The more I think about the words we use in the English language to separate things and name them, the more I realize how much confusion that can cause. Words are designed to create clarification. If I am standing across the room and I say, honey, can you please pass me my glass, without those words I would have to grunt and gesture and leave too much to the imagination. But words can also mislead us. When we use a word like brain, or mind, and treat it as something separate from the body, we begin to think and live as though the separation is real. It is not.
The body is the vessel that keeps the brain alive. It is the carrier, the medium the brain sits in so that it can think and contemplate and make choices that keep the body going, which in turn keeps the mind going. The two are inseparable. If they separate, one dies, and that is permanent. We should think of the brain as the center for awareness and the body as a sensor, a collection of instruments pointing inward and outward simultaneously. Eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin. Beyond these, there are subtler senses, our sense of time, our sense of orientation in space, our capacity to feel the quality of a moment without being able to name exactly what we are feeling. These inner senses are real and worth paying attention to, even when they resist precise description.
The mind is the brain in action, doing what it was designed to do through millions of years of evolutionary refinement. It thinks constantly. Even during sleep, even during dreams, the mind remains active, processing, associating, generating imagery and narrative while disconnected from the external world. Dreaming is a kind of controlled hallucination, the brain running its programs without external input. When we open our eyes, we re-enter the shared field of collective experience, the world that other creatures, and especially other humans, are navigating alongside us.
When you see a building, ten thousand people standing near you see the same building. Some find it ugly. Some find it impressive. Some use it as a landmark. Some do not notice it at all. But the building is there. To argue otherwise is a philosophical exercise with no practical value. Try walking through it. You cannot. You will break your bones on it. That is sufficient evidence. Yes, you could point out that there is more empty space between the molecules that compose that wall than there is actual matter. True. But there are molecules, and there are fields, and there are forces governing the behavior of particles we have not yet fully characterized. Something is happening. It is causing other things to happen. Start with that and build from there.
The mind is not only dependent on the external world for survival cues. We are physically dependent on what we collect from outside ourselves, oxygen from the air, nutrients from food, hydrogen and oxygen from water, to replace what the body loses continuously just by being alive. We are dependent on relationship with everything around us. The boundary between self and world is far more porous than the word self implies.
The brain is designed to evaluate and find ways to survive. It is equipped with mechanisms for grief, for laughter, for violence, for tenderness, for love. It is extraordinarily complex, and nature asked a great deal of it. We must protect ourselves against predators, environmental catastrophe, food scarcity, disease, and conflict, while simultaneously being gentle and regulated enough to raise small human creatures into people with positive self-esteem and the capacity for connection. Nature was genuinely ambitious when it built us.
Do not mistake this for saying we are fully equipped by instinct. We are not. It is not instinctual to make fire, to walk upright, to communicate in language, to identify which plants are safe and which will kill us. There is an enormous range of activities we must learn from others. Left entirely to ourselves, in states of anxiety and scarcity, we tend to default to the lowest-cost tactics available, dominance, competition, consumption, because they require the fewest calories and the least time. They work in the short term. They mirror what we observe in nature among creatures with less cognitive flexibility than we have.
But evolution appears to be moving, slowly and imperfectly, away from pure dominance and toward collaboration. The pressure to sustain life over time seems to favor creatures that work together, that build systems capable of supporting more life rather than simply consuming it. The age of the dinosaurs ended in part because the energy demands of those creatures exceeded what the planet could sustainably provide. Life, having nearly extinguished itself before, seems to have learned something from that. It diversified. It distributed. It found ways to convert sunlight into energy, and then to pass that energy through increasingly complex chains of organisms, each dependent on the others.
Humans occupy a strange position in this chain. We are capable of thriving on plants alone. We are also capable of eating the animals that eat the plants. We adapt to what is available and what we understand. When sufficient plant-based calories are difficult to obtain, flesh foods become practical. Tracking and killing small prey requires intelligence and improvisation, both of which we have in abundance. Growing corn, watermelon, kale, or oranges from soil requires knowledge, patience, and stable conditions that have not always been available to most of the human population across most of human history.
It is worth noting that most of the world's human population lives in the northern hemisphere, far from the tropical latitudes where plant food grows most abundantly and continuously. Whether this is because those regions were once more temperate and we simply stayed when conditions changed, or because we became creatures of habit and built systems of property and nation that made migration increasingly difficult, is an open question. What it means practically is that we became a species that transports food across vast distances, a feat that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors and that we now take entirely for granted.
When you eat a coconut from Thailand, you are consuming something shaped by Thai soil, Thai weather, Thai sunlight. The food carries information about the place it came from, subtly and below the threshold of conscious awareness, the way a letter carries something of the person who wrote it beyond the words themselves. Our foods connect us to places and climates we will never visit. In this quiet way, the global movement of food is also a movement of consciousness, of shared biological experience distributed across a species that is far more interconnected than it usually realizes.
The brain did not evolve in isolation. Neither did the body. Neither did the person. We are relational creatures embedded in a relational world, and the language we use to separate things, mind from body, self from environment, individual from species, is useful for navigation but misleading as a description of what is actually happening.
What is actually happening is that everything is connected, and we are somewhere in the middle of it, trying to figure out what to do next.