From an article grappling with why we have such a difficult time getting our bodies to fall in line with the responsible and health-conscious plans that our brains make:
People of earlier ages didn’t have “selves,” didn’t see themselves as “thinking things” inside their heads who had to get out of their own mind to interact with the world. … The revolution of [René] Descartes’ thought was that the basis of human existence is thinking: I think, therefore I am. The fact that we know ourselves to be thinking inside our own minds makes it impossible to doubt that we exist. From this came the entire philosophical enterprise of proving that the external world also exists. We can’t doubt that we’re there, at least as a mind, but how do we prove everything we perceive isn’t an illusion?
Fast-forward 500 years, and nearly everyone in the Western world thinks of themselves as minds “inside” heads. A person is their mind, or the thinking part of themselves.
via You Can’t Help a Self You Don’t Have | Patrol – A review of religion and the modern world.
This post make me think that we’ve progressed beyond the classic philosophy class experiment of proving that you’re not just a brain in a jar hooked up to a computer simulation of the world. Instead, we’ve developed the impression that even if our skulls are real they’re still just a kind of jar that holds the “real us” — our thinking part.