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Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

I believe that the Brain-Computer analogy has been very harmful.

I grew up thinking of myself as a "brain on a stick" - my body didn't really matter and only my brain was important. I think read a bunch of science fiction that made fun of this idea, but I didn't realize it was making fun of it and I took it seriously.

You are not a brain on a stick - your body is important. Developing an understanding of your sensations and emotions is important. Developing an understanding of your deeply held beliefs and assumptions is important. Keeping your body healthy is important.

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The first mistake is to exclude the brain from the body. The brain is just another part of the body. It doesn’t live in a universe of its own hermetically sealed off from the body. It is the body! Every region of you is you. Certainly, some regions (I hesitate to use the word “parts“ with all its mechanistic baggage) are more critical to your existence and operation, but that doesn’t have anything to do with your identity qua identity. The brain is seamless with “the rest”, and in a state of mutual and coherent dependence with “the rest”.

(Now, I can argue that the intellect as abstracting faculty is not material, but this faculty is not disconnected from the brain and needs the brain to operate, and so again, the health of the body affects even those faculties which, strictly speaking, are not bodily per se.)

> You are not a brain on a stick

We probably are not, but I'm not convinced that the opposite is true.

Stephen Hawkins did not notoriously exercise much, given his condition, and yet he died at 76, despite the odds.

Einstein routinely walked a few miles a day and that's all the exercise he did.

Many other popular great thinkers of the past spent a lot more time on books than improving their bodies.

In Italy we learn as children about Giacomo Leopardi, a very popular poet, writer and philosopher of the 19th century, according to Wikipedia "considered the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and one of the most important figures in the literature of the world", that His continual studies undermined an already fragile physical constitution, and his illness, probably Pott's disease or ankylosing spondylitis, denied him youth's simplest pleasures

Without evidence I reckon that all we can conclude is that only sometimes exercise is the best cognitive exercise, but we don't know why nor if it is actually true.

Without attempting to take away anything from your comment I will point out that a routine of walking a few miles a day is sufficient to reap most cognitive benefits.

I agree.

But who actually doesn't?

We all (almost) walk a few miles (or kms) a day, without even realising it.

Most people in the US don't walk a "few" miles a day, the average is 1.5-2.5 miles (depending on the study). Our very car-centric society makes it difficult to get incidental walking distances up. If you switch to kilometers, then yes, the average person in the US walks a few kilometers a day.

I'd wager that most professional office setting americans walk less than 5000 steps a day.

I'm lucky if I even get that without supplementing with intentional exercise and I guarantee I walk more than anyone else in my office (during the work day)

I'd agree with that. Unless I'm trying to increase the amount I walk, I usually come in under 5K steps a day. It's not at all hard to add a few tasks to get it up to a more reasonable number, and I do, but if I don't intentionally add those tasks, the baseline is very low indeed.

Yes, it is a relative thing, not a determinative thing.

It's hard to talk about this without tripping on ableism - but - Stephen Hawkins started out with such a great cognitive ability that a deficit later in life would have been less noticeable. Life is more than a cognitive experience, it's a human experience. Hawkins' human experience was not great. I've read that he was very hard on the people close to him. Even if exercise 'only' helped with dealing with emotions, that would still show up as a cognitive improvement - it's hard to think straight when you are upset.

> I'm not convinced that the opposite is true.

I'm not entirely sure what 'the opposite' means. "You are a brain on a stick"? It is evident that the brain does not survive without the body. It is evident that the brain is affected by what the body does. The body is not a stick.

The brain does compute, but it is not a computer. A computer does not actively take in information about the world. A computer does not form familial and tribal affiliations. A computer has a very limited experience of the world.

> Einstein routinely walked a few miles a day and that's all the exercise he did.

Do you mean to say this is insignificant? I think even if you don't work up much of a sweat or do some heavy lifting or whatever, a daily walk is very good for your health.

I always understood the brain as a computer analogy to be more that the brain performs computations, which seems kind of obvious but wasn't really obvious before it was adopted as a model. That doesn't mean it's entirely distinct/separate from the rest of the body at all.

> Developing an understanding of your sensations and emotions is important

There are pleasant social side effects from doing this but sometimes being so in tune can affect you in weird ways too.

"Balance in all things" - Ember Spirit

You can largely blame Descartes for this notion.

This rather finds its origin in religion (Abrahamic, amongst others), where the soul is regarded being as separate from the body.

Mind-body dualism is an older position than Descartes, but cartesian dualism is distinct from the Aristotelian hylemorphic theories that were popular for a long time before, and still profoundly shapes the way we think in ways that may be difficult to even realize because the world view completely permeates all modern western thought.

It does however become very apparent when you read pre-cartesian authors that their views on the soul are off.

If you equate the soul with consciousness, it's obvious that a potted plant does not have a soul.

If you view it as the animating principle, it's equally ridiculous to say a potted plant doesn't have a soul, since it's so clearly growing.

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