complexity.  I've learned to appreciate the human heart.  Anne's heart faithfully beat for 59 years, which is a stunning achievement regularly exceeded by the heart-beating streaks of countless other people such as me (I'm in my 60's).

Mostly, I've learned to appreciate the importance of community.  I've seen many dozens of people come out of the woodwork to offer comfort and assistance for my daughters and me in many major and minor ways.  I now have increased respect for the way healthcare workers treat the family of dying patients. I've learned to appreciate straight talk from these professionals.  I've learned to appreciate the patience and kindness of all the people at the cremation service we are using.  We are surrounded by good-hearted people, including countless friends and relatives.  They are everywhere.  They are constantly bringing us flowers and soup and snacks and offers of ever-more help. It has been humbling.

We are in our George Bailey moment and people are running to our rescue in droves to tell us that we are not alone. It feels wonderful.  I know that the hard part will be when all of the adrenaline is gone and when my daughters and I will experience unrelenting emptiness.  That leads me to also appreciate the many friends and professionals who offer grief counseling individually and in groups.

Death in one's family can be one of the better ways to learn what it means to live a good life.  And to paraphrase Tim McGraw, I have better learned to live like I am dying.

I'll end with a Facebook tribute I created for Anne. More than anything else, she wanted to make sure her children were OK. This was her prime directive.  My daughters are working through this with me and I am strongly convinced that we will be ultimately be OK as we continue our life journeys stronger and wiser. Thanks for reading through to the end.

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