I’ve always thought it odd that human beings (and perhaps all other creatures, if we know) are equipped to be aware of, and be in control of our “outer existence” (my term), but not our inner existence.
We can’t tell our various organs to behave a way we might want them to, nor can we detect that something inside us is wrong (like having organ failure or the presence of a growing tumor) by “knowing” it the way I would know that my foot is cold, or my muscles are achy or my head needs sleep. In short, most of our inner workings are beyond our awareness and control.
To illustrate, I can feel if my foot is, say, in a bucket of ice water. And I can pull my foot out of the bucket – or not – if I want. Yet I can’t, say, tell my intestines to hold off sending my just-eaten breakfast down the pipeline because I know that I won’t have access to a bathroom all day. Nor can I even feel/know exactly where in the pipeline the meal is.
Why is this? And – I know this is going to sound weird – is there the possibility that this flaw (IMO) might one day be corrected? I mean, if there is a whole neural detection and control system at work in our body/brain that is just not “plugged into” our conscious mind, could we maybe one day tap into it? Or do all those unfelt and uncontrolled inner functions just take care of themselves separate and unwired from the greater inner workings of our body’s system?
It’s* my * spleen, dammit, and I want to control it!
WAG: Given that people are more than willing to knowingly poison themselves (alcohol, tobacco, etc.) I’d say being able to do something like give yourself an adrenaline boost whenever you want would pretty quickly lead to some bad consequences.
Plus it’d be a shame if while concentrating on where your lunch is in your system, you walk off a cliff.
Not to mention that I can’t think of any evolutionary advantage. I know from experience that if I’m in a situation where I can use the bathroom whenever I want (at an office job) I go at a different frequency than if I’m on an airplane for 12 hours.
I remember reading a book by Orson Scott Card where the main character was able to monitor all of his body functions, and I thought a lot about that at the time.
Isn’t meditation or something like it sort of like what you’re saying. Where you calm your mind and slow your heart and relax your muscles?
I don’t think I would like to actually do what you’re saying. I would have to divorce my good friend vodka or else here the never ending nagging of my liver telling me to quit trying to murder it.
I guess it could have some good uses like the poster who recently started a thread about his/her stomach was filling up with blood and they had to go to the hospital. It would be nice if his body had said, “hey were bleeding here take us to the hospital” long before they felt the symptoms and it had become very serious.
Well, I think that the evolutionary advantage comes from making these functions ‘automatic’, in that the conscious part of your brain is then free to concentrate its efforts on higher-level thinking.
It also has a bit of a ‘fail-safe’ function, in that processes like heartbeats, breathing, digestion, etc., continue to happen when you are asleep, unconscious, distracted, etc.
It seems like a side effect of making these processes happen automatically is that it also makes them involuntary – you no longer have any conscious way to control them. That’s just the way it happened to evolve, and since it works OK, it hasn’t changed.