Pedantic irk:
The oddly limiting language surrounding the holistic view on what a human is really annoys me. We're not human plus extra. For example; we're not humans plus microbes. Being a human req...
@nprofile1q...
If you really think about it, we require comfortable temperature, air, water, and food. Without each of those things, we're not alive for long. So there's no separating us from the biosphere as a whole. We tend to think of our lungs as a bodily organ, but without the vegetation which produces the oxygen, lungs do us no good. So in effect the trees are as much an organ of our body as our lungs, and the sun and shadow of earth is an organ of our homeostasis, and so on. The separation between us and those outer organs is no different than a blood cell floating around freely in our arteries and veins. It's just an illusion of separateness.
Similarly every cell of our body has it's own walls and boundaries which could be likened to the outside of our body on a macroscopic scale. Each cell signals the cells around it and the body as a whole when it's needs aren't met. What we call "the self" is more like the central computer on the bridge of the star-ship enterprise. When we eat too much chili-pepper, our stomach signals the brain just as though it were Scotty shouting over the intercom that there's a fire in engineering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holon_(philosophy)
If you really think about it, we require comfortable temperature, air, water, and food. Without each of those things, we're not alive for long. So there's no separating us from the biosphere as a whole. We tend to think of our lungs as a bodily organ, but without the vegetation which produces the oxygen, lungs do us no good. So in effect the trees are as much an organ of our body as our lungs, and the sun and shadow of earth is an organ of our homeostasis, and so on. The separation between us and those outer organs is no different than a blood cell floating around freely in our arteries and veins. It's just an illusion of separateness.
Similarly every cell of our body has it's own walls and boundaries which could be likened to the outside of our body on a macroscopic scale. Each cell signals the cells around it and the body as a whole when it's needs aren't met. What we call "the self" is more like the central computer on the bridge of the star-ship enterprise. When we eat too much chili-pepper, our stomach signals the brain just as though it were Scotty shouting over the intercom that there's a fire in engineering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holon_(philosophy)
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