Monday, February 25, 2013

body and mind

These categories of affective and cognitive are clearly repositories for what was previously, and still is, stored in the notions of mind and body, subject and object, etc., and so, first, yes that's some resilient shit (in its insistence on remaining a dichotomy in human brains), whatever it is, and second, a better description involves some recognition of the layered-ness of human bodies, some realization that the tension described when I speak of cognitive dissonance is the sister of the tension felt in my bladder and that the tendencies of our brains to divide phenomena like human bodies into neat categories is a response to a bodily tension, felt in the brain region of the body, and an attempt to find satisfaction in the release of this tension. Considering how varied are the origins of our genetic developments -- so many contexts, millenia and more apart, a mishmash that exposes dichotimization as artifact-- I wonder about missing links, how it's connected, how these minds came to separate themselves from their bodies in theory, but not in practice.

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