Mis Embodiment

Suppressing hunger and appetite. Food becomes nauseas. Indistinct full and unfull.

Existential AI fears fall into the existential silo that we are separate from each other, our communities, our selves. Cartesian trap of (which spawns) nothingness

EXCAVATIONS
Maurice Merleau-Pony “Phenomenology of Perception”
Zepbound
Sartre “Being and Nothingness”

APPLICATION

Merleau-Ponty’s insight, that we do not have bodies but are bodies, has a direct bearing on how leaders make decisions under pressure. The Cartesian separation of mind from body that underlies much of traditional decision making theory produces a specific pathology: leaders who treat their physiological state as noise to be managed rather than signal to be read. When the amygdala narrows perception, when cortisol disconnects the prefrontal cortex from the heart, when heart rate variability drops, these are not interruptions of rational decision making. They are the decision making environment, operating at full force. The leader who can read their own physiological state in real time and recognize when the body is generating fear rather than insight has a material advantage. Pretending we are disembodied minds making calculations is a common and potentially costly error in high-stakes decision making.