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gurugeorge comments on The lymphatic system is found to connect to the Central Nervous System - Less Wrong Discussion
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I remember reading a book many years ago which talked about the "hormonal bath" in the body being actually part of cognition, such that thinking of the brain/CNS as the functional unit is wrong (it's necessary but not sufficient).
This ties in with the philosophical position of Externalism (I'm very much into the Process Externalism of Riccardo Manzotti). The "thinking unit" is really the whole body - and actually finally the whole world (not in the Panpsychist sense, quite, but rather in the sense of any individual instance of cognition being the peak of a pyramid that has roots that go all the way through the whole).
I'm as intrigued and hopeful about the possibility of uploading, etc., as the next nerd, but this sort of stuff has always led me to be cautious about the prospects of it.
There may also a lot more to be discovered about the brain and body too, in the area of some connection between the fascia and the immune system (cf. the anecdotal connection between things like yoga and "internal" martial arts and health).
I'm really skeptical of claims like « the "thinking unit" is really the whole body », they tend to discard quantitative considerations for purely qualitative ones.
Yes, the brain is influenced, and influences, the whole body. But that doesn't mean the whole body has the same importance in the thinking. The brain is also influenced by lots of external factors (such as ambient light or sounds, ...) if as soon as there is a "connection" between two parts you say "it's the whole system that does the processing", you'll just end up considering the solar system as a whole, or even the entire event horizon sphere.
There is countless evidence that, while your body and your environment have significant influence on your thinking, it's just influence, not fundamentally being part of the cognition. For example, people who have graft or amputations rarely change personality, memory or cognitive abilities in any way comparable to what brain damage can do.
We have more than anecdotal evidence. While there still things to be discovered about the interaction between fascia and the immune system, it's already quite clear that if fascia get's too loose and cells rub against each other too much they die and you get inflammation.
Macrophage also have it harder to get around when tissue is very tight.