Of Flesh and Gundams
There’s this image that gets hinted around. It’s not always explicit; it’s more assumed.
There’s a person. An “I” or a “you”. And the person is essentially piloting the meat mecha that is their body. Sometimes the person is the soul. Sometimes it’s the brain. Either way, the person is somehow controlling the body, but not really a part of it.
I’m not a religious person, so I’m not going to speak much to the role of the soul. Most of what I thought might be the soul when I was younger turned out to be neurology. But I do know enough about neurology to be very clear in this: we are not piloting meat mecha.
I’ve been thinking about this even more than usual lately because once again some people are making noise about how soon we’ll all shed our bodies and upload our consciousnesses to machines. Like the rapture, for tech nerds.
Every time people start rhapsodizing about how much they’re looking forward to this, I think you’re telling me more about yourself than you probably mean to.
It’s all very Medieval Catholicism. We will shed our complicated, sinful, distressing, mortal bodies, and in doing so become perfect and pure and eternal.
When I hear this, I hear a person carrying a lot of fear and shame.
It’s not like I don’t get it. If you hang out in queer and disabled spaces you’ll certainly hear plenty of people yearning to become a disembodied sphere of light or an unobservable void or a floating specter.
When your body is the location of pain, dysphoria, frustration or helplessness, it’s not surprising that you might fantasize about not needing it. Whether you’re rooting for the singularity or anxious about sins of the flesh.
But you wouldn’t be a recognizable version of yourself without your body.
I don’t mean that in an existential way. I mean that your body is the necessary home of parts of you that you think of as pretty integral.
If I ask where feelings come from, most people point to their brain, because that’s how we’re taught it works. And that’s not wrong. It’s just incomplete.
You’re emotions aren’t limited to the inside of your skull.
How do you know you’re afraid?
It’s not about rational recognition.
You know fear by the racing of your heart, the drop in your stomach, by your sweat and shaking.
Without your body, where would your fear live?
The reality, of course, is that fear is one of the things that many of the people longing for something to save them from their bodies want to leave behind them. Why would they need it, if they are immortal, perfect and pure? Fear would be vestigial then, wouldn’t it?
Let’s look as fear’s biological twin, anger.
Some of us are more comfortable with anger than we are with fear, but others aren’t. Usually the split seems to be whether we’ve had enough chances to safely express anger, which is an opportunity that’s unevenly distributed.
Physically, anger and fear are extremely similar. They’re managed by many of the same chemicals, with many of the same responses in the body.
If you were uploaded into the cloud, or had a new android body, there would be no organs or blood vessels to tell your brain “blood pressure is up, digestive track is paused, circulation to limbs. Ready to fight”. You might have a hard time recognizing that you’re angry.
People who are used to ignoring signals from their body already can have a hard time recognizing their feelings. That could be because of chronic pain, disordered eating, trauma, dysphoria, shame, some types of neurodiversity, and even having been pushed to ignore physical stimuli for sports, work or school expectations for long enough.
So, what happens if you’re not getting your bodies signals/don’t have bodily signals to let you know you’re angry?
Picture someone who can’t feel anger. No matter what happens, they can’t feel even irritation. What would that person be like?
They’d be a doormat. They’d lack the signal to stand up for themself. No anger means no defending yourself by pushing back on dangers or cruelty. No fear means no defending yourself with getting away from painful things.
Ok, but do we need anger and fear if we’re a bunch of 1s and 0s?
Well, do you want to be able to be afraid or angry on anyone else’s behalf?
If you want to feel love, if you want to care about justice, you need unpleasant feelings.
And if you need feelings, you need a body that’s integrated with your mind.
I’ve said many times that I’m not interested in purely philosophical debates about whether cybernetics and implants take away someone’s humanity. Those kinds of debates usually boil down to dehumanizing ableism pretty quickly.
I’m very interested in conversations about how to honor the psychological needs people have when cybernetics get involved. What roles do various body parts play in emotions? How can we maintain those roles while preserving and/or enhancing the other functions of that body part?
If you have a continuous-flow heart valve that’s saving your life, but it means you don’t have a pulse for your brain to track, what happens to your feelings?
I don’t know. I can find studies documenting that people with these implants struggle with depression, but they usually focus on physical impairment and supportive relationships. Both are very reasonable and important, but not the whole story.
But at least your brain is getting something from your body- some messages to decode.
If you can’t care about what you care about, is that really you?
Now, I have a whole lot to say about how the idea of a continuous self is illusory anyways, but that’s a whole other letter.
The bottom line is, I don’t think most of us would make the trade-offs involved to get digitized.
I don’t think it’s going to become standard that people will trust someone to code a facsimile of their entire brain-body connection. Even setting aside issues of how much blind faith you’d have to have in the good intentions of the person coding that, your own personal embodied emotions are unique to you.
Your gut is building neurotransmitters according to their own unique microbiome. Your lungs, your heart, even your muscles are carrying personalized signal patterns. Your personal emotional patterns live in your body.
Virtual immortality isn’t coming.
We’re all going to have to get used to being creatures of flesh.
Thanks as always for reading! Before I close, I have another free book promo link to share with you all. There are 20 books to choose from, available all of March. Check it out right here!
Lee Brontide
Thank you for joining me for another month of Shed Letters. If you know someone who you think would like to join us, please feel personally invited to share any of these emails, or send them an invitation to sign up here. And remember that Secondhand Origin Stories is available for free as an ebook here, or in paperback form from your local independent book shop.