I have long been interested in what I term "life itself," a bracketing of the word life to bring our attention to the existential experience of life as well as to heighten our appreciation of the miracle we are "given," engaged in, dancing with, and so forth. Life itself is in front of us, is something that we experience, even enact.
I am also interested in consciousness and the unconscious, or the brain or what some call "the shadow" and in what ways does consciousness produce what we think of as life itself.
Alva Noë is a philosopher at UC Berkeley and he warns of making the serious error of assuming that we are our brains; this is a serious fallacy. We have a brain and with remarkable capacities but consciousness and our awareness of the processes of life are an achievement, an upshot of the interaction with our environment that we participate in, not something that is produced within our brains.
Here is the link to an interview with Noë on Salon that captures what he is talking about. Here is another interview with him in Edge. I am also going to buy his book, Out of Our Heads, which looks to be a fascinating read.
Here is an interesting quote from the Edge interview:
A useful analogy is life. What is life? We can point to all sorts of chemical processes, metabolic processes, reproductive processes that are present where there is life. But we ask, where is the life? You don't say life is a thing inside the organism. The life is this process that the organism is participating in, a process that involves an environmental niche and dynamic selectivity. If you want to find the life, look to the dynamic of the animal's engagement with its world. The life is there. The life is not inside the animal. The life is the way the animal is in the world.
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