How to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 7: Your Amazing Body

Chapter 7: Your Amazing Body

Hello again, newborn baby. I’m here again to give you advice on many important topics. This is our seventh visit, the seventh chapter to this 100-chapter story.

Today we are going to talk about your amazing human animal body. First of all, you don’t have a body. Rather, you are a body. “You” is shorthand for trillions of cells that somehow work together. When “you” decide you are hungry, that is actually trillions of microscopic cells coordinating their separate energies into a few macroscopic actions: crying for milk, sucking and then swallowing the milk. How did that miracle of coordination happen? Honest people don’t claim to know.

All of this is pre-verbal for newborns like you—done without the use of words. This seemingly makes you brilliant but actually this puts you into the same predicament as chimpanzees, pigs, mice and earthworms. Your amazing body almost entirely takes care of itself without needing any words at all. And when you finally develop language, you’ll have only the illusion that those words are pulling the strings, whereas your words are only an epiphenomenon. Whenever you “decide” to say “hello,” something else made you “decide.” Your words don’t cause your words, because that would be an eternal regress. We will save the rest of this dangerous topic for another day, however.

People think they know their bodies, but they know almost nothing. We don’t even know how it is that “we” control our breathing or how the body does this automatically when “we” ignore it. We don’t even know how we think thoughts or imagine the ocean. We don't know how we keep from falling over as we run down the sidewalk on our two peg legs. We don’t even know how it is that we are able to start peeing. Or how we digested yesterday’s meal.

Some people will protest and claim that we do know a lot of things. I agree. We know a LOT of things and it is wonderfully useful to know those things. This knowledge allows us to invent smartphones, medicines and rockets. But we never get totally to the bottom of anything. We think we are explaining, but we are only describing. As I was once told by philosopher Andy Clark, “An explanation is a description that makes us feel good.” We have only thin explanations in a deep world. As Nietzsche said,

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.

Maybe we don't fully and deeply understand anything but certainly we can make things, right? Not really. We can only rearrange things. As Carl Sagan said, ““If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Making things worse, when we do rearrange things, they always eventually fall apart, as Heraclitus noticed thousands of years ago.

We appear to be dynamic patterns rather than bodies. The stuff of the universe moves in and out of us, yet somehow the pattern and form our bodies more or less remains. We are thus like flames, though far more complex. We turn bananas into poop to assist our largely subconscious effort to pass our genes to the next generation. How's that for complexity, especially when we figured out how to transport our bananas to our city from 1,000 miles away by using a flying aluminum tube?

We like to say that we understand basic things like how our body works, but that is mostly to keep our sanity. We say lots of things to reassure ourselves, yet we don't even know how our words convey meaning from person to person. We blithely accept words as substitutes for deep understanding because we must. We are experts at concealing our ignorance of our own bodies. Nietzsche had a lot to say about this self-ignorance:

Does nature not conceal most things from him-even concerning his own body, in order to confine and lock him within a proud deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the bloodstream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw away the key. And woe to that fatal curiosity which might one day have the power to peer out and down through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and then suspect that man is sustained in the indifference of his ignorance by that which is pitiless, greedy, insatiable, and murderous-as if hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger.

Now, back your body. It is more complex than you will ever be able to imagine, multiplied by fifty trillion. Your liver is an immense chemical factory packed into one side of your abdomen and it works extremely well even though we don’t have any deep knowledge of how it works. We notice correlations and we attribute causation, but the magic is in the complex fluid movements and as we drill down from biology to physics to quantum physics, the ultimate “things” we would like identify as the objects of our explanations smear into wave patterns.

OK. Maybe that is too esoteric. Let's simplify. Have you ever considered your ankles? Mundane ordinary ankles. They are a collection of bones so small you can almost wrap your hand around them, yet they hold up your body all day long and they can last for 100 years. Even one ankle can hold up your entire body weight, even if you hop. How is that possible. If they get injured they usually fix themselves. How is that possible?

How is it possible that the body is so good at patterns of actions such as peristalsis, vomiting, sneezing and orgasms, where the body orchestrates a complex cascade of mini-actions? And we haven’t yet mentioned the brain, three pounds of such “mind-blowing” complexity that it allows us to fire up our memory and imagine walking through our house! We can generate mental representations in such exquisite detail that we can find our keys while lying in bed with our eyes closed! “I left my keys on the back porch!” And it doesn't help us to blithely say that our brain is like a computer. Our brain does not work like a modern computer. It doesn't have architecture anything like a computer. Further, everything thought we think is infused with emotional valence.

Instead of working like a store-bought computer our brain seem to run on connectionist architecture that excels at pattern matching. We’re “good at frisbee, but bad at math.” That’s another observation by Andy Clark. We have thinking meat in our brains. How does meat think? How is that possible? If all of this unnerves you, perhaps you would rather conclude that thinking goes on somewhere other than in a body, perhaps in a disembodied soul. That is a dramatic fail.As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio concluded: "There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body."

We have immune systems that are factories of natural selection (and much more) within our own bodies. They identify and neutralize complex threats without requiring us to think about those threats. How powerful are immune systems? When someone dies, their body starts to “rot” within a few hours. But the bugs and microorganisms that devour bodies at death are always trying to devour our living bodies too, but bodies, relying on their immune systems, usually beats the invaders decisively. That’s how powerful your immune system is. Without a functioning immune system, a newborn baby like you would never make it to two days of age.

On a microscopic level, there is probably a lot more going on in our bodies than we even want to know. Yesterday, for example, you were oblivious that your body defeated pre-cancerous cell that would have replicated and killed you in a year. Again, it’s probably a really good thing that “you” aren’t needed to keep your body running well. If you were in charge of your body, all of the harrowing microscopic things going on underneath your skin would scare the shit out of you and you wouldn’t have a clue about what to do about any of this.

As you grow up, look at your hands often and marvel at them. Think about how amazing they are, giving you the power to grasp and sense and fight and caress. The hand: a multi-function tool if there ever was one. Your hands are all the evidence you need that your body is extraordinary.

And now please note that we’ve only discussed a few of your amazing body parts. There are hundreds more, including your tiny ear bones which, millions of years, ago served as jaw bones in our reptile ancestors.

Take care of your body. It’s more amazing than anything a science-fiction writer could imagine. Be good to it. Thank the stars that you inherited something so incredibly complex and functionl that defies deep explanation.

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How the Far Left Sees Masculine Men

Andrew Sullivan discusses men like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson who don't shy away from being masculine. They are commonly derided by the political Left, including the Woke Left. The title to his article: "Between The World And Men Truckers, Rogan, Peterson and the revolt of masculinity." Here's an excerpt:

No, the left is not calling all masculinity toxic. But they get pretty quiet when you ask for a definition of non-toxic masculinity that doesn’t end up sounding like being a woman. And, no, they’re not explicitly denying that there are biological differences between men and women — they just speak and act on the premise that there aren’t, that boys do not need a different kind of education than girls, that all-male groups are problematic, and that finding a way to direct masculinity to noble ends is somehow enabling the oppression of women, or gay people. The result is that men are subject to left derision, right machismo, and complete cultural derailment.

And that’s where Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson come in. They too, of course, are mocked constantly, demeaned as chauvinists or white supremacists, etc. But what Rogan does is speak and talk the way men do with each other in private, which, in this media era, is a revelation. He doesn’t entertain the woke bromides of gender theory because he’s lived a life, clearly loves being a man as much as Adele says she loves being a woman, and believes, as he once put it, that “bad men are just bad human beings who happen to be men.”

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Consciousness as the Tip of the Cognitive Iceberg

Perhaps you will enjoy this passage, but perhaps you will find it disturbing. Here is one of my favorite passages on the fact that we are not ultimately (in any meaningful way) the conscious authors of what we do. The passage is from Johnson/Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh:

Consider, for example, all that is going on below the level of conscious awareness when you are in a conversation. Here is only a small part of what you are doing, second by second:

    • Accessing memories relevant to what is being said.

    • Comprehending a stream of sound as being language, dividing it into distinctive phonetic features and segments, identifying phonemes, and grouping them into morphemes

    • Assigning a structure to the sentence in accord with the vast number of grammatical constructions in your native language

    • Picking out words and giving them meanings appropriate the context

    • Making semantic and pragmatic sense of the sentences as a whole

    • Framing what is said in terms relevant to the discussion

    • Performing inferences relevant to what is being discussed

    • Constructing mental images where relevant and inspecting them

    • Filling in gaps in the discourse

    • Noticing and interpreting your interlocutor’s body language

    • Anticipating where the conversation is going

    • Planning what to say in response

Cognitive scientists have shown experimentally that to understand even the simplest utterance, we must perform these and other incredibly complex forms of thought automatically and without noticeable effort below the level of consciousness. It is not merely that we occasionally do not notice these processes; rather; they are inaccessible to conscious awareness and control.

The above passage should severely reduce our confidence in introspection as a tool for what is going inside of us, as part of "cognition." And, in fact, the work of Johnson and Lakoff requires us to expand the geography of "cognition" to include far more than the brain.  It needs to include the entire human body:

As is the practice in cognitive science, we will use the term cognitive in the richest possible sense to describe any mental operations and structures that are involved in language, meaning, perception, conceptual systems, and reason. Because our conceptual systems and our reason arise from our bodies, we will also use the term cognitive for aspects of our sensory-motor system that contribute to our abilities to conceptualize and to reason, Since cognitive operations are largely unconscious, the term cognitive unconscious accurately describes all unconscious mental operations concerned with conceptual systems, meaning, inference, and language.

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About Mass Formation Hypnosis

Dr. Robert Malone recently discussed "Mass Formation Hypnosis" on Joe Rogan's show:

I decided to do a deeper dive into this topic.  Clinical Psychologist Dr. Mattias Desmet discusses Mass Formation Hypnosis with Max Blumenthal in this video:

As Desmet describes at 14 min (and summarizes at 19:45), there are four conditions for MFP:

1. Lack of social bonds

2. Lack of meaning making

3. High levels of free floating anxiety. They don't know why they are anxious and it is very distressing/painful for humans to experience because of the lack of control, resulting in risk of developing panic attack. They actively look for something to which they can attach the free-floating anxiety, something they can control.

4. High levels of free floating frustration and aggression

What happens when these conditions exist? Desmet explains: A narrative is disseminated that A) indicates an object for the anxiety and B) offers a strategy/solution for this object of anxiety. As a result of this narrative, all of the free-floating anxiety attaches to the object of anxiety offered by the narrative, resulting in a over-willingness to participate in the strategy.

In present times, the object of the anxiety is the virus and the strategy is the lockdown, social distancing and other corona measures. MFH allows people to feel that they can control their anxiety by participating in the strategy. When large groups of people participate in the strategy, it leads to a new social bond, new connectedness, a new solidarity, and this leads to a new sense-making in life. In other words, life becomes meaningful through the heroic struggle with the object of anxiety (the virus). COVID led to a new solidarity because everyone participated in a heroic collective battle with the virus. As social beings, we switched from isolation to the new strong social bond (or solidarity) with large masses of other people. This is why people enthusiastically buy into the corona narrative even if it is utterly absurd. For those not caught up in MFH, they are amazed that others so often utter such absurdities.

Those caught up in the narrative don't do so because the narrative (the set of extreme COVID measures) is correct. Rather, they do so because they seek the new powerful social bonds. Many of the measures are not relevant or true, but they function as rituals in which people participate in order to connect to the masses of others caught up in the narrative. The more absurd and unscientific the COVID measures and the more that sacrifice is demanded, the better the measures function as rituals. This fits the general function of rituals: a behavior that you participate in not because it is functional to protect you from the virus, but to show to the tribe/collective that the collective is more important than the individual. You would be in error to think that as COVID measures become more absurd, more people will wake up to the insanity, but that is an illusion. The more absurd the measures become, the more blinded certain people will become.

Mass Formation is a type of hypnosis. In hypnosis, the attention of an individual is hyper-focused on a very small part of reality, making the rest of reality disappear into darkness. People caught up don't realize that in obsessing over the COVID measures, they are losing much else, meaning that they lose interest in cost/benefit analyses. Even substantial losses are a small price to pay in order for one to feel that one is part of the heroic struggle against COVID. This has led to an aggressive stance toward heterodox outsiders, people who question the narrative, such as Dr. Robert Malone. The masses always need a common enemy, which includes the virus as well as the people who don't fall completely in line.

At Min 30, Blumenthal applies the theory to many political movements in sadomasochistic fashion. These phenomenon are always destructive and self-destructive. Desmet adds: The exclusive focus on one part of reality to the neglect of the rest of reality inevitably leads to self-destruction. George Orwell noticed that the masses, the crowd, exists because it has to channel/satisfy its frustration/aggression and it needs to attach its anxiety to a certain object--and once an object of anxiety is destroyed, the crowd seeks a new object of anxiety, which also must be destroyed. Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She noticed the in its effort to keep reattaching its aggression to new objects of anxiety, the masses become a monster and the system destroys itself.

Desmet fears that we are seeing the emergence of a new totalitarian state, exactly as Hannah Arendt predicted, not led by gang leaders but by dull bureaucrats and technocrats, pursuant to her concept of the banality of evil. We can see this by the extreme COVID response in Australia. These measure are palpably absurd to those not caught up in the narrative. Arendt warned: once you accept the starting point, there is no stopping. You feel compelled to accept all the rest.

This theory of Mass Formation Hypnosis would appear to have ubiquitous applications--wherever anxiety is widespread. This theory has screamingly obvious application to the formation of many religions, for example.

Relevant to the above: Joe Rogan's guest, Dr. Robert Malone was recently deplatformed by Twitter, a stunning development, given Malone's credentials:

Dr. Robert Malone is the inventor of the nine original mRNA vaccine patents, which were originally filed in 1989 (including both the idea of mRNA vaccines and the original proof of principle experiments) and RNA transfection. Dr. Malone, has close to 100 peer-reviewed publications which have been cited over 12,000 times. Since January 2020, Dr. Malone has been leading a large team focused on clinical research design, drug development, computer modeling and mechanisms of action of repurposed drugs for the treatment of COVID-19. Dr. Malone is the Medical Director of The Unity Project, a group of 300 organizations across the US standing against mandated COVID vaccines for children. He is also the President of the Global Covid Summit, an organization of over 16,000 doctors and scientists committed to speaking truth to power about COVID pandemic research and treatment.

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What it Means to Identify as . . .

I'm trying to work through this concept of "Identify." What does it mean to "identify" as something? I noticed Colin Wright asking the same question:

Colin Wright:

I've still yet to hear a coherent definition of "identity" in the "I identify as ____" sense. I'm not convinced anybody knows what they're talking about. I think we'd all be a lot better off if we just buried that term and used a few more words to communicate an actual thought.

--

I'm an atheist. I don't "identify" as an atheist, I simply am one because I don't believe in God. I'm a biologist. I don't "identify" as a biologist, I simply am one because that's what I studied. I am straight. I don't "identify" as straight, I am simply attracted to females.

Where does "identity" come into it? Is it just the sum total of my experiences, behavioral tendencies, personality, beliefs, likes & dislikes? Well that seems infinitely complex and impossible to label.

"Identity" seems entirely meaningless and unnecessary. What am I missing?

Erich Vieth: [This is a work in progress.]

My take. When someone "identities" as a X, they like to think of themselves as an X and they expect others to nod complete uncritical agreement and pretend that it always denotes real world accomplishment, though it's often faux heroism or a cheap signal of tribal membership.

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