David Egan Philosophy

On the same day that I submitted my final grades for the spring semester, I took the final exam for my online course in human anatomy and physiology. Those of you who have been following the newsletter for a while (and have a good memory) will recall that I wrote about this course in a newsletter a year ago. I’d been facing financial uncertainty and thinking about getting a “real job” and so I signed up for the course in anatomy and physiology to fulfill a prerequisite for nursing school.

In the event, the job offer from Koç University put the nursing plan on hold but I decided to finish the course. Partly this was just in case I had a change of heart about the move to Turkey and partly a sunk costs desire to finish what I’d started. But mostly it was that I found the subject matter captivating and wanted to work through the rest of it.

It turns out (you might be surprised to learn) that the human body is quite complicated. What with other work responsibilities, plus a huge move, it took me a year and a half to get through the entire course. But it really does feel like it was worthwhile to persevere. The reason I mention this here is that I found a lot of cud for philosophical rumination in what I studied.

Philosophy and the empirical sciences share a common origin in the West. The same Greek thinkers who established the discipline we still call philosophy—Thales and Anaximander, Pythagoras and Democritus, Plato and Aristotle—were also among the earliest thinkers to study natural phenomena in a systematic way. Aristotle is remembered today as a philosopher but about a third of his collected works are on topics in biology.

The sciences started to emerge into distinct fields of study in the early modern period—at a time when figures like Galileo and Newton were known as “natural philosophers”—and the question of the relationship between philosophy and empirical science has been a vexed question for philosophers ever since.

On one hand, sub-disciplines like cognitive science and the philosophy of physics happily blur boundaries, with practitioners in philosophy departments publishing in the same journals and attending the same conferences as colleagues affiliated with science departments. The fairly new discipline of experimental philosophy, or XPhi, uses the tools of empirical psychology to tackle perennial philosophical questions.

Other philosophers keep empirical science at arm’s length. Ludwig Wittgenstein conceives of philosophy as “what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions.” Martin Heidegger notoriously concedes to the sciences that they concern themselves with beings of all kinds and leave nothing out—and then proposes that philosophy studies this “nothing” that the sciences leave out.

If you’re familiar with my academic work, you’ll know that I’ve spent a lot of time studying Wittgenstein and Heidegger so you can guess where my sympathies lie. So why am I saying that I’ve found the study of anatomy and physiology philosophically illuminating? Have I had a change of heart?

Not really. I don’t think a knowledge of anatomy and physiology will help me resolve any of the philosophical questions that concern me in the way that, say, Joshua Greene thinks that cognitive neuroscience can answer pressing questions in ethics. It’s not as a source of data that I find my newfound knowledge of the human body philosophically illuminating. It’s as a source of something else, which both Socrates and Aristotle identify as the starting point for philosophy: wonder.

Here’s one entry point for showing what I mean. My textbook runs over a thousand pages and the prefrontal cortex gets a paragraph. That paragraph includes this sentence: “The prefrontal cortex is concerned with the makeup of a person’s personality, intellect, complex learning abilities, recall of information, initiative, judgment, foresight, reasoning, conscience, intuition, mood, planning for the future, and development of abstract ideas.” Okay, so there’s that part of the human organism. Anyway, moving on…

That one sentence in a terse paragraph on the prefrontal cortex covers most of what I normally think of when I think about what makes me me. It constitutes about 0.01% of what my textbook thinks is worth knowing about the organism that I am.

It’s not exactly news that there’s a great deal going on behind the scenes of deliberate thought. But it’s one thing to know that the body has all sorts of complex systems and processes and another thing to learn about them in detail. To know, for instance, that the muscle contractions that result in the keystrokes composing this essay involve thick and thin muscle filaments pulling together like fingers drawing a ribbon across a table, that this pulling motion gets triggered when one of the kinds of protein in the thin filaments changes shape as a result of calcium ions flooding into the space around them, that the cellular floodgates open to allow these calcium ions to do their work when the end of a nerve fibre releases a signalling chemical into the small gap between the nerve fibre and the muscle fibre, that this chemical’s release is the result of a sequence of electrochemical reactions in a sequence of neurons that originates in the brain—I’m cutting a lot of corners here, but you get the idea. “He didn’t lift a finger” is a colloquial expression to describe someone not making the most minimal effort. But lifting a finger is a tremendously complicated undertaking. It’s a not-so-small miracle that I can lift my fingers at all.

The sequence involved in triggering muscle contractions is just one of the mind-blowing things I learned about. Another highlight was the sequence of steps by which pressure waves in the air set up vibrations in fluid in the inner ear that cause microscopic hairs to bend that send electrical impulses to the brain that we then experience as sound. Another was the formidable throughput of the kidneys, which filter something in the range of 150 to 180 litres of fluid per day.

And then there’s the delightful terminology. I’ll take a brief digression to give you some of the best:

• Grey commissure: not an enigmatic advisor to the king in a Tolkienesque fantasy world but rather the central band of grey matter in the spinal column.
• Buffy coat: not trendy outerwear for the shoulder seasons but rather the thin layer of white blood cells and platelets that forms between red blood cells and blood plasma when a blood sample is centrifuged.
• Crypts of Lieberkühn: not a cursed subterranean chamber in a Poe-like horror story but rather crevices in the small intestine lined with glands that secrete digestive juices.
• The Frank–Starling Law of the Heart: not “the love you take is equal to the love you make” (that’s the Lennon–McCartney Law of the Heart) but rather a law that describes how the output of the left and right ventricles of the heart remain balanced.
• Golgi apparatus: not a contraption in a mad scientist’s workshop but rather a structure inside cells that resembles a pile of pancakes, and which modifies, sorts, and packages proteins sent to various destinations.
• Primitive streak: not a college ritual in which drunken students run around naked but rather a faint groove that appears in the third week after fertilization and clearly establishes the head and tail ends of the developing embryo.

Okay, fun’s over. Back to philosophy.

Part of what’s enchanting about learning so much about the 99.99% of anatomy and physiology that doesn’t involve the prefrontal cortex is just how much intelligence the body contains beyond the math-and-chess kind. Complex chains of electrical signals and hormones keep the body informed about what’s going on and what it needs. In a crisis, the body reacts quickly, and in a wide variety of ways that escape conscious awareness. Each cell is like a miniature city, bustling with communication, manufacture, export and import.

Importantly, this bodily intelligence isn’t so different from the math-and-chess kind that philosophers tend to take as the paradigm of intelligence. The prefrontal cortex is a part of the body, after all, and what goes on there has a bearing on a lot of what happens elsewhere. And what happens elsewhere has a bearing on what happens in the prefrontal cortex as well. The parts of me that worked through the complex arguments of Spinoza’s Ethics this spring and the parts of me that monitor and manage my blood volume and pressure are cooperating parts of the same strange and marvellous organism.

Like I said, I don’t think my newfound knowledge about anatomy and physiology serves as data that will resolve philosophical problems. It’s not as if Descartes’ sharp distinction between mind and body rested on his failure to notice their connectedness so that I now have the tools to correct him (he did notice, but how he dealt with the issue is a story for another time). It’s rather that my studies have served as what Wittgenstein calls “objects of comparison” that shift the way I look at things.

Seeing myself from a physiological point of view deepens my sense of what it means to be a human animal and how my mind is entangled with complex processes that lie deep beneath the level of conscious awareness. What I gain from this point of view isn’t a set of answers to questions I was already asking. It’s rather that I look at the questions themselves differently, and maybe feel moved to ask different ones. 

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2. Charcoal is a major source of cooking fuel in the African continent. More people work in charcoal production in Africa than work in coal mining worldwide, and the charcoal trade may earn more money in Africa than cocoa or chocolate production. (source)
3. Private security guards outnumber publicly funded police officers in the United States by a ratio of two to one. The third largest U.S.-based employer globally, after Amazon and Walmart, is a private security firm. (source)
4. The world’s first major synthetic plastic, celluloid, found its first major commercial application as a substitute for ivory in making billiard balls. (source)
5. Point Nemo is the name given to the “oceanic pole of inaccessibility”: the farthest place on the planet from land. It’s a point in the South Pacific Ocean about midway between New Zealand and Chile and a little under 2700km from the nearest land. The human being closest to Point Nemo at any given moment is likely an astronaut. (source)
6. 60% of the United States’ crude oil imports come from Canada. The second and third largest sources of crude oil imports are Mexico and Saudi Arabia, at 10% and 7% respectively. (source)