13
Brains, Bodies, and Minds
Against a Hierarchy of Animal Faculties
DAVID DILLARD-WRIGHT
What good is a brain? By itself a brain doesn’t do anything at all. In a jar with formaldehyde, a brain makes a good paper weight or teaching tool, but it can’t think. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technology, used to map processing regions and draw the tenuous line between life and death, can only detect mental activity in living brains, which means that the diagnostic tool also measures the contributions of a functioning body. Brains, human or nonhuman, mammal or reptilian, begin to die within a few minutes of oxygen deprivation. The brain only accomplishes its work when intricately linked to a living creature, itself tied by innumerable fluid connections to its environment. Having a mind requires having a brain, to be sure, but it requires much more than that. It requires all of those things a brain requires: circulation, respiration, and sensation, among other factors, like a suitable and stimulating environment. Understanding minds requires including all the processes that make brains possible. If the body is instrumental to the brain, it is equally instrumental to the mind.
Traditionally, we think of mind as consciousness, as self-awareness and language, but these functions of mind, the positing functions so prized by human beings, are a by-product of mind’s features, chief of which are to keep the body alive and moving around in the environment, alert to the exigencies of situations. Language and self-consciousness, traditional markers of the human, should not be termed “higher” functions of mind, because they are not more complex or more necessary than what are labeled biological or vital processes. Human beings can survive perfectly well without words, but they can’t survive at all without a steady supply of oxygen flowing toward their cells, without nourishment and water. The process of language acquisition, though certainly a remarkable cohesion of social, neurological, and motor faculties, is no more remarkable than the transcription of DNA or the chemical steps of glycolysis. Self-awareness, language, and other “macro” processes are just the flip side of the coin to the “micro” processes of cell biology and neurology. Neither end of the spectrum should claim primacy as preeminently real, superior, complex, abstract, or another modifier that adds “specialness.” Rational thought may give intricacy to human meaning, but it could not arise at all without the body’s engagement with its environment.
Some philosophers, especially in transplantation ethics, believe that the essential part of a human being is the mind, incautiously equated with the brain, and that this is where the person is really located (e.g., Baron 2006; Cherry 2005; Taylor 2005; Wilkinson 2003). This cluster of recent thinking on transplantation views the rest of the body as more or less interchangeable, and new medical technologies seem to confirm this view. After all, surgeons, aided by a bevy of pharmaceuticals, can now transplant the liver, the kidneys, the heart, and the lungs. Because transplantation of the brain still exceeds present capabilities, it seems natural to conclude that the brain is unmistakably the seat of unique personhood. Personhood—an idea often directly or indirectly wed to anthropocentricism, even when applied to cetaceans and primates (“higher” mammals)—does not, in fact, reside in the brain but rather encompasses a wide range of factors.1
The notion of personhood residing in the brain should be complicated and explored because it has a great impact on the way that we think about mind in humans and other animals. Mark Cherry, one of many theorists to take up the question of personhood and brain, writes, in a way typical of recent bioethics: “[The] higher brain [is the] … seat of human consciousness, memory, and the cognitive capacities that sustain personhood…. As [philosopher of science Roland] Puccetti put it, where the brain goes, there too goes the person. Persons are distinguishable from all their body parts; however, they are only separable from most. This implies that, in strictly secular terms, a person’s body can be regarded as a collection of things with which the person is more or less intimately associated” (2005:25). Here Cherry argues that only the brain “counts” as the seat of personhood, because the memory and personality reside in the brain. Cherry attributes a sentimental attachment to the body and makes it into a possession, a special type of property: bodies and body parts may be treasured possessions, but they are possessions nonetheless. The insistence on “human” consciousness in the previous quote itself rests on the Judeo-Christian ideal of the image of God. Only the “higher” brain (implicitly serving as the site of the imago Dei) really counts in Cherry’s vision: All else is exchangeable, and, by this logic, animals without “higher” minds (however this questionable line might be drawn) also do not count and must be entirely valued at exchange rates.
I disagree with Cherry. I believe that personhood, however fuzzy the term, must be continually renewed by myriad processes, which take place in interaction with information and not merely in its storage. Memory itself is a complex philosophical topic and should not be confused with mere information storage; it too interacts with the surround. It can be externalized through books and computers, shared in storytelling and writing, linked to people and places, carried in posture and gesture. Moreover, the body is not a “collection of things” only loosely associated with the person: To have a different body is to experience the world differently, to be a different person. Yes, the body is plastic and its parts are “interchangeable” to a certain extent, but these interchanges matter and should not be dismissed as incidental, as though some hidden core or essence would remain unaffected beneath these alterations (e.g., transplantation, implantation, plastic surgery, and the like).
To Cherry’s credit, he says that the processes of the “higher brain … sustain personhood,” meaning that they should not be equated with personhood. On one level, the body might properly be regarded as an object, as property, so long as it is equally conceded that a second perspective goes along with this one, a perspective in which the body is not merely mine but is also me. The body is an object and yet not an object: It is “that by which there are objects” (Merleau-Ponty 2004 [1945]:105, emphasis added).
This leads to considerations of whether a brain in a vat would qualify as a person. Even if scientists could keep a brain alive in a vat, it would hardly qualify as a mind, unless the vat were to become a prosthetic body. Mind requires body, requires a network of relationships with the outside world. Mind is inherently social, and I mean this in the sense of a “general sociality” that includes any sort of vital or semiotic exchange with the surround (Dillard-Wright 2009a, 2009b). The simplest one-celled organisms have a form of mind, here taken as a kind of structuring or organization, in the form of nutrition and reproduction, absent any kind of neural network.2 Their “bodies” network with the surround through these processes, and we can follow this same embodied logic all the way to the most complex mammals. Even computers have a sort of body—a processor, a hard drive, a monitor, etc.—and network socially with other computers and human users. Even sentient robots would have to have a body, and abstracting mind from the processes needed to produce that mind is an artificial exercise. This would still hold true in the science fiction scenario of completely self-aware robots. Indeed, the processes themselves, whether living or nonliving, “wet” or “dry,” already contain mindedness, inasmuch as they organize inputs into a new whole. Even if we concede the interchangeability of “parts,” different bodies would lead to different minds, different styles of thinking and problem solving. Embodiment constitutes mind and its so-called higher functions, and the body is not merely appended to the mind. Cherry says that the “higher” functions of mind sustain personhood, but he neglects to say that cognition alone does not, in fact, sustain personhood.
Once again, if it is possible to view the body as instrumental to the brain, it is equally possible to view the brain as instrumental to the body. The brain, of course, should not be situated as the polar opposite of body, since it belongs to body. The feedback loop between body and brain, or between the different sectors of an overall sensitivity, makes for the mind, a point some theorists miss by insisting on the “higher” mind as the “seat” of consciousness. Consciousness or mind, as a process involving many factors, doesn’t sit anywhere but rollicks along with the organism into its environment, which also constitutively creates “mind.” The maze is part of the lab rat’s mind; the thoughts of a driver on the highway include the lanes of traffic. Minds propel themselves forward through the world and take their cues from that world. Making consciousness a static entity or essence in-residence decapitates it, obscures the temporal, perceptual, osmotic flows that make minds. The functions of body that produce mindedness should include not only perception and motility, as Merleau-Ponty (1963 [1942]; 2004 [1945]) demonstrated, but also the less intentional processes of circulation and respiration, together with the conditions that make them possible. The yardstick of self-awareness, which seemed the only proof of “higher” functions, has been overdetermined as a measure of cognitive, and hence moral, worth. If we accept the Darwinian paradigm of natural selection and variation over time, it becomes impossible to generate such ontological dividing lines that would separate functions into higher and lower groupings. In other words, a neuron is a neuron, in an earthworm, a chicken, or a human: One experiment even uses leech neurons for biological computing (Chase 1999). By privileging the human platform of intelligence, specifically the arrangement of the human brain, investigators historically missed the intelligence of other species. Now important advances are being made that recognize the intelligence of birds, octopi, and reptiles, nonmammal species with widely differing anatomies (Gaidos 2009). Respiration and circulation link together the various creaturely and cybernetic architectures: Whether mounted on a motherboard or within a fleshly matrix, neurons, as living cells, must breathe and consume.
The privileged role afforded contemplation in the classical and Christian traditions carries over into scientific pedagogy on cognition: We have learned to speak of “higher” and “lower” functions for the brain. The brain stem is a more “primitive” region, controlling the baser functions, while the rest of the brain takes the more weighty work of reason itself. Dividing the body into systems (circulatory, respiratory, nervous, etc.) makes possible the abstraction of parts or sets of parts from each other. While this subdivision serves as an important heuristic device, these cleavages should not be taken as literal descriptions if presumed to mean that “parts” and “systems” function independently. The pervasiveness and persistence of the mechanical metaphor of parts and systems can be explained by its political usefulness. By dividing the body into systems—“Divide and conquer” goes the Roman maxim—the animal (human or nonhuman) is subjected to various forms of control and loses a sense of the body as lived from within. As opposed to the phenomenological perspective, or what Deleuze and Guattari (1987:159) call the “Body without Organs” (BwO), the perspective of science turns the individual into a medical or research subject that becomes a conglomeration of parts or bits of information, a sort of dissolving deployed for economic/political purposes (see also Weisz 2006). Known from the inside, experientially, the body has no organs, or the organs are only dimly, obscurely felt, as in a stomachache, asthma, or appendicitis. Even then, the boundary between say, the feeling of the stomach and the feeling of the small intestine cannot be securely located, just as, in the children’s game, one cannot say, with eyes closed, when another person’s finger has reached the inside of the elbow on the surface of the skin. The view from the outside, the third-person point of view, the God’s-eye, theological point of view, which is also the scientific, medical way of seeing, makes dim awareness of the organs explicit. This specialized knowledge then extracts value from the patient in the form of treatments and procedures: “The organism is already … the judgment of God, from which medical doctors benefit and on which they base their power. The organism is not at all the body, the BwO; rather, it is a stratum on the BwO … that, in order to extract useful labor from the BwO, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:159). The biomedical researcher takes over the position of God in having the privileged point of view on the living body and, by deploying this privileged or “objective” point of view, can then claim access to power over the living subject (the BwO). Biomedicine has inherited a theological tradition it does not acknowledge, a tradition that subsumes all ways of knowing under the one correct or orthodox positivism. “Having the organism be first” means claiming the body as composed of systems, as mechanical, to be the primary and most correct way of viewing the body. Other ways of knowing the body are not necessarily decried as false, but they must take their place in line, so to speak, behind this most forceful and politically effective hermeneutic.
By contrast, the lived body knows no distinctions between respiration and circulation, thinking and movement, and immerses itself in its tasks. In fact, these processes absolutely depend upon one another in the formation of what can only be called “thinking” after the fact.3 The body is the unification of diverse sensations, and, as a “nexus of living meanings,” leads to positing consciousness, which then returns to the world through intentional activity (Merleau-Ponty 2004 [1945]:171–175). No special center coordinates the body’s processes: A more chaotic, ad hoc organization leads to what we call mind. Looking for mind, then, requires tracing the patterns of organization that give rise to it. The ecological niche calls forth the appropriate manner of mindedness for that particular evolutionary situation, and an advantage is only an advantage so long as that particular niche remains relatively stable. Popular markers of “thinking” as construed from an anthropocentric perspective—language, self-consciousness, etc.—are not absolute but contingent definitions of intelligence that have little bearing on mindedness as such. A complete theory of mind would need to take into consideration differing types of mindedness that account for the wide array of intelligences on the planet. While it may flatter human egos to think of ourselves as the only intelligent life in the universe, such viewpoints ignore the many brilliant faculties of our nonhuman (and even inanimate, e.g., plants, computers) kin.
This cosmological view of thought poses a threat to the human sense of uniqueness, but it better matches the Darwinian continuity of species and gives human thought not just precursors but parallels in nonhuman modes of knowing. To acknowledge continuities between human thought and the thinking of other animals does not amount to positing sameness—rather, such a viewpoint contextualizes mindedness within the somatic and environmental niches that support it. There are as many possible modes of mind as there are species, and individual variations and histories also come into play. Nevertheless, processes like circulation and respiration, motility and communication overlap species boundaries and inform transspecific theory and practice. Going into this territory of relatedness requires addressing the underlying fears that would prevent such an exploration from happening.
Much horror and supernatural writing plays on the fear of the animate body, which comes from a discomfort with the animal nature of the human life. In Washington Irving’s classic tale, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” a headless horseman torments poor itinerant schoolmaster Ichabod Crane, chasing the young teacher through the small New York town and finally dashing Crane to the ground by using his pumpkin head as a projectile. Crane himself, like the famous apparition, is all body and no head. “The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs…. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew” (Irving 1820). A gullible fellow with a penchant for the fantastic, Crane’s mental life consists mostly of ghost stories garnered from Mather’s History of New England Witchcraft.4 Crane also spends his free time fantasizing about food, plotting ways to fill his stomach from the larders of the parents of his pupils. Crane, the scarecrow with a small head, can never seem to fill his straw stomach. At last he falls victim to a body without a head, as though Crane’s fantasies turned against him. The story tacitly identifies witchcraft and superstition with the body and the stomach, the flip side of the head’s rationality. Ichabod and his plight symbolize discomfort with the body and its materiality (somatophobia), as the feminine-gendered processes of the body threaten the masculine rationality of the head (Acampora 2006; Schusterman 2008).5
Washington Irving’s headless horseman, like the zombie hordes popular in fiction and movies today, has a body but no brain. Rather than being controlled by the mind, in these forms of popular entertainment the body has broken away from the mind and gone along without it. The headless horseman actually wields his own head as a weapon, reversing the usual direction of philosophical and popular thinking: We expect the head to control the body and not the other way around. A corpse strikes fear for the same reason: although vacated of mind, it carries the vestiges of personhood in face and limbs. Even though it has lost its animation, a corpse still wears an expression, still has the outward form associated with living. This specter scares because of its loss of unity and the lingering suspicion that perhaps rationality represents a false sense of security and control. Even without Buddhist philosophy or Husserlian phenomenology, we all suspect that maybe we aren’t the contained selves our personalities and bodies advertise: Internal dialogue becomes a chorus of competing voices, and the body a medium for conveying competing identities.6 In contrast to the classical and Christian traditions, in which sensation and passion had to be subordinated to rational thought, the body too has its intelligence, as anyone who has ever stubbed a toe or suffered from food poisoning knows. The members, the organs assert themselves more forcefully than a syllogism. Thought can work its way “up” as well as “down”: we don’t treat our bodies as mere stumps or pedestals for the head and the brain. Even our somewhat sedentary, office-bound bodies know the feeling of a sore butt, a crick in the neck, a foot gone to sleep. This knowledge below rational thought and the primary senses contributes as much or more to our sense of “being-in-the-world,” to use the Heideggerian description, as any propositional thinking ever could.7 Merleau-Ponty has called attention to the domain of embodiment neglected by Heidegger and insisted that we think through the dialogical relations, the constitutive interplay, of body and world.8 Minds do not govern bodies from above, as a puppetmaster controls a puppet, he insists. Rather, mindedness unfolds as the body navigates around in the world and propels its intentions outward into concrete actions.
Merleau-Ponty’s embodied phenomenology has left its mark on a number of disciplines. Over the last few decades, it has become de rigueur in academic circles, especially feminist, environmental, and animal studies, to write about the lived body and the ways our perceptual and sensual lives contribute to the formation of knowledge. Even engineers seem to have gotten the message, perhaps by a different route, as the new disciplines of social robotics and embodied AI demonstrate (Mazis 2008). Allan Hobson (2002:466), summarizing the ideas of neurologist Rodolfo Llinás (2001), might have been channeling Merleau-Ponty when he wrote, rephrasing Descartes’s famous cogito, “I move, therefore I am a self, (I think).” In other words, motility, for Llinás specifically the nerve cells, underlies the “higher” processes of cognition. Respiration and circulation, among other processes, make motility possible and cannot be viewed as “beside the point,” or outside the scope of mind. If we confine what “counts” as mindedness to the so-called higher processes of conceptual and linguistic thinking, we run the risk of trying to make consciousness self-supporting, like a house of cards suspended in midair. A better theory of consciousness or mind will be dispersed into a number of different processes and will not posit a break or a hierarchy between the “higher” and “lower” functions of mind. We might rephrase the cogito even farther, to say, “I breathe (or I digest), therefore I move, therefore I think, therefore I think I am,” but this isn’t a very snappy phrase. At this moment we realize the appeal of René Descartes’s (1998 [1637]) original formulation and at the same time realize its limitations: The price it pays for its simplicity is the loss of accuracy and complexity. In order to be more accurate and complete, we will have to think all the way “down,” to all of the processes that make minds possible. Thinking through all the body’s processes will help reattach mind and body, preventing philosophy from suffering the same fate as Ichabod Crane, who was haunted by the headless body.
Insights from voice theory help to clarify the relationship between the vital body and the body as representation and will provide a bridge between human mindedness and the minds of other creatures. Voice theory is currently undergoing a shift in emphasis under the aegis of phenomenology and Eastern philosophies. Phenomenologist and singer Päivi Järviö speaks of two paradigms of voice pedagogy, one that views the “singer’s body [as] an instrument that is used as a tool to produce a sound” and a second paradigm in which “the singer with his voice is a living human being” (Järviö 2006). The first perspective uses anatomy and physiology, along with “drawings, plastic models, and mirrors” to make the singer or actor more aware of the things she does with her larynx, diaphragm, and vocal chords, becoming aware of the good and bad habits that she has developed over time (pp. 68–69; see also McAllister-Viel 2009). However, in order for the process to continue, this objective, third-person perspective must merge into a greater synthesis, in which breathing and thinking become one, or, stronger still, a perspective in which “mind can be understood as a manifestation of breath” (Järviö 2006:169; see also McAllister-Viel 2009:172). Järviö gives a first-person account of what this synthesis feels like from the inside: “My body reads the score, singing silently. My body is this ability to read music and to sing…. Hitting that weightless moment, jumping into an empty space, is a frightful moment of almost limitless freedom, producing a voice that is one with the body and not in a continuous state of imbalance” (p. 66). Järviö here identifies freedom with silently plunging into the lived body, not with consciously carrying out a plan of action. In the immersed perspective that thinking through breathing affords, all the entanglements of positing consciousness fall away in that “frightful moment” of union with the bodymind.
So used to thinking of our heads, à la Sleepy Hollow, as detached from the body, the mindedness of the chest region can indeed be scary. Since we have accustomed ourselves so much to the plotting, planning, and abstraction of propositional understanding, going along with the flow of the lived body can feel like rushing downstream in a whitewater raft or feeling weightlessness on a roller-coaster ride. But this current beneath the currents of thought, once recognized and appreciated, becomes nothing less than a new way of approaching the world.9 The surface interaction of the senses and the conceptual wrangling of thought processes give way to an enveloping unity, which includes these other perspectives and yet transcends them. So it is that singers and actors often describe themselves feeling a unity with the audience, a kind of “absorption” or “communion” in which interpersonal barriers dissolve (McAllister-Viel 2009:173).10 Järviö continues, “Singing is not about the material factors of music: sounds, timbres, pitches, durations, scores, notations…. Rather, it is about a living singer opening her being for others in the moment of letting go, about allowing the listeners to feel the invisible infinity of shared Life, the silent experience of being, opening in music” (2006:74). By describing singing as a kind of silence, Järviö intimates that the idea of singing or performance as a conveyance of content from one party to another gives way, in the better moments, to a whole in which singer and audience merge into the song. The song reverberates through all of them, and a life beneath or before conscious thought makes the experience worthwhile. The breath that courses through the singer’s body becomes her life, is literally life-giving and yet also eclipses her other concerns, and it is the life and sole focus of the listeners as well.
This enraptured description surely does not happen in all musical experience (otherwise we would all rush immediately to the opera house), but it does disclose something of the daily life of our bodies in their congress with the environment and with other subjects. Since it does not rely solely on discursive reasoning, I believe this way of seeing and understanding the body can provide glimpses of what the minds of other animals must be like. The language and concepts that we prize so much as human beings may just be a complicated set of blinders that prevent us from seeing our emplacement in a completely different domain of life, equally available to us but stunted by the frenetic pace of infotainment culture. Concentrating on breath and body, whether through meditative practices, physical exercise, or artistic expression, becomes a way to bring awareness down the spinal axis to the chest. This recentering places the head along the periphery of the body as just another extremity. We may recoil at such a realignment because it challenges so many of our assumptions about what it means to be human, but the results can be quite welcome. This displacement creates an opening to the world previously unnoticed and makes known a fundamental kinship with other beings not bound by genera and species. We need not posit a World Soul or a group mind in order to make such co-constitution possible, because similar processes make all of the various animal minds function.
Co-constitution through similar processes allows at least a partial glimpse into the minds of nonhuman animals. To turn from Ichabod Crane to whooping cranes, the endangered species that helped to spur the American conservation movement, we can see large similarities and differences between species that mark the possible iterations of mind.11 Cranes can stand stock still indefinitely, as anyone who has seen them or other shoreline birds can attest, and yet they also have famously elaborate mating dances. They can be quieter than thought and they can call loud enough to be heard for several miles. Eurasian cranes fly at thirty thousand feet over the Himalayas, and their close relatives can be found near sea level in the marshes of Texas (Beletsky 2006). Cranes breathe like we breathe, albeit with the specialized lungs of birds, and yet they can sleep while standing on one leg. To the untrained eye they all look the same, yet they can be recognized individually using Wessling “voice prints” (Hutchins 2003:23–39). What do we make of this wondrous difference of capacities, both within the family of cranes and between cranes and human beings?
Spoken and written language becomes a specialized type of human vocalization, akin to the mournful cries—indeed the wide variety of purposive vocalizations—of the crane. The shared phenomena of vocalization, respiration, circulation, and cultural features like mating rituals allow us to affirm kinship with the crane and yet to recognize that significant differences exist that we may never be able to precisely access from a subjective viewpoint. Style of embodiment matters—what counts about the crane is its unique mindedness—not the crane’s ability to measure up to an invented and artificial anthropocentric yardstick of intelligence. A broader theory of mind will value the crane’s intelligence per se and not only by comparison to human capabilities. Differing species—different individuals as well—live their lives with different mind-body architectures styled for differing modes of problem solving. Human beings certainly have many wonderful, unique capabilities, but these capabilities should not be regarded as the endgame, the sine qua non of mindedness. The earth exhibits a queer proliferation of forms, each productive in its own right, each capable of ambling, playing, mating, thinking in its own way.
The different layers of organization—motility, language use, breathing and respiration—occur side by side in a lateral relationship. Sometimes they mutually affect one another, as when a morning run triggers a higher pulse or a heated conversation leads to actual body heat. At other times they may function in a more parallel fashion, with little obvious interaction or mutual influence. All these layers of organization occur with more or less specificity in humans and in other animal species, and preferring one of these layers over another is a value judgment and not a neutral statement of fact. We may say that the capacity to use language or the capacity for self-awareness is a higher or better kind of consciousness, but such a judgment rests on no ultimate criteria. A computer cannot continue to function without the fan that cools its motherboard or a source of electricity, and an animal body cannot function without breath and blood. I suggest, then, that the value judgment of higher and lower is not justified and may actually obscure the way that minds arise from embodiment. Turning awareness to processes of embodiment that may usually go unnoticed makes possible a broader and deeper theory of mind that takes better account of how humans and other animals interact with their surroundings.
The very idea of mind can become an “organized transcendence” of the sort Deleuze and Guattari discuss (e.g., in the earlier quote about BwO). Isolating a single trait or a single way of being from the diversity of species on the earth risks a totalizing kind of discourse that would privilege some forms of embodiment over others.12 A pro-animal perspective—one that combines the best impulses of ethology and animal studies on the one hand and animal welfare and animal rights on the other—must be suspicious of the category of “mind” in general, because it usually implies human minds as a standard of achievement or proficiency. Mindedness is a moving yardstick, one that animals are often found to surpass only to have the achievement removed retroactively, depending on the mood or agenda of the investigator. If discourse on minds is to prove useful in the future, it must take into account a broad range of capacities and acknowledge differing types of minds for differing ecological niches. Otherwise, mindedness becomes just another wedge to justify continued human exploitation of animals and the earth. Further exploring the lived body—even its unconscious processes—brings to awareness a level of embodiment that functions alongside motility and rationality as co-constitutive of “mind.” In speaking of mind, whether in the humanities or the sciences, investigators must beware of what “counts” as mind, because so much cultural baggage hinges on that question. Including processes like circulation and respiration in the discussion of mind does not just satisfy the ethical requirement of including other species, it also promises to more accurately portray the ways in which minds arise from embodiment.
Notes
Part of the research for this project was conducted through a summer residential fellowship at Michigan State University in 2008, funded by the Animals and Society Institute.
 
 1.  A full examination of “personhood” and its limits and implications is beyond the scope of the present essay. As a provisional definition, personhood is a state belonging to any entity capable of self-regulating, independent action in concert with the surround. This would include human and nonhuman animals as well as many plants and machines.
 2.  Here I follow Charles Sanders Peirce’s definition of mind as any kind of structure or organization in nature, parallel to what he calls “thirdness” (see Corrington 1993; Weiner 1958).
 3.  I align myself here with the bundle theory of the person, developed by Derek Parfit (1989).
 4.  I was unable to find the original document. The title could be a creation of Irving’s, perhaps a conflation derived from Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana: The Ecclesiastical History of New England (1702) and his Wonders of the Invisible World (1970 [1693]).
 5.  Richard Shusterman’s ongoing project of “somaesthetics” more fully explores this phenomenon, and Ralph Acampora articulates a somaesthetics of human-animal relationships.
 6.  The Buddhist rejection of a stable core of the self has many commonalities with postmodern relational and narrative ideas of selfhood (see Klein 1994; Lyotard 1984; McGhee 1995). Husserl’s (1977 [1931]) study of phenomena or appearances paradoxically became a study of interiority or consciousness.
 7.  “The compound expression ‘Being-in-the-world’ indicates in the very way we have coined it, that it stands for a unitary phenomenon. This primary datum must be seen as a whole. But while Being-in-the-world cannot be broken up into contents which may be pieced together, this does not prevent it from having several constitutive items in its structure” (Heidegger 1962:78, H. 53).
 8.  Merleau-Ponty (2004 [1945]) critiques Heidegger’s Dasein and also continues Heidegger’s project by saying, “The body is our general medium for having a world” (p. 169).
 9.  See also Carrie Rohman’s Deleuzian discussion of vibration and voice in this volume. The vibrational has an intensity in its own right, before or otherwise than the currents of thought, an aesthetic bridge between the orders of life.
10. Merleau-Ponty (2004 [1945]:373) uses the metaphor of “coition” to describe perception, a theme discussed in Rohman’s essay in this volume.
11. Only a few hundred whooping cranes remain in the wild (Sibley 2000:156).
12. Totalizing in the Levinasian sense of an imperialist homogenization that ignores infinite variation beneath the surface (Levinas 1969). Making the infinitizing movement, when it comes to animals, means revealing the varied and complex worlds of other species, which are reduced to bland sameness in anthropocentric thinking.
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