The embodied self.

• Author: Pollack, Robert
• Position: Fourth Annual Symposium: The Work of Patricia Williams

I first met Pat Williams about twenty years ago. The Ford Foundation had given me a grant to set up a faculty seminar on human identity. I had proposed to test the novel idea that senior faculty at a place like ours might benefit from a serious discussion of the differences among us, but only provided that those differences were allowed to be discussed freely and openly.

Toward that end I had proposed to bring together colleagues who would leave me and other white, or male, or Jewish, or science-trained, or straight participants in the minority, so that the conversation might not be constrained by the most common presumptions about whom an "ordinary" professor is likely to be.

To keep us all from simply staring at each other I proposed that the seminar would meet each time to discuss a piece of fiction close to the heart of any one of us. I do not recall the book Pat picked, nor the one I picked, but I feel with absolutely no loss of intensity now as I reflect on it, the astonishment I felt to be argued with, taken seriously, gently mocked, and deeply understood by her.

Pat changed my way of seeing myself, her, and everyone else since then.

So now I wish to address a question raised by my experience then, in the reflective context of this celebration of Pat's professorship, my fifty-first anniversary of life with my wife, the artist, Amy Pollack, and my two decades since that seminar as a teacher and scientist versed in molecular biology, neurobiology, and evolution, as well as the notions of my own religion.

The question is this: have we a "self" that is in any way separable from the body?

I will begin with the answer from science: the "mind-body" issue is over. Of all those mental states that the human organism experiences through a lifetime, the ones furthest from current molecular analysis are those that we experience as our imagining of what is going on in another person's mind.

From such imaginings emerges our unique ability to imagine things that cannot be in nature, but that live in our minds with full reality. And from this class of mental states--the class that will one day be reduced to gene-expression circuitry but for now we may call free will and imagination--comes that great misconception of philosophy, the mind-body separation.

There is no mind outside of the body; there is only the body with its embodied mind. That has been a conclusion from the work of students of evolution, neurobiology, and gene regulation for some time now.

To say that science knows something like this from its ability to cast questions as disprovable hypotheses, and then show that such an idea is resistant to disproof, would be the next step for me if this were a science paper.

But this essay is in honor of Pat and of her capacity to articulate inner experience, so I would like to shift the ground, and instead tell a story about myself.

Here is my case-study report:

On October 5, 2012, my...