When I first encountered mind-body dualism as a philosophy, I pictured monks frustrated with their bodies wishing their minds could be dissociated from them so that they could avoid the ‘temptations’ associated with ‘the flesh’. Supposedly ‘pure’ minds are not troubled by the need for food and water, thermal comfort, sexual fantasies, or urgent needs to defacate while trying to concentrate on something. No wonder religions tend to idealize a disembodied afterlife where our souls persist after our flesh decays. Remembering that, in evolutionary terms at least, the various parts of our bodies are the emergent products of networks of interdependent collaborations among cells that have specialized their functions, it is not difficult to imagine that one part of the body might become irritated with the behaviour of another. But mind and body seem to be a particularly vulnerable fault line.

When I become ill, or my tinnitus worsens, or whatever internal pipework in my face it is that means I hear my breathing rather like the space-walk scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, I feel that irritation intensely. Sometimes, there is even no bodily provocation for such irritation at all. I have wished I didn’t have to breathe, that my heart would stop beating, that I didn’t need sleep, or that my body would cease causing me the discomforts associated with the symptoms of illness. If I had a robot body, for example, then a malfunctioning part could simply be replaced using a few spanners and a bit of solder. It would be a routine occurrence, perhaps as part of an annual service one could do oneself, rather than some major, potentially life-threatening undertaking requiring specialist skills.

The experience of some form of dysembodiment, as we might term a persistent desire to inhabit a different body, is prevalent in contemporary society, and causes significant psychological discomfort, and in the worst cases, severe mental illness. The concept of dysembodiment cannot distinguish among the sources of the problem: be they in the mind, the body, the environment, or some combination of these. For example, a long-term medical problem that might make one wish one had a different body could be caused by an inherited condition, stress, social norms about what people’s bodies should look like, and/or pollution. Whatever the cause, the issue would be addressed by living in a different body. Though I could hardly say I suffer much from dysembodiment, when I do find myself whimsically wishing I had a different body because of some inconvenience or another, I tend to imagine it being a machine rather than flesh. Why replace my body parts with some other randomly emergent meat, as opposed to carefully designed, precision engineered, and, critically, replacable and perhaps even upgradable machined parts?

Another alternative could be to do away with embodiment altogether. However, if we imagine brains as information processing machines, ‘pure mind’ is computation with no physical engine making it happen — I cannot conceive of a means by which such a thing would be possible. If this isn’t just my limited imagination, but a fundamental law of the universe, then one way or another, embodiment is something minds must accept in order to be minds at all. Then, if nothing else, increasing entropy means that the body will decay. Bodies allow minds to exist, but they also malfunction and need maintenance, which irritates minds and makes them wish they didn’t have bodies.