THE BRAIN THE BODY THE SOUL THE MIND

Description

The title of this book is a give away. It indicates a preferred personal hierarchy. The mind occupies the superior position. Why I hold this opinion and what the other parts of the title mean to me, I shall try to explain. It is clear that there is an overlapping in all four, but we per force differentiate amongst them for better understanding. This should help us return to a composite understanding of the complexity of being human.Let me be explicit on one point. I am neither a medical doctor, nor a molecular biologist, neither a geneticist, nor a philosopher or a psychologist. I have studied these subjects only as an interested person and not as a scholar. This book will therefore be in layman’s terms because the technology and higher scholarship are neither in my grasp nor interest me. If you have not studied the subjects much, then there may be some interesting information for you.Finally, the inferences I draw may be because I do not know enough about the subject or because specialists find it hard to break away from their established norms and are not willing to make these inferences. This book is by a non­specialist. It is written for non-specialists. It contains a few theses, but primarily, it is an attempt at sharing information. The inferences I draw will be presented without the beating of drums. So you’ll have to be attentive all the time to catch them. I shall primarily be discussing these matters with regard to human beings.I first developed some talks in 1993, and presented them to the members of the Islamic Philosophical Association, Pakistan, in October and November 1995.The talk on ‘The Body’ was further developed and presented to the Pakistan Philosophical Congress in the summer of 1996. Since then the talks were further worked on and presented at other venues. It was only in 2002 that I realised that I had stumbled onto something interesting, which tends to place these talks in the realm of philosophy. For a non-philosopher to venture into the landscape of ivory towers is scary. Many prise open this stark terrain only to be rebuffed by the denizens of that stand-offish world. For that I am well-prepared.I have drawn from many sources but most particularly from Maps of the Mind by Charles Hampden-Turner (from which I have occasionally drawn literally), and from The Oxford Companion To The Mind, edited by Richard L. Gregory; Enryc!opaedia of EsotenOc Man by Benjamin Walker; The Abingdon Dictionary of Living Religions, General Editor Keith Crim; Enryc!opaedia Britannica; the Mind’s I, composed and arranged by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennet, etc.