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The Necessity of the Human Body
November 20, 2021 at 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm GMT
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In this salon, Ben Fleming discusses the ways we are trying to make the human body obsolete. Is it ethical? Is it even possible? And why do we want to escape our physical bodies?
As a personal trainer I have spent a lot of time invested in the human body. I regularly train my body and I teach people to value their bodies and to have an understanding of how it works.
But is the body a necessary part of what it is to be a human being?
My intuition says we need a body … but I don’t have any solid arguments for this! It just feels wrong to say the body can be disposed of, replaced, or transcended in a way that is lossless. But this might just be my bias given how much time and attention I have given the human body.
Many believe we are on the verge of being able to decouple human consciousness from the body, transcending our physical limitations, building newer better bodies to inhabit, storing our minds for space travel, or living disembodied in simulated online universes, never worrying again about our physical limits or the prospect of dying.
Join me for a freeform discussion about the worth of our meat-bag mind-vehicles, transhumanism, gnosticism, mortality, mind/body dualism, digital consciousness, suffering, exercise, and the everything in between.
Suggested reading/watching:
https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/can-humans-be-immortal/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/
This salon is part of a track of salons on the topic of good physical health. The title of this track is “Mens Sana in Corpore Sano” which means “A Healthy Mind in A Healthy Body”. My desire is to think deeply and collaboratively about physical health, gathering the collective wisdom of our experience, but also to apply that thinking to our physical bodies, turning theory into practice.
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