Since I was small, I’d lived my life through screens, one way or another. For the last quarter-century or so, I had been piloting the machine of flesh and sinew to keep my mind going, rarely engaging with the machine itself. This was a mistake.

The machine was necessary, but unremarkable. It tolerated the relative abuse I’d put it through, really through inaction rather than specific events. I rarely sought out physical sensation - the mind was far more interesting. It won’t surprise you to learn I was a bookworm.

Over the last couple of years, I’d felt a dissonance start to amplify, and this came to a head with the loss of my father-in-law. A little cliché that a death in the family forces you to stare at your own mortality. The machine was fallible. As much as I enjoy a good mecha story, I really needed to be in the world than just piloting the machine and experiencing life in the abstract.

Embodied cognition teaches us that thought emerges only in the full context of the body - the collection of organs that sense the world and ground us in it. Merleau-Ponty, godfather of phenomenology, takes this even further - “Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.”

Screens had compressed the world. From my family computer in the dinging room, to my personal laptops and smartphones (a term that now feels very dated), my first relationships formed. I was a richer, more vibrant person on the internet - the person I felt I truly was. The compression also compressed my thoughts, being ignorant to how powerful the “shower thought” was, or the thoughts I had while in those liminal spaces between the screen and whatever necessary location I had to pilot my machine to.

After tending to my father-in-law’s affairs, I resolved to stop living in my head quite so much. Partially out of fear of the inevitable, partially forced to reckon that I was no longer a twenty-something with unlimited possibilities and all the time to explore them.

I experienced a kind of humility in rejoining my body after years away. The nostalgia of climbing over rocks and feeling sand between my toes, combined with the acute realisation that you are capable of both more and less than you used to be. I realised that my body had held on to so much–tension long ignored, fatigue overruled, postponed joy and deferred sadness. It had always been trying to communicate these things, but I just wasn’t listening. The body keeps the score indeed.

A few things changed. The first was moving with intent. I started with walking, then kettlebells, and now my regular routine of exercise 6 days a week. Running, oddly enough, is the thing that has resonated with me the most, with lifting being an on-again-off-again relationship I’ve had for a long time. I was listening to my body, for what felt like the first time.

I began to think differently—not just with different thoughts, but through a different mode of being. Less control, more noticing. Less analysis, more relation. The world became thicker, stranger, more alive. I wasn’t watching it any more. I was in it.

I am no longer just a pilot. I am the machine, and the machine is me, being in the world with all we’ve got.

In a world being rapidly changed by simulacra of minds, being truly embodied has shown how stark the differences between our minds and these simulacra are. They can put on a good show, but they aren’t concious. Can a disembodied mind even perform things like spatial reasoning, with no concept of “space”? What would happen if there was an embodied simulacrum?

What if an LLM could touch grass?