Dissolving Minds and Bodies

In this short essay, I willconnect scientists from five fields through Spinoza’s concept of mind and body in order to reveal the impor-tance of the body, especially in relation to spatial design. Spinoza’s philosophy states that body and mind exist in parallel with each oth-er. Spinoza says that without perception through the body there is no mind, and that this limited mind contained in a body, with skin as its boundary, is part of the infinite intellect. In turn, the infinite intel-lect allows individuals to explore thinking what one experiences with one’s body. Biochemist, Rudolph Schoenheimer (1889-1942) focused on the es-sential role of the body in providing input for the mind, what he called “dynamic state of body constituents.” His experiment consisted in feeding amino acid-marked food to adult mice. After three days, he found that the mice’s excretions were almost entirely non-marked materials. The marked materials were found inside the body. What it says is that, very quickly, food became part of mice’s body and also that some part of the body became waste. 98% of our body’s matter changes in one year. Materially, we are the same as the food we had today, as dynamic as water that travels from the body to the river, to an other animal’s body and so on. Our body is continuously changing, dissolving and taking part in the material world. Although there are different scales of time in its process, the principle of con-tinuous flow is the same in the entire living/non-living world, whether at a peak in the desert or in the chair where you are sitting right now. To see it from Spinoza’s view, perception through body is an exten-sion of mind. What if we take into account that the mind now keeps changing its components, as an infinite cycle of material recompos-es into the infinite intellect?