"Mens sana in corpore sano". My title this morning is in Latin, a language I studied at a small private high school in Boston that made frequent mention of this phrase, a quotation from the Roman satirist Juvenal. It means "a healthy mind in a healthy body", and Juvenal was mocking the frivolous prayers of his contemporaries by saying that only a healthy mind in a healthy body was worth praying for. At my school, and in general these days, this phrase is used to emphasize a balance between physical and mental development. My school has classrooms to train the mind and athletic fields to train the body, and their ideal is to pay equal attention to the two.
But this interpretation would make equal sense if Juvenal had referred to "a healthy mind and a healthy body". He didn't, though, he said "in". Which makes, when you think about it, a rather bold philosophical assertion, that the mind is in fact "in" the body. And, for that matter, that the two are distinct entities at all. Philosophers use the word "dualism" for this idea that mind and matter are separate, that there is something other than the physiology of the body that makes us think and feel. Living things are certainly different from dead things, in a way that science was completely unable to explain until comparatively recently, and it was thus natural to speak of "mind" or "soul" as something different from, even beyond, ordinary matter. Plato went further and argued that souls and abstract entities were the only things that really existed, and that matter was only a pale reflection of true reality. Descartes was able to convince himself that his mind existed, since he knew that he was thinking ("cogito ergo sum", and all that), but he had to admit the possibility that the whole material world might be an illusion, which convinced him that spirit and matter were two different things. This left him with the problem of explaining how the world of spirit could interact with the world of matter, but that's another story. I hope that most of you didn't come here this morning to hear a lecture on Cartesian dualism, and if you did you are out of luck because I'm not remotely qualified to give you one.
What I do know something about professionally is computer science. One of the things I teach my students about at UMass is the Church-Turing Thesis, which says that in some respects all computers, all hardware entities, are the same. That respect is that any general-purpose hardware, given enough time and enough resources, can run exactly the same software -- it's capable of emulating any other hardware. Church and Turing proved some mathematical theorems that led them to formulate this statement in the 1930's, but it has a more concrete meaning for us today. When we buy a computer, we don't worry about what kind of processor it has, but only how fast it is, how much memory it has, and whether someone has done this emulation job for the software we want. If we own a Mac, and someone has written a video game for Windows, we know that eventually someone will "port" it to Macs and we will be able to run it. And finally, one of the key ideas of the World Wide Web is that software is written that has no idea what hardware it will someday be run on -- the only thing that matters is the computer language of the software.
There's an obvious analogy here to minds and bodies, or as the song says, bodies and souls. We have known for a while that electricity is running around in the brain in something like the same way it runs around in a computer, so is the mind just the software running on the body's hardware? We can build computers to do some of the difficult things that human minds do, like play chess or navigate with a map. Does that mean that we can eventually build a piece of software that will act exactly like a human mind? If we did, would that software actually be what Star Trek calls an "intelligent life-form"? Alan Turing proposed his famous test to guide research in artificial intelligence -- if a machine can demonstrate thinking that is enough like human thinking to fool a human observer (through a long email conversation, perhaps), then we should call it intelligent. And of course more philosophers have killed many trees and spilled many electrons discussing whether such an artificial intelligence would really be intelligent. And I'm not going to give you a lecture on that, either.
But if a mind or a soul could exist as pure software, we can imagine detaching our own minds, or souls, from our bodies. One of the core beliefs of Christianity is that our soul is immortal, and that when we die it will leave our body to eventually be judged by God and exist in some kind of afterlife. The idea is pretty thoroughly ingrained in our culture. One doctor in Haverhill, Massachusetts in 1907 even weighed human bodies before and after death and found that a fraction of an ounce had gone missing somewhere. If you're a Star Trek fan, you might remember the episode where Dr. Janice Lester uses a convenient alien machine to switch bodies with Captain Kirk, so that she can fulfill her lifelong dream of becoming a starship captain. The idea is that Janice's hardware starts running Kirk's software, and Kirk's hardware starts running Janice's software. On television, this can happen, because the director explains to William Shatner that instead of emulating James T. Kirk, he's now going to be emulating Janice Lester pretending to be James T. Kirk in James T. Kirk's body. But in reality, isn't this pretty implausible, even with strange alien technology? Could your body really be a bare general-purpose machine, waiting to be programmed with any software that will fit?
There's a slightly different separation of mind and body in George Plimpton's mad vision of himself playing golf, a separation between management and labor. The plan seems to be that the admirals in Plimpton's head have all the technical knowledge needed to hit a golf ball correctly -- all the workers in the joints have to do is carry out their orders and the ball will go where it's supposed to go. It's a very twentieth-century idea, separating the mental and physical work of industry, like Frederick Taylor or Henry Ford, and it's something we'd like to think we've gone beyond in the twenty-first century. Working without thinking is dehumanizing (I'll skip a third philosophy lecture I'm not qualified to give, on the Marxist concept of alienation of labor), but the real reason that our capitalist system has gone beyond it is probably that the idea of workers working without thinking just doesn't work very well. Modern managers learn about teamwork and empowering workers, as in the Germans and Japanese building better cars with teams that care about their work and have the technical knowledge to think about it, or the Federal Express drivers with computers and bar code readers managing their own inventory from inside their trucks. A well-run enterprise has its decisions made at the appropriate level, so that the top managers neither micromanage their workers nor leave them to drift without guidance. My fellow board members of this Society will recognize that idea, because it's been dominating our thinking about how this particular enterprise should be run.
In computer science we often refer to the difference between top-down and bottom-up thinking. To solve a problem top-down, you divide it into pieces, then divide the pieces into pieces, and so on until the pieces are small enough that you know how to solve them. It's the way we teach students to write simple computer programs, where they can understand the problem all at once and see how to decompose it. With more complicated problems, top-down thinking alone doesn't work, just as Plimpton's admirals simply don't understand the problem well enough to give their workers exactly the right orders. You need bottom-up thinking as well -- you solve toy problems, simplified versions of what you really want to do, to build up your ability to address harder problems. In short, you play.
(I ran across a definition of play recently, in a New Yorker article on children's playgrounds, an article that I believe we'll be hearing more about in the poetry service in three weeks. Anthropologist Melvin Kammer defines play, human or animal, as "inefficient, partly repetitive movements in varied sequences with no apparent purpose." Keep that idea in mind -- I'll get back to it.)
Researchers in robotics, like my UMass colleague Rod Grupen, have found that the top-down approach also doesn't work very well for designing control mechanisms for robots to let them do things like pick up objects or screw in a light bulb. (Think about how many muscles in your hand do how many different things as you screw in a light bulb.) They've had much more success working bottom-up -- they give the robot a motivation and let it play around until it discovers a useful control mechanism. The reason, again, is that moving a whole lot of muscles at the same time to hit a golf ball or screw in a light bulb is complicated, apparently too complicated to be managed top-down all at once. But simple actions can be combined, with practice, to do complicated things.
If there are admirals inside Tiger Woods' head, I don't think they need to say very much, because they have complete confidence in their crew. After all, the workers at Tigers' joints are experienced veterans, because Tiger has practiced and played golf obsessively since he was a small child, taking who knows how many thousands of swings in that time. When he swings now, the admirals (I'm picturing Toshiro Mifune) offer a few words of Zen Buddhist wisdom, and the crew springs into coordinated action like the crew of a yacht in the America's Cup race. I imagine that from Tiger's point of view, In the words of the Ben Lee song I played at the beginning of the service, or of Tiger's most famous corporate sponsor, he "just does it".
The way I've come to think of it is that Tiger doesn't think about swinging the club, he swings the club. Tiger may well think of it in terms of a story from his own religious tradition. A student asked the Buddha what he did before he was enlightened. "I chopped wood and carried water". And after he was enlightened? "I chop wood and carry water." If the team in the body is sufficiently well integrated, it can carry on without very much direction from management.
There's a physiological basis to this notion of the workers taking care of the jobs themselves. When you react to something normally, a signal goes from your sensors, like your eyes or serves, up to your brain, your brain decides what to do, and a signal goes back down from your brain to your effectors, the muscles. A lot like that battleship, really. But _reflex_ actions have a shorter loop, like sensor to spinal cord to effector or even shorter, and trained actions can become reflexes. You can probably think of times when your body seemed to do something by itself -- I've felt this playing frisbee, when the disc is suddenly in my hand without my appearing to have had anything to do with catching it.
When you know how to do something well, like driving a car, or sparring in karate, or singing, it is your experience and ability that gives you the freedom to just do it. Just doing it doesn't mean that you're not thinking, or that your brain is not engaged. It means that the component parts of your action are things you can just do -- the workers have got a firm handle on it -- so you can put them together in creative ways. Some people are better than others at doing this -- they have more of what the developmental psychologist Howard Gardner calls bodily kinesthetic intelligence, one of his "multiple intelligences" -- but anyone's ability can be enhanced and developed by the right training.
When I first thought of giving a sermon on this topic, I had grave doubts about my qualification to do it. Here I am, in the same room with Lynne Marie Wanamaker, a martial artist and profesional fitness trainer, and I'm planning to talk about integrating your mind and body, physical training, and wellness. Who am I to say anything meaningful about this? Well, I was a fairly good wrestler in high school, and I now sing and act -- two areas where the same interplay of mind and body comes in. But my primary physical activity these days is walking my dogs. And it's actually my dogs that I want to talk about next.
I began thinking about this sermon last spring when I had one dog, a female golden retriever named Cardie. Like most goldens, she is beautiful and elegant. One of the very few things I know about yoga is the "downward dog" position -- head near the ground, arms spread forward, back completely arched. Cardie has a beautiful downward dog, putting her whole body into it. Walking through the woods at Northfield Mount Hermon with Cardie off her leash, I began to see that she was in many ways a role model for "just doing it". She runs through the woods, into swamps, fast, slow, near me, far away from me -- rather than thinking about being a dog, she is being a dog. Or maybe a wolf? No, not an adult wolf, who would be worrying about finding food. Like all domestic dogs, she's like a wolf pup.
Have you heard of the notion in evolutionary theory called neotony? It's comparatively easy for a species to evolve by retaining juvenile characteristics longer into adulthood. We, for example, are much more like baby apes than like adult apes, with our large heads, lack of hair, and flexible brains. When humans started keeping wolves around in their caves, they selected for puppy characteristics -- cuteness, playfulness, submissiveness, ability to learn -- and our domestic dogs are the result. Cardie, in particular, is big on "inefficient, partly repetitive movements in varied sequences with no apparent purpose" -- she zooms through the forest not in search of food but just to play, just to be a dog. I, on the other hand, spend most of my walks in the forests thinking about being a human. I compose lectures, think over the cares of my day, and sometimes even write sermons.
Later last spring, I came to realize that this difference between Cardie and me was not a simple matter of species. We acquired a second dog, a male cairn terrier puppy named Duncan. (Toto in The Wizard of Oz was a cairn.) Duncan cannot be trusted off leash, so he spends his walks obsessively exploring everything within the twenty-six foot range of his extendible leash -- that is, when I'm not holding the button down to keep him away from cars or poison ivy. Since he was bred for catching vermin rather than to assist in duck hunting, and because most creatures he encounters are much larger than he is, Duncan is clinically paranoid -- he barks at any suspicious noise or movement, especially children on bicycles for some reason, and usually interacts badly with other dogs on his walks. He's worked out a companionable relationship with Cardie, based on species-appropriate behavior like wrestling and racing around the house, and is usually pretty good with the cat, who is almost his size. With humans, he's affectionate if a bit overexuberant.
But on his walks, I can see Duncan overthinking, thinking about being a dog instead of being a dog, just as George Plimpton was overthinking his golf swing. As a male dog, he is always looking for a good place to mark territory, something I'm not used to as I've only had females. He goes into barking spasms at places where there were hostile dogs on prior occasions, whether they are there now or not. And like that other famous canine overthinker, Wile E. Coyote of the Warner Brothers cartoons, he hatches plots. When Cardie is lagging behind us, he will curl up at the side of the road, apparently trying to impersonate a small grey boulder. When Cardie comes by, he bursts out and gives chase, for the few seconds until Cardie's longer legs take her more than twenty-six feet away from me.
As may be clear, I identify a bit with Duncan and am a bit envious of Cardie's calm and even temper, and her free and easy play. Rather than thinking through everything, I would like to just set my thinking at rest and be completely aware of my surroundings. In fact, what I want is exactly what Taran had under the influence of Adaon's magic brooch -- he was fully awake to the world around him, as if he had been sleepwalking through the rest of his life. Later in the story, of course, Taran has to voluntarily give up the brooch in order to fulfill his mission, but he still remembers what it was like to be fully aware. This gives him a great feeling of loss, but also gives him a knowledge of his potential that helps him grow, to be a man and even to become a king at the end of the last book.
Wouldn't it be a great gift to feel what it was like to be fully aware, even for a short time? Taran had this gift by magic, but Adaon earned it as a bard, spending his life wandering the land, studying music and poetry along with nature and the people he met. In the real world, we have to earn this gift as well -- some get there by meditation, some by prayer, some by physical disciplines like martial arts. I've devoted a lifetime to mathematics, which can certainly give a feeling like no other of completely understanding something.
I think I also get there sometimes by singing and acting. When I know a song, better than the one I sang today, I can sing it without thinking about singing it, which allows me to feel it and, just maybe, convey the feeling in my singing. Once I know my lines and blocking on stage, I can explore the range of feelings that I can convey to my fellows on stage and to the audience. It takes me beyond my everyday thinking, if only for a moment or two at a time.
As we all experienced earlier in this service in our meditation, athletes, actors, and singers warm up before they practice or perform. It has the physiological purpose of getting their body ready for whatever unusual demands are going to be placed upon it. But it's also a ritual to provide focus, especially for athletes or actors or singers in a team. We do simple things together so that we can then better do complicated things together.
We actors have another ritual called "strike" at the end of a run of performances, where we take apart the sets and put all of our materials into storage for the next show or the next season. Many of you might have experienced something similar when a group of friends gets together to move a household. Yesterday I spent four and a half hours moving lumber, set pieces, and folding chairs on and off a truck, to finish the Hampshire Shakespeare Company's summer season. It's a necessary chore, but it's also a ritual to mark the dissolution of the company that's spent so much time together putting on Hamlet and The Tempest, so that we can go on with our separate lives until our company reforms, with some of the same people and some different ones, next spring. And strike is also really fun, at least for the first four hours or so, and a well-managed strike gets done in four hours. Top-down management of a strike doesn't work. There are the producers and technical directors who are the only ones who know where everything has to go, but if they had to give every order to every actor and crew member to move every little thing, we would need days rather than hours. In a good strike the managers get teams onto tasks, with the bare minimum of instruction necessary, and set them going. For us, the workers, the intensity sometimes gets to the point where our work becomes play, and our joy in each other's company rivals the joy from singing or acting together. And when it's done, we're ready to move on.
Thinking is very important. Tiger Woods of all people, I suppose, should know the importance of thinking about what he was doing instead of just doing it. I'm a thinker -- by profession I think about mathematics and computing and teach students to think about it in productive ways. And Unitarian Universalism tends to be a religion of thinkers as well, from our history and from the sort of people we seem to attract. We can't and shouldn't stop thinking. But having a healthy mind in a healthy body also sometimes involves just doing it, just being a human instead of thinking about being a human, experiencing what it is to be fully alive and awake.
There are many ways we can see what our body can learn and know and enjoy, without or mind necessarily getting in the way. We can just do a sport. We can just do a physical art, a song, a dance. We can just walk in the woods, with or without dogs. We can just work with our hands. We can just play. In short, again in Ben Lee's words, we can just do it, whatever it is. And we can do that both alone and together, in this Society and in other societies, because we have much to share and much to learn from one another.
Last modified 18 August 2010