A common image for popular accounts of the “The Mind” is a brain in a bell jar. The message is that inside that disembodied lump of neural tissue is everything that is you.

It’s a scary image but misleading. A far more dangerous idea is that brains cannot become minds without bodies, that two-way interactions between mind and body are crucial to thought and health, and the brain may partly think in terms of the motor actions it encodes for the body’s muscles to carry out. Alun Anderson

www.edge.org is presenting thinkers around the world this year with the question “What is your dangerous idea?” Many of the psychologists’ answers are variations of “there is no God,” but many contributers deal with issues of science, society, and the person.

The above is very similar to Orthodox Christian view of the integrated nature of the “person.” We often speak of the mind, body, and soul as if they were distinct and separate, but they’re not. They’re aspects of the single hypostasis that is each person. There is no “mind” separate from the “body.” The “soul” is as integral to the body and the mind as they are to it. They’re inseparable. That’s why “death” is such an unnatural condition and is the ultimate conclusion of the sickness of sin (which fundamentally is our desire to individuate ourselves from the source of live.. God).