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November 26, 2001 – during yesterday’s sermon, I suddenly felt it obvious that one part of the brain can communicate with another by looping through the external world as a transient “corporealization of the psyche” (Franz Alexander) or “extrasomatory self” (Howard Bloom).  

As valuable as such artifacts may be to others (they are part of ourselves and they are –by our actions, conscious or not – accessible to others), they may have originated more humbly as a way of transmitting information in one part of the brain to another part even though not directly connected by neural pathways.

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Might this be, in fact, an aspect of normal brain function that has, by means of the utility of this mode of self-expression,  reached such extraordinary cultural dimensions in “art.”   Something like this is what happens in dreams – Freud’s central insight, that dreams can inform one part of our minds with information that resides or is coordinated elsewhere – we gain conscious access to the usually occult subconscious – we can gain insight about the otherwise unknowable forces within us that guides our behavior.

February 26, 2006 — do we extracorporealize in order to escape “the ignominy of flesh?” — surfing old NYTBRs: In his book on “The Power of Movies.” Colin McGinn, in his chapter “The Metaphysics of the Movie Image,” notes “that we feel ‘no alienation from a body like this, no division into me and it. It is the body as transformed into another type of material, an immaterial material. There is something wondrous and magical about it. . . . It is a body without the ignominy of flesh.’

     This is both good writing and good thinking. ‘Ignominy of flesh’ is borrowed from Yeats’s lyric meditation on mortality, ‘A Prayer for My Son’ – an ideal allusion, for McGinn has seized on the metaphysical punch that film, unlike any other medium, delivers. Just as Socrates and Descartes, in their different ways, argued for the ability of the human psyche to endure beyond death, film allows us to have the experience of the soul existing without needing a body to contain it. As McGinn writes, “Movies offer us a transformed reality in which the body is stripped of its material bonds and becomes united with our essential nature as centers of consciousness.’”

(from Wyatt Mason’s review of  ‘The Power of Movies,’ by Colin McGinn, in the NYTBR, January 22, 2006:6)

THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE

” . . . an animal artefact, like any other phenotypic product whose variation is influenced by a gene, can be regarded as a phenotypic tool by which that gene could potentially lever itself into the next generation.” (The Extended Phenotype – The Long Reach of the Gene  by Richard Dawkins OUP 1982/1999:199)

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The extended phenotype, consists of : “All effects of a gene upon the world. As always, ‘effect’ of a gene is understood as meaning in comparison with its alleles. The conventional phenotype is a special case in which the effects are regarded as being confined to the individual body in which the gene sits. In practice it is convenient to limit ‘extended phenotype’ to cases where the effects influence the survival chances of the gene, positively or negatively.”

“ABOVE my desk is a postcard from a friend showing two caddis larvae in cases they themselves constructed from fragments of real gold, tiny pearls and precious stones. This bio- jewelry is easy enough to create. You simply extract a caddis larva from its usual gritty home, provide it with some expensive building materials, and sit back and wait. The caddis larva’s home, or case, is a classic example of what Richard Dawkins calls an “extended phenotype”–a product of an individual’s genes that exists outside its body. // In The Mating Mind, Geoffrey Miller suggests that most of the products of human culture–including the cave paintings in Font-de-Gaume, Rachmaninov’s third piano concerto and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel–are extended phenotypes. In contrast to the caddis fly’s protective case, which has clear survival value and which evolved through natural selection, Miller’s view is that human artistic achievements have evolved through sexual selection.” (From Tim Burkhead’s review of The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller, Heinemann/Doubleday, £20/$27·50, ISBN 0434007412 in From New Scientist magazine, 13 May 2000)  The extended phenotype, consists of : “All effects of a gene upon the world. As always, ‘effect’ of a gene is understood as meaning in comparison with its alleles. The conventional phenotype is a special case in which the effects are regarded as being confined to the individual body in which the gene sits. In practice it is convenient to limit ‘extended phenotype’ to cases where the effects influence the survival chances of the gene, positively or negatively.”

CULTURE?  Man is the only animal who, in any considerable measure, bequeathed to his descendants the accumulated wisdom of past generations.  (Lotka, 1925) . . . . “Culture and biology are intimately related . . . the creation of culture is a biological imperative and its character is shaped by the needs and limitation of the organism.” (Beck 1961:19)