Home > Topic > disembodied
1 " If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival. "
― , How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
2 " Other animals are exceptionally good at identifying and reacting to predators, rivals and friends. They never act as if they believe that rivers or trees are inhabited by spirits who are watching. In all these ways, other animals continually demonstrate their working knowledge that they live in a world brimming with other minds as well as their knowledge of those minds' boundaries. their understanding seems more acute, pragmatic, and frankly, better than ours at distinguishing real from fake. So, I wonder, do humans really have a better developed Theory of Mind than other animals? ...Children talk to dolls for years, half believing or firmly believing that the doll hears and feels and is a worthy confidante. Many adults pray to statues, fervently believing that they're listening. ...All of this indicates a common human inability to distinguish conscious minds from inanimate objects, and evidence from nonsense. Children often talk to a fully imaginary friends whom they believe listens and has thoughts. Monotheism might be the adult version. ...In the world's most technologically advanced, most informed societies, a majority people take it for granted that disembodied spirits are watching, judging, and acting on them. Most leaders of modern nations trust that a Sky-God can be asked to protect their nation during disasters and conflicts with other nations. All of this is theory of mind gone wild, like an unguided fire hose spraying the whole universe with presumed consciousness. Humans' " superior" Theory of Mind is in part pathology. The oft repeated line " humans are rational beings" is probably our most half-true assertion about ourselves. There is in nature an overriding sanity and often in humankind an undermining insanity. We, among all animals, are most frequently irrational, distortional, delusional, and worried. Yet, I also wonder, is our pathological ability to generate false beliefs...also the very root of human creativity? "
3 " ...this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings. "
― Elizabeth Goudge , The Scent of Water
4 " So I stood up and did a handstand on my Guru's roof, to celebrate the notion of liberation. I felt the dusty tiles under my hands. I felt my own strength and balance. I felt the easy night breeze on the palms of my bare feet. This kind of thing -- a spontaneous handstand--isn't something a disembodied cool blue soul can do, but a human being can do it. We have hands; we can stand on them if we want to. That's our privilege. That's the joy of a mortal body. And that's why God needs us. Because God loves to feel things through our hands. "
5 " In a society in which nearly everybody is dominated by somebody else's mind or by a disembodied mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn the truth about the activities of governments and corporations, about the quality or value of products, or about the health of one's own place and economy.In such a society, also, our private economies will depend less and less upon the private ownership of real, usable property, and more and more upon property that is institutional and abstract, beyond individual control, such as money, insurance policies, certificates of deposit, stocks, and shares. And as our private economies become more abstract, the mutual, free helps and pleasures of family and community life will be supplanted by a kind of displaced or placeless citizenship and by commerce with impersonal and self-interested suppliers...Thus, although we are not slaves in name, and cannot be carried to market and sold as somebody else's legal chattels, we are free only within narrow limits. For all our talk about liberation and personal autonomy, there are few choices that we are free to make. What would be the point, for example, if a majority of our people decided to be self-employed?The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means. "
― Wendell Berry , The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays
6 " A real man—real in all the ways that we recognize as real—finds himself suddenly abstracted from the world and deposited in a physical situation which could not possibly exist: sounds have aroma, smells have color and depth, sights have texture, touches have pitch and timbre. There he is informed by a disembodied voice that he has been brought to that place as a champion for his world. He must fight to the death in single combat against a champion from another world. If he is defeated, he will die, and his world—the real world—will be destroyed because it lacks the inner strength to survive.The man refuses to believe that what he is told is true. He asserts that he is either dreaming or hallucinating, and declines to be put in the false position of fighting to the death where no " real" danger exists. He is implacable in his determination to disbelieve his apparent situation, and does not defend himself when he is attacked by the champion of the other "
7 " Normative statements about " women's roles" and girls' and women's behaviour being " appropriately feminine" were replaced with more neutral statements about what women and girl versus boys and men do and think and say they want. In this way, conventionally gendered behaviour was taken out of the context of prescription and presented as simple description. This had the possibly unanticipated consequence, though, of taking these behaviours out of the context of the social world. The descriptive approach significantly deemphasised the role of norms, social structures, and modelling in developing gendered traits. Instead, disembodied as " naked facts" of sex differences, they began to look more and more like simple reflections of male and female behaviour. "
8 " The world is changing because we're changing it. And that makes me understand, at least, what kind of person I'd like to be. A person can seek ways, whether big or small, to heal the world. That, to me, is spirituality and one's 'soul.' Not some disembodied eternal wishfulness but a way of being that, most days, I can work on. Life is like walking with a flashlight on a dark night. You can't see your destination, but each step illuminates the next few steps, and, taking one after another, you can get where you need to go. Only now, we'll need to quicken our pace if we are to avoid major upheaval in this century. It's up to us not just as individuals but as citizens of nations and of the world. "
― Carl Safina , The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World
9 " The problem with classical disembodied scientific realism is that it takes two intertwined and inseparable dimensions of all experience - the awareness of the experiencing organism and the stable entities and structures it encounters - and erects them as separate and distinct entities called subjects and objects. What disembodied realism ... misses is that, as embodied, imaginative creatures, we never were separated or divorced from reality in the first place. What has always made science possible is our embodiment, not our transcendence of it, and our imagination, not our avoidance of it. "
― George Lakoff , Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought
10 " Wandering is not limited to geography. Also an altered state of consciousness, it allows a disembodied self to drift on currents of collective awareness with minimal attachment to the physical world. This state of wander tapped imaginative faculties that opened me to a freedom of being only previously experienced through travel. "
― Gina Greenlee , Belly Up: Surviving and Thriving Beyond a Cruise Gone Bad
11 " So this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings. "
12 " It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another's actual and bodily existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they meet in the dim wood that it was like the first encounter in the world beyond the grave of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering in mutual dread, as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost. "
― Nathaniel Hawthorne
13 " Oh for God’s sake,” came Morgan’s sleepy voice, disembodied in the dark. “Go after the hot guy, would you?” “The peanut gallery needs to shut up,” Elle muttered into the cushion. “Just sayin’,” Morgan said. “I’d leave you alone out here in a hot minute to go have sex if I had the chance.” “I’m not going to go have sex while you’re out here knowing I’m having sex!” “Your loss,” Morgan said. “Oh my God,” Elle said. “Stop talking! "
― Jill Shalvis , Accidentally on Purpose (Heartbreaker Bay, #3)
14 " pg.90 of Philosophy in the Flesh: We are basing our argument on the existence of at least three stable scientific findings--the embodied mind, the cognitive unconscious, and metaphorical thought. Just as the ideas of cells and DNA in biology are stable and not likely to be found to be mistakes, so we believe that there is more than enough converging evidence to establish at least these three results. Ironically, these scientific results challenge the classical philosophical view of scientific realism, a disembodied objective scientific realism that can be characterized by the following three claims:1. There is a world independent of our understanding of it.2. We can have stable knowledge of it.3. Our very concepts and forms of reason are characterized not by our bodies and brains, but by the external world in itself. It follows that scientific truths are not merely truths as we understand them, but absolute truths. Obiviously, we accept (1) and (2) and we believe that (2) applies to the three findings of cognitive science we are discussing on the basis of converging evidence. But those findings themselves contradict (3). "
15 " By now it was too late to call St. Jude. He chose an out-of-the-way patch of airport carpeting and lay it down to sleep. He didn't understand what had happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had been through the wash. He felt roughened, bleached and worn out along the fold lines. He semi-dreamed of disembodied eyes and isolated mouths in ski masks. He'd lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was was what a person wanted, you could say that he'd lost track of himself. "
― Jonathan Franzen , The Corrections
16 " Mary.” Turning at the soft sound of her name, she glanced behind herself. Then frowned. “Lassiter?” “I’m over here.” “Where?” She looked all around. “Why is your voice echoing?” “Chimney.” “What?” “I’m stuck in the fucking chimney.” She raced over to the fireplace and got on her hands and knees. Looking up into the dark flue, she shook her head. “Lass? What the hell are you doing up there?” His voice emanated from somewhere above her. “Don’t tell anyone, okay?” “What are you—” An arm came down. A very sooty arm that was encased in a red sleeve that had white trim. Or what had been white trim and which was now smudged with ash. “You’re stuck!” she exclaimed. “And thank God no one lit this fire!” “You’re telling me,” he muttered in his disembodied voice. “I had to blow out Fritz’s match like a hundred times before he gave up. Fuck, that sounds dirty. Anyway, just remind me never to try to be Santa for your kid, okay? I’m not doing this again, even for her.” Mary stretched a little farther in, but the logs on the hearth stopped her. “Lassiter. Why can’t you free yourself by dematerializing—” “I’m impaled on a hook that’s iron. I can’t go ghost. And will you just take this?” “Wha "
17 " He hung up on her. She'd just been hung up on by a disembodied brain in a jar. Fantastic. "
― Rachel Caine , Bite Club (The Morganville Vampires, #10)
18 " She writes like an angel, it says of Laura on the back of one of the editions of The Blind Assassin. An American edition, as I recall, with gold scrollwork on the cover: they set a lot of store by angels in those parts. In point of fact angels don't write much. They record sins and the names of the dammed and the saved, or they appear as disembodied hands and scribble warnings on walls. Or they deliver messages, few of which are good news: God be with you is not an unmixed blessing. "
― Margaret Atwood , The Blind Assassin
19 " [re: I Corinthians 15:34,58] " The present life of the church, in other words, is not about " soul-making," the attempt to produce or train disembodied beings for a future disembodied life. It is about working with fully human beings who will be reembodied at the last, after the model of the Messiah. "
20 " My recommendation instead, however, is that we do not surrender questions of value, whether absolute matters of truth, goodness, and beauty or relative judgment of more or less truth, goodness, and beauty. With those questions to the fore, in fact, we can interrogate various other traditions and truly learn something that can improve our own. Perhaps the Presbyterians really do know more than we do about due process in church government. Perhaps the Orthodox really do know some things we do not about iconography. Perhaps the Mennonites really can teach us the meaning of 'enough.' Perhaps the Pentecostals can help liberate us from dull and disembodied worship. Baptists who have learned to improve their procedures from Presbyterians, their art from the Orthodox, their finances from the Mennonites, and their worship from the Pentecostals do not therefore become worse Baptists but better ones. And so around the ecumenical circle, no? "
― John G. Stackhouse Jr. , Finally Feminist: A Pragmatic Christian Understanding of Gender
