Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Final Paragraph

1. The interoceptive turn is a historical step to the other side of our mind’s looking glass, into the heart of our complex organism, reconciling us to our mortal embodiment, forcing us to consider our mental makeup with humility as just one aspect of biology – a far cry from the posthumanist future that Yuval Noah Harari and others warn us about.
2. It does not dissolve the mystery of how we are able to think and speak sophisticated thoughts, create art and meaning, or indeed investigate self and world: science does not replace experience, and though it is indispensable to serious thought about human nature, and to the advancement of clinical care, so is a humanist eye on what the best of science can tell us about ourselves.
3. Yet this new picture has a transformative power. It can help understand, to an extent, how we relate to each other as embodied beings, how we feel at each moment of our lives, why Woolf’s ‘creature within’ feels what she does when unwell.
4. It can help us understand each other in our animal nature so as to regain harmony with nature, and in our inherently social nature so as to regain harmony with each other – and to maintain our psychophysical integrity in the face of the ‘procession of changes’ that Woolf writes of.
5. No window pane into the self is perfectly transparent. But we are clearing up some smudges.