I have a mind to raid the fridge. “My” elbow, “my” knee, “my” perception, “my” propensity… it’s like there is a possessor-in-keeping of all aspects of this being. Semantics? Maybe: but there are so many ways to be self-referential without invoking a possessive. Thoroughgoing agnostic as I am, I can still entertain the notion that the overall franchise that comprises this writer takes up a lot more room than my given cubic meter, and the center of identity lies elsewhere. All this while awaiting news that the “sense of self” has been has been successfully and reproducibly identified.

“Emworlded” — yes!

In the series I’ve been doing on my old home grounds, from photographs of the territory, I’ve been reintroduced to emotions and visions that I never had language for before — that is, visual language, paint that could approximate something of the feelings I had for what I saw. As a child, I simply had no exposure to visual knowledge, other than what I made up. Music, yes, poetry, yes, but we had no (visual) art books, no (visual) art lessons, no art interest available, either in the family or in school. So to see the world of my childhood, now that I have such tools as viridian and burnt umber, available to me is something miraculous.

This doesn’t deny your point about spoken language, by the way; I spent enough time gazing, trying to understand, to comprehend, to fix, those views of Pine Creek and the mists/greens/waters that the visions remained with me all these years and were only recently unlocked by the tools. So I was “emworlded” so strongly that 60 years later, the world I was immersed in still glows in my brain/mind/body.

I don’t know about getting endorphin release from lying on a beach in Florida. In snowy Michigan, I am more likely to experience it while cross country skiing.

About computers, ask Steve, our artificial intelligence expert.

Are peptides analogous in some oceanic sense to the long-sought fountain of youth? I can imagine elders crowding the beaches of Florida and elsewhere, the better to bathe in the rejuvenating pep tides.

What would be your take on the relationship between a computer and a computer program?

Rudolph Steiner was no help.

I, too, lean towards the idea that brain/mind/body are intertwined, having spent a sabbatical in Candace Pert’s NIH lab, where, a long time ago, I studied ‘Molecules of Emotion’ in the limbic system of the brain and learned that immune cells respond to the same peptides.

Supposedly, Rene Descartes’ notion that animals are simply machines without feelings led to animal vivisections without killing their pain with anesthetics. As I understand, from reading secondary sources, Darwin rectified this way of thinking by telling 19th century people that both humans and animals have emotions.

And how foolish of Darwin not to include Man (women, too!) as one of the Animals.