Universe

I am the walrus  

Where does our body end and the universe outside begin? Maybe there is no seam 

by Michael Nenonen  

You decide how much it's worth to you:

The holidays are over and, like many people, I’m back at my fitness centre, trying to drop the ballast I gathered across the festive season. Exercising would be easier if my brain agreed to produce an endorphin or two, but it believes I’m better off without any potentially addictive natural highs.

Despite this, I’m actually pretty good about working out. I go to the centre for a few hours every week, a routine I’ve maintained for over a decade. After all these years, I can safely say that I’ve got the body of a god, but, as the old joke goes, that god happens to be the Buddha.

The other day while I was doing my crunches, I listened to my heartbeat, which sounded like cymbals being played by a baboon on crystal meth, and I began thinking about my body. What does it mean to be embodied? Do I have a body, or am I a body? What do I mean by the word “body” anyway?

Three bodies per person

Leonard Angel, a professor of philosophy and the author of Enlightenment East and West (State University of New York Press, 1994), argues that each of us has three bodies. First, we have an experiential body. This body is the particular physical system we experience as present whenever we’re aware, the body that we can feel, taste, smell, hear, and see, and that provides a centre for our sensory experience of the world.

Second, we have a volitional body. This is the body that responds to our commands, that moves when we tell it to move. Third, we have a causal body, the physical support system that makes it possible for us to have experiential and volitional bodies.

These bodies aren’t identical. My experiential body produces countless sensations my volitional body can’t control or even understand. My causal body certainly includes such things as my autonomic nervous system, my gastro-intestinal system, and my circulatory system, which typically operate independently of my volitional body, and which are often inaccessible to my experiential body.

While experiential and volitional bodies are relatively straight-forward, causal bodies are a little more complicated. What is included in our physical support system? Surely it includes all the organs, muscles, bones, nerves, and other localized phenomena that we normally associate with the word “body,” but Angel argues that we shouldn’t restrict our definition to these phenomena. If our causal bodies include everything that supports the physical existence of our volitional and experiential bodies, then this must also include the air passing through our lungs and the nutrients flowing through our stomachs. In fact, whatever interacts with us in a causal fashion is by definition a part of our causal body. Angel writes, “There is no compelling meta-physical reason which leads one to say that fruit trees and the atmosphere are not to be regarded as parts of one’s causal body, whereas the appendix, small toes, gall bladder, and hair are.”

I am the universe

If Angel is correct, then we all share a causal body that encompasses the entire Earth, but it doesn’t stop there. Think of what it takes to produce a brain capable of consciousness, of having both experience and volition. The human brain is the most complicated object in the known universe. It’s the latest stage in an evolutionary process that’s over three billion years old.

Before that process could begin, a solar system capable of supporting life had to coalesce, which could only happen after a second generation of stars had appeared. According to Ian Barbour, the author of Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues (HarperCollins 1997), “We now know that it takes about fifteen billion years for heavy elements to be cooked in the interior of stars and then scattered to form a second generation of stars with planets, followed by the evolution of life and consciousness. A very old expanding universe has to be a huge universe—on the order of fifteen billion light years.” The human brain could only emerge in a universe as vast and ancient as the one we inhabit. And so our causal body is finally identical with the whole causally interactive universe, the network of causation from which everything arises and into which everything falls.

But what is the significance of the brain’s consciousness? Is it a pointless aberration in an otherwise unfeeling cosmos? Perhaps not. Many philosophers, such as Alfred North Whitehead, the father of Process Theology, argue that the only way to avoid the problems of mind-body dualism is by assuming that the capacity for experience is a property of existence itself. This property would reside, in however rudimentary or latent a form, in unified systems as miniscule as the atom. It would progressively develop through more nuanced and integrated responsive systems, such as those found in cells, followed by the increasingly sophisticated nervous systems found in the animal world, culminating, so far as we’re aware, with the expression of self-reflective, multi-layered consciousness in the human brain.

A sense of space

If our causal body is the universe, and if human consciousness is a sophisticated expression of a latent property found everywhere in the universe, then what would this mean? Alan Moore, the creator of such comics as V for Vendetta, wrote an entire series devoted to this very subject. In the culminating issues of Promethea, he speculates that we’re space-time’s sensory organs, the means by which the living universe perceives itself.

So, maybe I do have the Buddha’s body; maybe everyone does, and maybe that’s not a bad thing at all.

You decide how much it's worth to you: