The Mind-body solution

Stepping out of the darkness of the enlightenment

The idea is something like this. Your relationship with your parents IS cognition. It is not a metaphor, it is not an “inner representation” in your brain cinema where its used as a metaphor. The literal, physical, historical relationship with your parents IS cognition, and it is a psychically manifest entity.

You are not a little man in your head controlling your body like a mecha. Your body is the pilot and the world is the mecha.

this is what mean “Get into robot shinji”

The mind-body problem is the kind of wittgensteinian “asking the wrong question”, and we have long had examples from neurology that are nonsensical, revealing our framework as flawed, such as the classic “people’s nerves in their fingers show electronic activity a microscopic moment before the brain does, when the test subject “chooses” to move his finger”. Your response to these discoveries must be to either embrace total materialism and call all sentience and free will a hallucination, or, denying the experiment, or, embracing utter incoherence. Or, if these options are not to your satisfaction, you can step back and ask a different question.

We also know that a lot of cognition takes place literally in the gut, in your gut flora, and not centrally inside the head. This is just the kind of thing that's either ignored because it’s inconvenient to our general worldview, or handwoven away as “well it’s probably because it puts some cool chemicals in the blood that goes into the brain or something.”

It’s all unsatisfactory and the structure doesn't hold together, because it’s all add hoc trying to preserve a general worldview, the modernist worldview and view of man, sentience, and the world. It’s the kind of stuff we usually take for granted as “having always been this way”, simply because we happen to live in it. I propose it has not always been this way, and while he might not be the single cause that created this worldview, but perhaps only was the person to articulate a prevailing sentiment of the time, I think it’s illustrative to trace it back to Descartes and the cogito.

Descartes’ cogito was a project to achieve the simplest, most fundamental thing that “could not be doubted”. “cogito ergo sum”, “I think, therefore, >implying an “I””. This is presented as being something undoubtable, since to articulate the words is to prove them. Unfortunately for Descartes all logic is ultimately tautology and he essentially did nothing, but that’s not really the point. The point is, this was a prevailing mood at the time, and meditations was a very famous book – either influential, or representative. I don’t want to get into cause and effect here.

My point about it is that regardless of whether it is cause or effect, it is and was, very popular, and it is and was central to the worldview, and our view of man, cognition and the world, since. Despite easily being poked holes in and critiqued, it is the worldview we are trying to preserve, because we know no alternative.

The picture Descartes paints of man, as as an ethereal soul residing nowhere, which dreams the physical world. All things can be doubted: is my body real, am I a brain in a jar, etc, except this one thing: cogito ergo sum. This concept is the core of the reason-worship world we live in today. Only the Cogito cannot be doubted, thus, “rationality” takes primacy over all things.

But the big glaring problem with this is that Descartes was not a human. He was a psychopath who tortured and cut animals open while they were still alive, for his own personal pleasure. And for the reasons of his own handicaps in this regard he was probably completely blind to the flaws of his worldview himself: in terms of “stated vs revealed intentions”, “meditations” is not really about finding “that which can be known with certainty” but rather – as with most philosophy – it was a quest to inspire fear, to discover “what, which we have not previously doubted, can be doubted” - to which new heights can we drive our neurosis, how much further can we fear.

And the Chinese finger trap all philosophy gets perpetually stuck in, is that everything can be doubted, and if you ever think you find the limit, you can just torture the subject until they doubt even that. You can always induce more neurosis, more doubt, and more fear. There literally is no bottom.

The idea of human cognition as layers of representation and hallucinations, of “the brain generating images of the world”, even going as far back as Plato's shadows on the cave wall, are not based on “certainty”. The philosophers lie. Stated vs revealed intentions: They don’t serve certainty, they are not on a quest for “truth”. They serve Fear above Certainty. When Descartes claims to be searching for that which cannot be doubted, he is really just cutting the reader to pieces for his own wicked thrill of vivisection.

The fundamental flaw in the modernist worldview is that it is based on fear. Fear is the core Tenet - because in this mindset, doubt always come before certainty. In descartes project he does doubt whether “He” exists - certainty only comes later. The atomic building block for the worldview and philosophy is not reason. Fear comes first.

Which is probably also the reason that the world is run today by psychopaths, who understand these things by instinct and exploit it. But that’s tangential to the point.

Our basic assumptions about human cognition are built around neurosis, fear, doubt: doubt everything except reason. We first built a psychology on fear, and then we build (or restructured) a society around this understanding of psychology, and that is what modernity is. It’s no wonder that everything spun out of control and spun into industrial mass human slaughter. It’s fundamentally a hysteric, paranoid, spazz out.

What the Nietzschean “death of god” is, is the redirection about basic assumptions about cognition and psychology, and what some call the “bronze age mindset” - the pre-modern mindset – is an presumption about human psychology based on kierkegaardian faith – bravery. The opposite of the descartian Fear.

In biological terms, it's the different between building our conception of sentience around either the fight or flight instinct, and up until Descartes, it was built on fight.

We have to do away with the entire structure of representation and Freudian hallucinations. They are post hoc attempts to rationalise the inconsistencies of modernity with the human experience. They are nonsensical. You literally have to accuse yourself of hallucination, to have a stable worldview. It’s complete nonsense.

When we say something like, "you are the sum of your social relationships", this is not functioning like a material factory production, your relationships are not the Cause setting a series of mechanical cause and effects in motion, resulting in a hallucination you call sentience, where you experience is passively like a little homonculus soul-dwarf watching a movie. You physically are those connections. Your relationship with your parents is not some metaphor through which you interpret the world, externally from the world, in some “mental space” outside of “space” - you literally are your relationship with your parents, in the fullest, physical sense.

I probably can't say it any clearer than: it is not a metaphor, it is literal.

This is the connection between cognition and history that we need to resolve the fundamental problems of our age, and step out of the darkness of the enlightenment. Them calling it enlightenment was never more than calling a gang of political enforcers "antifa", in the first place.

Becoming strong makes you "think" better not because “being in good cardiovascular shape gets you more oxygen transported to the brain” or some vague bullshit like that, but because you are physically better integrated into the world, and being stronger, you have more agency, more influence. The solution to the mind body problem is lifting weights and eating enough protein.

As a sidenote this is also why in Christianity we are promised the resurrection of the body, and not merely an afterlife where you exist as a soul or a ghost. Continuing existing in such a manner, without a body, is what hell is.

Philosophy is the study of (What is the good life?) life, with the implicit assumption that you can find out without acknowledging death – that Death is not integral to understanding questions about life. Which for definitional reasons as I have talked about many times, is a hopeless contradiction, as death is the only thing that makes the word have any linguistic meaning in the first place, as a definitional border. Theology is the study of death.