Sam Gentle.com

Corporealism

I have recently been trying yoga and it's something of a surprise how calming it is despite being physically strenuous at times. Though I suppose I shouldn't be that surprised; I've always found running quite meditative in its own way, as well as most other forms of repetitive physical activity. It feels like exercise occupies most of your brain, making it easier to focus, though I have no idea if that's actually true. The yoga instructor said that it should be meditative, that yoga without meditation is just aerobics.

Something about that phrase really got me thinking about physicalism. It's one thing to accept that your mind lives in your brain, but your brain also lives in your body. So you might accept "I always feel sad, therefore there is something wrong with my brain", but "I always feel sad, therefore there is something wrong with my lungs" doesn't sound plausible. But why? Your lungs deliver oxygen to your brain. There's as much reason to think depression could be a lung problem as that a misfiring engine could be a fuel pump problem. In fact, there is evidence that living at a high altitude (with less oxygen) might cause depression.

In that light, I wonder if our view of the body as composed of various systems – muscular, skeletal, nervous, digestive and so on – is leading us astray in that regard. Those systems are not like our nice theoretical systems, with nicely decoupled and separable components. It's very difficult to analyse a single bodily system in isolation, and it seems like a problem just about anywhere can be caused by a problem just about anywhere else. Which is to say, maybe meditating with your body makes a lot more sense than it seems.

The funny thing is that I'm pretty sure most serious yoga people are dualists, which makes me wonder how they ended up with such a physical kind of spirituality.