Probing Bodies for Answers

I am intrigued by the innovations of science on the body ever since I visited the Body World's II exhibit this weekend at the Ontario Science Centre. This exhibit featured real cadavers, preserved through a technique developed by Gunther von Hagen called "plasticization". The bodies were split open in various ways in a variety of positions, from the "pole vaulter" to the "skateboarder", as well as various dissections, from the "ring man", who had rings of flesh from the superficial to the interior, and "drawer man" who's chest opened up like a set of drawers to display his tightly packed innards. These served as diagrams of nerves, muscles, skeletal structure, and cardiovascular organs.

There were also natural irregularities, such as a man who had six fingers and toes on each limb as a result of a congenital disorder. There were tumors, brain hemorrhages, and smoker's lungs. It was all a little bit shocking to stand beside a corpse, look over at him, and take notice of his tattoos. I'm sure part of what attracted several thousand visitors in one afternoon was the lurid appeal of seeing dead bodies, whether we would like to admit that or not. However, I was reminded again of how surprised I was to see various orthopedic innovations, such as a hip replacement, and an artificial heart valve, when I read this story, about a baby who received a heart transplant before natural birth, on Valentine's day, because that was the critical time. Is that an example of preserving life, or in some sense, speeding it up?

This idea that modern science can save us, or build a monster, is what led to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It has also allowed us to generate brand new heart tissue from stem cells, or make blind frogs see again. It boggled my mind to see a metal kneecap shining on a skeleton, like a gold tooth amongst pearly whites. Seeing a little metal valve in the middle of a gushy heart seemed so strange. It was like something you'd expect to see in a gas tank. It really reminded me that we humans are just hardware. We're manipulable. Our brains are like a motherboard, we can play around with electrodes, and do some circuit-breaking if we like. If we do have souls, do they morph as our bodies do, taking on new shapes as we're weathered by the world? We're flesh and bones, and while we may be something else if you dissect us according to another category of being, when we die, we die. Nietzsche was thus quoted for that very reason, right in the exhibit: "body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body."

That baby's life was saved by a transplanted organ the size of a golf ball. Another life (the surgeon's) that itself might have been saved in history too because of innovation, altered reality in a physical way. We see from this line of thinking, that choices can have an exponential result. If our bodies can perform feats to change their own structure and others, selecting which features survive by supplanting them in a mishmash of natural and interventionist parts, puts us in control of the conditions that we will thrive in. So how do we know that we are only our bodies? Might we not be a combination of many, and if so, which part of that consciousness that chooses, was simply a reaction? Which part of it is free will?

Filed under Philosophy