CIIS Public Programs Podcast

transcript

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This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs Department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit University in San Francisco. To find out more about CIIS, and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.  

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Abre: Hello everyone. Hello, thank you for being with us today. Hello Riccardo, delighted to participate in this discussion with you. We're going to be talking about your hypothesis, a very unique take on human experience, which you call the Spread Mind. It's also named the Mind Object Identity Theory. I’m really excited to be part of this discussion because your position addresses knowledge that should be useful to everyone. And these are also the ideas that I am personally addressing in my own work, in my field of research and teaching the practices of awakening.  

So, Dr. Riccardo Manzotti, you have several books, two in particular are scholarly volumes where you present and defend your theory in great detail, and a number of other books. I am your interlocutor for this discussion, Riccardo, so along the way I will share some of my own thoughts, but we're gonna first spend some time for you to address, to present some key points, and we'll go from there. So, thank you and to start out please make us understand your theory. 

Riccardo: Thank you. Thank you so much Abre. Thank you so much to the CIIS for this opportunity to present this hypothesis. Actually, I think that we can take all the conversation at the very informal way, because the core of the hypothesis I made, I would rather say, the hypothesis I stumbled upon, because it is something that at a certain point in my life it really made sense. So, as I was saying, the core of the hypothesis that I would like to talk about with you today, is extremely simple. It is so simple that I think that in the future when people will look backward, they would say, ‘oh how was it possible that people didn't have that didn't have that idea from the start.’  

So, I mean, what is this hypothesis? Let me let me get into the basic idea. Today as all of you know, one of the biggest problems we have, is to answer to the simplest or the most fundamental question we can ask, namely ‘what am I’…‘what are you’…what are you, Abre? And of course, many people today would reply, I am a body. But that's a little bit strange because if we think about how we usually express the relation between ourselves and the body, we don't reply with that usually, we don't use that expression usually we say that we have a body. And so, if you look carefully at the body, for example, on a in a textbook, on an anatomical book, we don't find something that is really like ourselves. So, if I think about myself what I think of is my world, my experiences, my thoughts my emotions. It's not my organs, it's not my body as such. So today this question that is apparently so simple and so fundamental is still very difficult to have an answer. What are we? Are we a body? It doesn't seem to be so obviously true, but what are the alternatives? What are the other options if you are not a body? In the past the traditional option was that were a soul, but what is a soul…today, a soul doesn't fit with our scientific explanation of the world. So, it's very difficult today to support such an alternative. What could be a soul, nobody has ever seen a soul. And here we're not talking about the religious meaning of a soul, which is not something I have anything to say about. We are saying that we simply have no reason to believe that this soul, the notion of the soul, is an explanation, is a scientifically acceptable explanation of what we are.  

So, we are left with this unanswered question what are we? And we know that in the scientific world the standard reply is that we are some process in our brains. In 1996 Francis Crick wrote a famous book called, The Astonishing Hypothesis, and Astonishing Hypothesis was nothing but that we are nothing but our brain processes, that our experience, ourselves, our emotions, our thoughts, everything we are is nothing but what's going on inside our brain. And yet, if there is something that has been shown repeatedly and consistently by neurosciences in the last 50 years, 60 years, is that inside our brain there's nothing like our own experience. There's nothing like ourselves. Inside the brain there are many extremely interesting phenomena, there are synapses, neural spikes, there are neural patterns activation, there are incredibly interesting activities done by the networks of neuron but there isn't anything like our own experience. There isn't anything like our own life. Nobody has ever been able to find inside their brain anything like a person, anything like our own experience. So, the question today seems quite hopeless that's why in the literature it is called the hard problem. It is called the hard problem but a better name might have been the hopeless problem, [Abre: laughs] because no one has any clue…yeah exactly the hard problem is it's just a polite way to point out that the explanation of our everyday experience of the world is hopeless if we assume that our experience ourselves, whatever we, are is inside our brain or is identical with the brain. Why? For a very simple reason, inside our brain there isn't anything like our own experience, that's a fact, that's a fact that has been shown repeatedly and repeatedly by neurosciences.  

The more we know about what's going on inside the brain it's just a plastic a copy of a brain that I always use in my…and the more we know that inside the brain there isn't anything like ourselves. Of course, we know that what's going on in the brain is associated, correlated, necessary, is supporting, our own existence, that's a fact. But that's not us knowing that what's going on in the brain is the stuff we are made of.  

So, we are left with a fundamental question, ‘what are we made of if we are not made by the brain, if you are not made by neural processes?’ And as I said at the beginning …. We cannot use the notion of the soul. Why? Because in a scientific, in the scientific description of the world there isn't anything like our experience. So, could we find a solution? And that's where my hypothesis steps in. And it is an hypothesis that is a little bit like what Sherlock Holmes was fond of saying, ‘once you have rejected everything that doesn't work what is left can be the solution of the problem.’ And in a way such a solution is hidden in plain sight. It’s something that we have had always in front of us.  

What is my hypothesis?  A super simple hypothesis. The hypothesis is that at any time we are not made of the body, we are made of the physical world that surrounds our body, and that is one and the same with our own experience. This hypothesis at first may sounds a little bit bizarre, may sounds a little bit too radical, may sound either so, too simple to be true, or too good to be true, or just too different from our common sense. It is the hypothesis that whenever we have an experience of anything, an apple, a building, the face of our beloved ones, or anything, the books behind you Abre, the stuff, our experience is made of, is just the world itself.  

At first this sounds bizarre. This sounds bizarre because it goes against our common sensical notion that we are somehow inside the head. This is a common sensical notion that is super strong, and it is very difficult to get rid of. For many reasons, I would like to point out only to three reasons, but there are many more that conjure up to make such a common-sensical idea almost impossible to get rid of. One point is that one reason, is that we ever since we are born, we are identified by other people with our body. Our parents, our friends, whenever they have to point to us, they point to our body. That's the object that is socially representative of our existence. Our body is the object that is put into prison, for example, if they want to take our freedom away from us. Our body is usually the object that is requested to be in a certain place where they want us to be in that place. Well today this is no longer that true, because thanks to online technology to Zoom and other, YouTube, and other technology. We learn that it is possible to be in a place without our body being in that place. So as long as we are able to make things happen in another place by means of technology, we the let's say we, have weakened the relation between our body and our presence in a certain place. But the correlation is still extremely strong, I would call this the social aspect of our identity. We associate our body with our existence.  

The second reason is the fact that all our sensations are centered around our head. Why? Because in our head we have the eyes, the ears, the tongue, the mouth, the nose…so many of our sensations are centered around our body. But that's not because we are between our ears and behind our eyes. This is only because all our sensors, cameras, ears, microphones—biological microphones and biological cameras—eyes and ears and whatever, they are located on the head. But that's not a good reason to be where such sensors are located. For example, even if you believe that you are one in the same with your brain, as Francis Crick and most of neuroscientists do, you might be your brain in principle, might be located elsewhere. This is the content of the famous philosophical tale that Daniel Dennett wrote in 1978 Where am I. So, we don't know where is located the thing that is one with our self and the fact that we have all the sensors, all the ears, all the eyes in this place. The fact that the head is the perceptual center of gravity doesn't mean that we are located where our head is. So, I am asking you to think, do you really think that you are your body? If you look inside you, how much of your body are you going to find, and even more convincingly how much of your brain are you going to find if you look inside yourself? How much of what is your existence is like a brain? Or, if you look inside yourself, if you look at your own experience, don't you find the familiar world that is made of cars, buildings, sun, clouds, and other stuff? So, the basic hypothesis that I put forward is simply this one.  

Namely that we are one and the same with the world, rather than one and the same with the brain. The world surrounding us is a physical world. Is the world that reality is made of, and the hypothesis is that our body has a critical role, but the role of the body is that of singling out a subset of the world, rather than making or creating a copy of the world inside the body, inside the brain. So, usually neuroscience is looking for a copy of the world inside the brain. Because they think that whatever we are has to be inside the body. No one has ever been able to justify such an assumption. But this is an assumption that has been taken to be a dogma, to be an article of faith by neuroscience. It is something that is never questioned by neuroscientists. They claim to be materialist, but they are not. They are not materialists because first of all, they narrow all of the physical world only to the brain, and they have no reason to do that. Second, they give to the brain the burden of creating a not physical world, because if the mental world were physical, they should be able to show where the mental world is inside the brain. They should be able just to show us where is such a thing as the mental world inside a brain. But they never…. 

Abre: Riccardo, can we investigate this a little bit more and then you're going to share with us some other key points, or would you have more to say right now for this understanding? 

Riccardo: Yeah, I mean thank you, I mean if we look at all of the evidence provided by neuroscientists, they've never been able to show how neural activity becomes anything but neural activity. That may sound obvious, but it's a fact that in the physical world everything is just what it is. I mean a rock is a rock, a planet is a planet, a neuron is a neuron, why should a neuron be a mental representation? Why should the neural pattern be anything but a neural pattern? So, when we find the neural pattern in my brain, every time I see an apple why should we imagine that the neural pattern is the experience of the apple? Why should, we why should we force that to the neural pattern to produce the quality of the apple? We have the apple, we have the external world, we have everything we need all around us. The reason why neuroscientists got stuck with this notion that the brain must create a mental inner world, nobody knows where, and nobody knows how is due to the fact that we think in dualistic terms.  

We always think in a dualistic framework. So that's I think what you wanted to ask me, so we always think that we are separate from the world. The world has to be separate from us we must always be watching the world and we use expression in our language that enforce the separation between us and the word. We say things that are like, ‘I see an apple,’ but such expressions are maybe completely misleading. Maybe it might be just the fact that the apple is at that very moment the very thing that is one with us. So, I’m asking you to watch inside your experience. You're just, imagine that…I don't know where you've been today, or where you're going today, but when you are walking, when you are taking a walk under the sun, and you feel the breeze of the air, and there's a lot of stuff going on which is part of your world at that very moment. Why should you be just a brain at that very moment. If you could be all of that. Why should you narrow yourself to a brain sealed inside a body and peering at an external world when you could be the world itself with all its richness with everything it contains. 

Abre: Thank you, Riccardo. So, you give us a sense, a good sense, of your hypothesis and of course to take our experience out of our head is a probably a challenging view, right, for many. And in that you have a very unique approach in this domain of experience of consciousness, and it is worth noting that you are part of a whole new movement, and I know you want to stand on the periphery of it and not mingle too much with the others, but this is a movement on the external list of views of the mind, which has been developing over the last…we could say 25 years, about the last 20 years, the last 10 years, been lots of different views in these areas. And externalists where the mind is well, I would say not just outside of brain, but it goes, it's a mind that goes beyond the brain, now you may say it's all out there, but the mind is…it's unconscious, it's conscious, it's many things so you're saying the experience, the conscious part is out there, wherever the experience, whatever the object that is being experienced, that's what right…that's what the experience is…so this movement externalist view again, just for situation, the standard cognitivist view which we've had the last half of the 20th century, and these 20 years, started with the cognitive science revolution, the sciences of the mind.  

It's the computer metaphor - there is input through sensory motor, there is processing representations, and then there is output to what behavior. And this representation, processes of representation, the standard view tells us that we have no direct relationship to the world, what we're looking at is a representation in our own brain, where we're not too sure but it's kind of in there. And there is no direct contact with the world so that's a little bit scary in itself. Roger Sperry about 25 years ago, a renowned a neuropsychologist, biologist, Nobel prize winner. He saw a whole new era ahead, a cognitive revolution right, that would bring forth new perspectives on the mind…new ways of thinking about the mind, new values, and when what he saw ahead was a consciousness revolution that would be the most visionary and transformative.  

So, I think you are part of that revolution Riccardo, and I think that this grouping of extended, extended, cognition, consciousness extended mind is a whole theory of its own. But the spread mind that's what you call it right, spread mind [Riccardo: Right] so I don't know if you like extended consciousness, but there you know it's kind of part of these views where consciousness is out there in the world, and not something in the head, and that we actually have a direct experience of the world right? [Riccardo: Right] So, this is very important and now, and I love again, I want to take this little piece there you say, we are the starry sky in your description for this talk. The clouds, a rainbow, trees, people, even simple objects such as an apple, or a stone, and usually you take you hold an apple when you make your presentation. [laughter] We are not inside our bodies you say, we are out there in the world perceiving is being, so I think this is  really different from…we go from having no direct contact with the world, as per the standard view of the mind, to an experience as a world involving process of consciousness, all out there. And I like to say world involving dynamic process of consciousness I like to use this word dynamic because I look at now my own view, I look at the dynamics of the whole. The dynamics of the whole that makes us the being that we are with the mind evolving from the relational, brain body environment, and so the mind is again this this conscious experience and then there is you know everything that brings about this conscious experience. So that we can call all that demand or however we wanna call it.  

So but that's what I mean, there's a dynamics of relationship and importantly, now something that I’m involved with in terms of consciousness and these views, and your view in particular as well is in the context of transformative practices so whereas you look at experience the theory of experience. My focus is on the experiential transformation of that experience. Experiential transformation of our everyday experience of how we see the world right…and of course we also need theory for this because we want to give meaning, and we want to understand what we're doing, and we want to yes have a have a path of understanding. [Riccardo: Right] So strongly in agreement with Roger Sperry, I believe that this new thinking of the mind, which includes this extended consciousness, this particular view on phenomenal experience that you discuss. Offer us a whole new understanding, and not just the processes, the mechanism, but also for the transformation of our experience of our consciousness this awakening which is spoken of as awakening traditionally, enlightenment…transforming our own consciousness…so I look at this and really this transformation of consciousness, consciousness has evolved throughout millennia and millions and billions of years already depending where we want to go.  

But even since early humans millions of years consciousness has evolved for the transformation of consciousness and involved with awakening the mind has reached the capacity to turn around and look unto itself and change itself, right? [Riccardo: Right] So and this view there that you have, I feel, is very important and in the way that it relates. And so, a final very short point, we speak in the domain of transformation, an awakening state of consciousness as an example, we speak of direct perceiving right, for the awakened state an awakened state of consciousness. I mean there are different levels of awakening but, a direct perceiving where we speak of a perceiver, perceiving, and perceived becoming one and the same, becoming one in the same experience. And I think this is where this can relate to your theory really of mind object identity theory. I was looking for your more scientific… 
 
Riccardo: Yes…thank you for helping me to put my hypothesis in perspective in an historical perspective. [Abre: Right] There are a few things that I would like to stress. First sometimes in the science, as well as in philosophy, we deal with the problem that seems to be completely intractable or hopeless, like the hard problem, because we take the wrong approach. We start from the wrong assumption and let me make you an analogy. In the past a very a problem that seems to defy human understanding was to understand how could the earth not fall down, the earth as a planet they were wondering why doesn't it fall down into the abyss. And so, they the Hindu for example, had the idea that the earth was supported by a turtle, or by some other larger animal or whatever. That was the classic example of a pseudo-problem, it was not a real problem. Now we afterward we understood that the earth doesn't fall because there is no direction where to fall. So, the solution of the problem was to change the way in which we were tackling such a problem. We needed a new approach, a new, and I think that in the case of consciousness, one of the problems is the very use of the word consciousness. I in this sense I think that every time that we use the word consciousness we are already stepping into a dualistic attitude because there's the world, and there's the consciousness of the world. But, as I often say to my students, and to the people that I interact with, I never ate a conscious apple. I never eaten a conscious apple, I never saw my consciousness as something different from the world. I, I’ve, been…I always lived in a world, I didn't live in a world of conscious experiences…they people told me, philosophers told me that I was living in a world of shadows, like Plato our, our philosophy, our western civilization starts with the myth of the cave, with the idea that we are separate from the world and we keep telling this story in umpteen movies from the Matrix to Black Mirror, to from philosophers like Plato, to neuroscientists like Francis Crick. We keep telling people that they live in a world that is not real. And, what is this world made of if it is not the real world, and then we told them scientists and philosophers alike, we told them that they live in a world of mental appearances. That if you're lucky, are somehow more or less associated with the real world, but they're never the world as it is. But do we really have any reason to believe that?  

Do we have any reason to believe that there's such a veil between us and the reality? Or maybe it is just that we that so far, we had a naive notion of reality. That, that's and that's of course is my is my hunch. My hunch is that the world is really as it seems, and, the fact, that it is not how we would exactly how we might expect it to be is just because we have a naive notion of the way in which the world is. So usually what we do is the following: we have a naive notion of reality, since reality doesn't match with our beliefs, we assume that reality has to be like our beliefs, predicted to be, and we explain the leftover in terms of mental experience, in terms of appearance. So, if the world is not as we expect it to be, we say well, it must be, the culprit must be our experience of the world.  
 
Abre: So…we're gonna do you…? Yeah you want to finish this yeah? 

Riccardo: Yeah… [Abre: Go on] so my hypothesis is extremely radical. There aren't two things, there isn't a mental world, and a physical world. There isn't a world as it is and a world as it appears. There is just one world and we are one in the same with this world. My theory and my hypothesis then shows how the world might be just the way it appears as to be, and this idea and then I get to an end of what you were saying, but just to draw an historical line. This idea is consistent with how could I say…with a direction that science has had for the last 400 years, namely the direction that Galileo took in 1600. When he for the first time said there isn't such a thing as absolute velocity but there is only relative velocity. This idea has been a very important intuition behind many of the most important scientific advancements. It's the idea behind Einstein’s general relativity, and I’m just asking people to take into consideration the possibility that everything has a relative existence, in such a way, we can explain why everyone is living in a different relative world. At first this may sound a little bit different, but it is not at all it is just as difficult as understanding that if we go to the motorway with two different cars, object will have different velocity relative to each of us. So, I’m just trying…I’m just trying to bring the notion of subjective inner world into the physical world.  
 
Abre: Yeah, I think we'll come back to the velocity. Because I'd like to speak to some of the things…you've packed so much in just a few minutes.  You say, well first you said  consciousness, the problem, the world is already a problem and Terry Deacon who wrote his last highly substantial book, if anyone can plough through it, says it's not…the problem is not consciousness itself…you know like focus on the self. And I…I like that because we can look at the self as a subset of consciousness for sure, but talking of consciousness making it a thing it's kind of hard to relate to it. But the self, everyone can relate to the self, right? And then you say we are so, that's one, one pointer here…and then you say we are one and the same with this world so I love this, and  well you know and of course people are going to be well you know ordinary day-to-day consciousness, I’m not exactly one in the same way the world. But then again if I go back to the transformative experiences teaching that the teaching and practices that transforms experience again, we come to states of the seer, the seeing, the seen being one and the same.  

So that what I see there now the seer is the seen is that world one and the same with this world. And I, this is not so as mystical as it could sound, everybody has had that experience and I would like to point to this experience…now everybody has not…not everybody but, those who have gone to  the top of a mountain on a hiking day and if you don't have mountains, and you haven't been there then maybe the beach, the ocean right this works. So, going to the top of the mountain you sit at the top of the mountain, eat your sandwich, talk to your friend, and then eventually things start quieting down, and then eventually this vastness of the space starts moving into you. The stillness, the vastness, and the silence, I mean you can hear the birds, but the silence this vastness of silence, it moves into you and then in that process what happens is the self falls away. That separation between me my friend, me, me and my sandwich, all of that falls away, and we are one and the same with this world. The sentence what you're saying is right there, we are one in the same, we become one and the same with this landscape. I walk through the forest, I become one in the same with the forest, and the forest is walking me. I am walking the forest, the forest is walking me, one and the same. And what happens here is that the separation of me, what you pointed to earlier when you were a child and your mother pointed to you and your name is Riccardo Manzotti, and you know you have to feed this mouth, and not well for me not the mouth of my doll, and put the shoes on these feet, not the feet of my doll, right?  

So, so all of this is learned…so a question though for you because you see now, we can transform this view of the world, and it's not that we are going to be always all expanded and I mean, there can be a tension can come, a focused attention can, come within this dimension of being the world. [Riccardo: Right] But so, going from this wide-angle view of consciousness, bringing the focus back on your hypothesis. From your standpoint how do you explain that, yes, this is your experience, you are your experience, and this experience of the world, you are that. But this is not something that people experience in their day-to-day living unless you know, there's been some kind of transformation along the way.  

People's experience, and as you have pointed out, most people view their experience as happening where they are, and where they are is where their body is. And that's where their sense of self is, right, and the self is kind of right here, or hovering where the body is, and yes behind the eyes more likely the head, and this is actually in line with the classical cognitivist view right? So how, how do you once again to just revisit that…how do you address that? 
 
Riccardo: I love so much the example that you just made because you put together two very important things. One is the fact that when we are in nature, and when we are just in contact with nature, when the body is in contact with nature, we feel that the separation between us and the world disappears. Disappears because it has never been there. [Abre: Mhm] It has always been a social construct, and you were right it is such a feeling of the self as something separate, as a burden that we keep with ourselves is generated by our social interactions. And there's a reason for that – control. Society has to do with control. [Abre: Mhm] Every society has the problem to control its members. It's not always a negative thing, but it is surely something that society needs to do. And the control, often the easiest way to control people is to control their bodies.  

Once you, and we can see some example of that today with notions such as that of bio control that has been, for example, addressed by Yuval Harari’s recent work, and by many other authors. So, by controlling the bodies of the people, we can control people, and what's easiest then convince everyone they're just one and the same with their body, and that they are identical with their bodies. Think about that, that notion has many negative consequences on our existence, because we can no longer be what we care for…we can no longer be what we really…love, like it might be our art, it might be our beloved ones, it might be nature. We are stuck inside our body. Our body is a trick that many societies have used in order to chain people to a specific place and location. It is a way in which they can put on everyone a chain that cannot be broken, unless we understand that we are not our body. I remember a few, a couple of years ago, I was running in a central park and I saw a group of elderly people on a very rainy and chilly November day, like more or less during the winter. It was raining and it was very cold. And I asked myself what are these people doing in Central Park? It was very early in the morning, and then I got it. They were Central Park. They didn't care at that very moment about their body, they didn't care about what was gonna, I mean, to many other conditions that may refer to their own body. They were just there to allow their self, their existence, to be one with Central Park as a whole.  

So, whenever we do something we really care for, we see that we break such a chain. So, it's all too easy to identify the self with the body, and so I agree very much…I think you made just a great example, when we are alone in nature, we naturally feel one with the surrounding environment. There's nothing left, there's no place hidden from the reality. We are just one with the reality that surrounds our body. 
 
Abre: I like your point about the social and cultural and the learned aspect of the sense of self. Maybe I don't take as much a conspirational posture with it, [laughter] of society conspiring, and but there are habits of socializations and establishing sociality when we are very young. Jack Angler from Harvard has said, ‘you have to be somebody before you can be nobody,’ and that includes kind of the body growing up, you have to identify with this body as a human being in terms of being a healthy self before you can even start deconstructing the self. But these notions of being learned, and the potential for the self to also be different…there is a Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who wrote this wonderful book Cannibal Metaphysics, wonderful title as well, and describing people from Amazonian and Amerindian cultures, where their sense of self is completely different, and he, him too it's a completely new ontological term defining what is, what is the mind, what is the self. A completely new view of reversal where people there experience themselves in the animals that they see, right?  

So, it's it…I think in his own ways in terms of Indigenous cultures, we find this notion as well where the self is something which is inculcated, this consciousness of what, what I am, you know, what I am. I think people refer more to the self in terms of where they are, perhaps than the body, the body is more something, I think that people refer to it more in the sense of ownership. I have a body. And this notion of ownership is also important. How do you relate your hypothesis, and we I mean, we could speak of that sense of ownership for an entire week, so more at a you know level of just staying with that sense of self, and that sense of ownership in an accessible way? How do you relate that sense of ownership because after all, I have a body, I have emotions, I have thoughts, so are these experiences…? Or is this something that I have, these experiences? You see we still have the self here in the picture relating to this sense of ownership. Yeah how do you view this from, and again without going…I know you and I could speak for a week on this, [Riccardo: Right] but… 

Riccardo: Yeah, first of all, yeah…you mentioned that I put a conspiration [Abre: laughs] on my account of society. No, that was just an historical comment. So, if you look at all society from the ancient Roman Empire, to recent national states in Europe, we see that associating the identity of the person with the body was a necessary step to be able to control what people did. [Abre: Right, mhm] So, it's something that has been done from in all organized society. It's a necessary step, like the invention of private property, right? 

Abre: Right, each human being has a body, and is somehow embodied because you know, wherever there is this conscious mind, there's going to be a body. 

Riccardo: I thank you very much for having for having introduced that word ‘being embodied.’ What does it mean to be ‘embodied?’ Does it mean that we are physically, or in any meaningful sense of the word, inside the body? Or does it mean that the body plays a role … 

Abre: The body plays a role. 

Riccardo: And of course, if we admit that the body plays a role, as is then it is a point of my theory, then we must explain what are we? Because I start from a very basic assumption that we must be something. [Abre: Mhm, right] So, what are we? We must be able to point at something. If we are physicalist, then we must be able to point at something physical, [Abre: Mhm] because that's the only option that we have. [Abre: Right] Neuroscientists have pointed to the brain, but this has so far has been an epic failure, because they have put so many resources in finding something like us in the brain and they've never succeeded, so far, at least. 

Abre: Right, so again coming back to that sense of ownership. Right? 
 
Riccardo: Exactly.  

Abre: My body, my thoughts…  

Riccardo: Exactly. What does it mean own a body? My reply to that question is that the body is the proxy of the world, which is identical with us. What do I mean with that? [Abre: Mhm] I mean something very simple. Take a well, I don't have it here, take a phone. When you speak with the phone, you're not speaking with a phone, you're speaking with someone [Abre: Right] through the phone. But the phone is the physical thing with which you are interacting. So, the phone is the expression of a person at the other end somewhere.  

Now, there is some sense in which at the moment in which you're speaking with the phone, that phone is the expression, is the proxy, of the person you're speaking with. [Abre: Right] Now, my point is very simple, is that the body is the expression of a world that at that very moment, at any moment, allows–sorry–expresses itself through that body, so the body is a proxy. What is ownership, to get back to your question. For me ownership is the fact that a body is the proxy of a world. What do I mean that I own a body? It means that that body is the proxy of myself. So, if you want to interact with me, you have to interact with my body. That's the sense I give to the word ownership. [Abre: Mhm] But of course, that doesn't mean that I am a soul, that doesn't mean that I am a ghost inside the machine, like the cognitive science believed, to some extent without being dualists in a metaphysical sense, but they were dualist in a scientific sense. So, my point is that through each of our, through our bodies we are worlds interacting together.  
 
Abre: Right, let me a quick, there is so much to talk about, but a quick last point….we are not the body, and but, if we are the world, the body is part of the world. So, we don't have to be outside of the body either. The body is part of that world, and we are the body, we are the world. I mean there's no reason to cut out, the body out of it, but one last tiny point about this. The, this sensory motor interaction body and environment, right, the something which has been called a Gallagher, the body image and but this, this other philosopher, Michelle Maiese very close to also Dorothée Legrand. Dorothée Legrand, maybe her work is even perhaps more voluminous, but Michelle Maiese says the following a matter of experiencing oneself, as she speaks of that sensory motor subjectivity, I know she speaks of subjectivity that word is a little bit, you have a lot to say about that, but the sensory motor…so that we feel that body right, this through the senses body-based perceptions, she says, this she describes this sensory motor subjectivity as…here's her quote ‘a matter of experiencing oneself as situated, forward-flowing living organismic body of a suitable degree of neurobiological complexity.’ Of course, we're not feeling the neurobiological, but, and although this basic bodily sense of self needs not to be accompanied by self-reflection, rationality, or high-powered consciousness, all high-powered mode of self-consciousness presupposes sensory motor subjectivity.  

This is supported by the fact that at least some non-human animals, and all ordinary human infants, have sensory motor subjectivity like these, some sort of me-ness, they are connected to the body. And this is pretty reflexive, we don't have to think about it. We don't have to rationalize; we don't have to be able to be conscious that I feel that way. But there is that a pre-reflective knowledge of the body…isn't this the body with all experiences, these ubiquitous kind of bodily self, a sense of the body, if the body wasn't there, we would know it. And, and, we know that because we have structures of self that fall away…they are bodily structures of self, and we only see them when they fall away, in through some practices of experiential work. So, this bodily self, the sense of the body, which is ubiquitous, which is part of all experiences that we have in the world, what do you think of this? 

Riccardo: Yeah no, no, it's a fundamental point. And of course, the body is the first object in some sense so the body is the first object that we interact with, but to some, only to some extent, because if you think about that there is one part of the body that we never experience, that there's never any direct role in shaping whatever we, whatever our life is made of–the brain and the nervous system–there is nothing in our experience which is made in any meaningful sense by the properties of our neural activities. So, there's nothing that is neural like, like the neurons in our experience. There's nothing that is brain-ish in our experience. 

Abre: Right we don't feel the neurons. 

Riccardo: We don't feel the neurons. We don't have no experience we are blissfully unaware of having a brain unless they told about it in a class of neuroscience. 

Abre: Right, well, we don't want to be conscious of everything because that would overload the system. I don't want to hear all that goes on with the digestions and feel everything… 

Riccardo: Yes, but in many cases, we have no choice about what we are conscious of [Abre: Mhm] and if that might be part of our experience sooner or later it would be. It never is, so there has to be a reason for that. The reason is that the brain is the center of our body, and therefore it can never be experienced as an external object. While, we can experience all the other part of our… 

Abre: OK, can you say that again. Can you say that again? 

Riccardo: The body, the brain being the center of our experience can never be experienced as an object of our world.  

Abre: OK, all right, that's what scientists say. Mhm. 

Riccardo: But we can always experience our body as an external object. I can see my hand right now… 
 
Abre: Right, and internally…. 

Riccardo: I can touch, I can touch well to some extent yes, to some extent yes, I can experience every part of my body as an object. 

Abre: Right and that subtle experience of the body is always there as part of all experiences, and what Maise is saying is that well, it doesn't have to be in the forefront. It doesn't have to be, but it's there and there is that experience because we've been going around with bodies all our lives, and there is an experience of body, which is also there, and again there's no reason to cut that body out of being…in the world. 

Riccardo: Well, Abre, we disagree, if when the body works really well, we don’t experience it. 

Abre: OK, in that instance, I totally agree with you. 

Riccardo: OK, when the eyes have no problem at all, they are completely transparent, and the world presents itself. And we have no visual experience of the eyes as such, there is just the world, when we have visual impairment, or… 

Abre: Not the eyes, but there's a body there…so and yes, we don't feel inside the eyes, it's like the brain. 

Riccardo: Just to say one more thing about embodiment, about the cognition, extended mind externalism, and the like. I think that all those views and theories were on the right track, and they were going in the right direction, namely they were all trying to get out of the brain as the only explanation of the mind, only they didn't go far enough. [Abre: Mhm] So they got stuck into some kind of dualistic framework, namely, rather than having the traditional mind/world dualism or the brain/world dualism,  they introduce a new kind of body/world dualism, which I think is not necessary, we can just be one with the world. And if I had to wrap up, what I want to tell is that we need no dualism, and then we can just step onto the world. There's no, there's no subject extending in the world. There's no mind spreading in the world. There is just the world. We are, we don't need it to reach the world… 

Abre: To be fair, to be fair, to these other theories, and of course we're not going to go into all this right now, but just the last little thing, to be fair. Many of them is a brain/body/world in terms of the relationships, in terms of explaining the mechanisms, the processes of the mind. [Riccardo: Exactly] So, I mean just to be fair, to because there are various theories they look at different angles, but you do have the very unique place of focusing on experience, and I do appreciate very much your [Riccardo: Thank you] …your way in which you approach it. So, I would now like to now thank you very much, Riccardo. 

Riccardo: Thank you, Abre.   

Abre: This has been a terrific, I would like to, and thank you to our audience, thank you for being with us today.  

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect.  

The CIIS Public Programs team includes Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliot, Emlyn Guiney, Jason McArthur, and Patty Pforte. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms.  

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