The Limits Of An Embodied Mind

I wrote this as a response to a post on a mailing list:

We're only done when I can't tempt your curiosity anymore. Here's my latest attempt:

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lakoff/lakoff_p1.html

This is the statement that made me think of sending you this link:

"We are neural beings," states Berkeley cognitive scientist George Lakoff. "Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything - only what our embodied brains permit."
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A while back, perhaps on a different blog, I wrote about my reaction to reading George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's seminal book on metaphors entitled Metaphors We Live By. My not so unusual reaction was that what they wrote about metaphors blew my previous inept conclusions about metaphors away. I have other inept conclusions aplenty.
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"His new book Philosophy In The Flesh, coauthored by Mark Johnson, makes the following points: "The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical."
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I doubt I'll ever get around to buying their new book unless it pops up in my life serendipitously. I'll certainly treasure reading it if it does. Presently, they've given me enough to contemplate for a long, long time, by freely providing the statement "Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical." in the review of the new book.

That's a humdinger of a conclusion in my world view. The respect they've previously conjured from me with their initial book sets me up to accept their new ideas with less than my usual skepticism, because I already believe that they got the lowdown on understanding the use and practice of me-taphors.

I never knew nothing about metaphors until I got curious about neurolinguistic programming. I didn't know much about what linguistics was about until about that same time. I still don't know much formally about these subjects, only when they're useful to me as a sham(ed)man or no. Whether they're useful to me as a prophet with an audience of One or no.

If the first human beings showed up in the interior of Africa, where the only source of vitamin D was through their skin, and they weren't getting enough vitamin D through their skin, and the pigment darkened as they tried to get more and more of it through the skin, and the darker pigment make it more and more difficult to get it, they would be forced to migrate to where there were plenty of fish to get it fram as a natural supplement.

Getting vitamin D through fish oils as a supplement meant that humans and bears could live without much sunlight in distant lands where they didn't have many natural enemies. When they both came out of those caves from hibernating all winter, then catching salmon from the Spring run made men and bears natural enemies in a place they migrated to in order to avoid other natural predators.

It gives me pleasure to think about the lack Vitamin D as motivator for migration. The role of Vitamin D hasn't been known for a very long time. The fact that the skin can provide all we'd normally need below 40 degrees latitude all year long if it's exposed to enough direct sunlight, but eventually being in direct sunlight that much caused the skin to become pigmented and that reduced the amount of Vitamin D the skin could manufacture.

I don't know any other sources of Vitamin D than fish oil. There are probably some vegetable or animal sources but not as rich or concentrated as fish oil. Meat eaters probably get much of their Vitamin D from it being in the meat of the animals they devour. That makes me think that if there are vegetable sources of Vitamin D, then traditional foods must have the most of it.

Yep, I was right. I stopped and Googled up "What are the natural sources of Vitamin D?" The link below was one of the first ones listed on the results page:

http://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/vitamind.asp

In regard to Lakoff and Johnson's conclusion that I can't think outside of my embodied mind? Is not the internet now a part of my embodied mind? I wondering how obsessed I could possibly be with Vitamin D if I had to use books and the local library to do my research. I probably wouldn't. But, with the internet and a natural language internet search engine like Google to do my research, then I can think outside the box of my physical embodiment. Cosmic consciousness and the Akashic Records not withstanding.