“My father died in January and his death has forced me to face a question for which I still have no answer. The issue is the relation of the psyche, or what I will call the “spirit,” to the material world. Since Plato, we’ve tended to think of human beings as defined more by their minds than by their bodies. This view is probably most pronounced among religious people, for whom the material world, including our physical bodies, are encumbrances from which we will one day be liberated. Our attachment to material things, or to physical reality more generally, is viewed as a kind of disease of which we cannot help but long to be cured.”

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/03/07/the-presence-of-things/

 

[Zagonostra: Below from Donald W. Winnicott (1896 – 1971) who I’ve never heard of or know anything about.]

“…man’s core problem lies in his struggle to arrive at an existence which is his and his alone but which, at the same time, allows for intimate contact with others. Intimacy, however, is an inherently limited affair. ‘At the center of each person is an incommunicado element, and this is sacred and most worthy of preservation. This core never communicates with or is influenced by the external world.”

psyche (n.)

1640s, “animating spirit,” from Latin psyche, from Greek psykhe “the soul, mind, spirit; breath; life, one’s life, the invisible animating principle or entity which occupies and directs the physical body; understanding” (personified as Psykhe, the beloved of Eros), akin to psykhein “to blow, cool,” from PIE root *bhes- “to blow, to breathe” (source also of Sanskrit bhas-).
Also in ancient Greek, “departed soul, spirit, ghost,” and often represented symbolically as a butterfly or moth. The word had extensive sense development in Platonic philosophy and Jewish-influenced theological writing of St. Paul (compare spirit (n.)). Meaning “human soul” is from 1650s. In English, psychological sense “mind,” is attested by 1910.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/psyche

“One of the curious features of the deep neural networks behind machine learning is that they are surprisingly different from the neural networks in biological systems. While there are similarities, some critical machine-learning mechanisms have no analogue in the natural world, where learning seems to occur in a different way.”

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610278/why-even-a-moths-brain-is-smarter-than-an-ai/amp/

 

“The world is as it ever has been, but our consciousness undergoes peculiar changes. First, in remote times (which can still be observed among primitives living today), the main body of psychic life was apparently in human and in nonhuman Objects: it was projected, as we should say now. Consciousness can hardly exist in a state of complete projection. At most it would be a heap of emotions. Through the withdrawal of projections, conscious knowledge slowly developed. Science, curiously enough, began with the discovery of astronomical laws, and hence with the withdrawal, so to speak, of the most distant projections. This was the first stage in the despiritualization of the world. One step followed another: already in antiquity the gods were withdrawn from mountains and rivers, from trees and animals. Modern science has subtilized its projections to an almost unrecognizable degree, but our ordinary life still swarms with them. You can find them spread out in the newspapers, in books, rumours, and ordinary social gossip. All gaps in our actual knowledge are still filled out with projections. We are still so sure we know what other people think or what their true character is.”

http://psikoloji.fisek.com.tr/jung/shadow.htm

“All brains gather intelligence; to lesser or greater extents, some brains acquire a state of mind. How and where they find the means to do so is the question raised by poets and philosophers, doctors of divinity and medicine who have been fooling around with it for the past five thousand years and leave the mystery intact. It’s been a long time since Adam ate of the apple, but about the metaphysical composition of the human mind, all we can say for certain is that something unknown is doing we don’t know what.”

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/states-mind/enchanted-loom

“From the beginning, doctors and philosophers engaged in parallel inquiries. Plato concurred with the Hippocratic belief that thought was produced by the rational soul in the brain. But he assigned emotion to the heart, which housed the spirited soul. Beastly appetites, according to Plato, were produced by the appetitive soul in the liver. Aristotle also divided the soul into three but believed the brain served to cool the blood, and that the part of the soul that synthesized and made sense of emotions and sensory input resided in the heart. Alexandrian anatomists in third-century-BC Hellenistic Egypt started drawing a more precise picture of the brain, taking note of the cerebellum, for instance, and differentiating between sensory and motor nerves. The influential second-century physician Galen showed that one could render an animal immobile—“without sensation and without voluntary movement”—by wounding a cerebral ventricle. He synthesized Alexandrian anatomy with Plato and with Aristotle’s idea of a tripartite, hierarchical soul.”

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/states-mind/thoughts-made-visible

“Conceived in pleasure and begotten in pain, the human animal is born naked like all other beasts. Much of the history of ideas about our condition is devoted to puzzling out the contrasts between the brutish constraints of our embodiment and our seemingly disembodied capacity to think, which projects us into abstract realms, away from our mortal, fragile, messy bodies. It is not enough that we can create mathematics, music, physics, and writing, in which bodily needs are silenced and sometimes transcended; we must also wonder about this very capacity. We are animals at once conscious, aware of finitude, and locked into corruptible flesh.”

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/flesh/body-and-soul