Name: 【TED-Ed】Are you a body with a mind or a mind with a body? - Maryam Alimardani
Uploaded: 2017-10-03T23:09:40.000Z
Duration: 6 min 10 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

It seems obvious, unless you've experienced the rubber hand illusion.

In this experiment, a dummy hand is placed in front of you

and your real hand is hidden behind a screen.

Both are simultaneously stroked with a paint brush.

No matter how much you remind yourself the dummy hand isn't yours,

and inevitably flinch when it's threatened with a knife.

That may just be a temporary trick, but it speaks to a larger truth:

our bodies, the physical,  biological parts of us,

and our minds, the thinking, conscious aspects,

have a complicated, tangled relationship.

Which one primarily defines you or your self?

Are you a physical body that only experiences thoughts and emotions

as a result of biochemical interactions in the brain?

Or is there some non-physical part of you that's pulling the strings

but could live outside of your biological body?

of whether the body and mind are two separate things.

16th-century philosopher René Descartes pointed out

that even if all our physical sensations were just a hallucinatory dream,

our mind and thoughts would still be there.

That, for him, was the ultimate proof of our existence.

the conscious mind is something separate from the material body

The notion of a non-physical consciousness

echoes the belief of many religions in an immaterial soul

for which the body is only a temporary shell.

If we accept this, another problem emerges.

How can a non-physical mind have any interaction with the physical body?

If the mind has no shape, weight, or motion,

Or if we assume it can, why can your mind only move your body and not others?

Some thinkers have found creative ways to get around this dilemma.

For example, the French priest and philosopher Nicolas Malebranche

claimed that when we think about reaching for a fork,

Another priest philosopher  named George Berkeley

concluded that the material world is an illusion,

This question of mind versus body isn't just the domain of philosophers.

With the development of psychology and neuroscience,

that there's any distinction between the mind and body.

Neuroscience suggests that our bodies, along with their physical senses,

are deeply integrated with the activity in our brains

our mental development is formed through our body's interaction

Every sight, sound, and touch create new maps and representations in the brain

that eventually become responsible for regulating our experience of self.

And we have other senses, besides the typical five,

and a sense of the relative location of our body parts.

The rubber hand illusion, and similar virtual reality experiments,

show that our senses can easily mislead us in our judgment of self.

They also suggest that our bodies and external sensations

are inseparable from our subjective consciousness.

If this is true, then perhaps Descartes' experiment was mistaken from the start.

After all, if we close our eyes in a silent room,

the feeling of having a body isn't something we can just imagine away.

This question of mind and body becomes particularly interesting

at a time when we're considering future technologies,

such as neural prosthetics and wearable robots

that could become extended parts of our bodies.

Or the slightly more radical idea of mind uploading,

which dangles the possibility of immortal life without a body

by transferring a human consciousness into a computer.

If the body is deeply mapped in the brain,

then by extending our sense of self to new wearable devices,

our brains may eventually adapt to a restructured version

Or perhaps uploading our consciousness into a computer might not even be possible

unless we can also simulate a body capable of delivering physical sensations.

The idea that our bodies are part of our consciousness and vice versa

It's found extensively in Buddhist thought,

as well as the writings of philosophers from Heidegger to Aristotle.

But for now, we're still left with the open question

Are we a mind equipped with a physical body as Descartes suggested?

Or a complex organism that's gained consciousness

thanks to a bigger brain and more neurons than our distant ancestors?

Or something else entirely that no one's yet dreamt up?