The "outer" body

Yesterday I have decided to try the Lisbon-Coffee-Books-Club meetup. Despite the fact that my book reading passion which was thriving while I was a teenager lost it's space to the many other passions that came later, I still find books to be one of the most valuable sources for knowledge and entertainment.

I did not have a strong background on the meetup subject: "The Body". I have this  interest bias which does not care much about material/physicals subjects outside of the strict domain of science, nevertheless I gave some thought to the subject so that I could participate.

It was nice to find more about the common/shared views related for some characteristics of the body, like health, other more specific ones, like the influence of the gender on your body exposition/treatment accross cultures, and the more controversial ones, like the relation between body and mind.

Now sharing a bit of my perspective on the subject. The word "body" when applied to animals/plants, covers all it's external and internal parts, which in the case of humans includes the brain, widely accepted as the mind driver.  However, for my brainstorming on the subject I have followed a more limited «and technically incorrect» meaning of the "body". In the next lines, the definition of body will be restricted to the physical visible/interactive components of the body, excluding  the heart, brain and overall organs from the considerations.

I can identify three core roles of the body for humans:
- The functional role provides the ability to gather/produce resources, defend against threads and exert physical  power over other humans
- The communication role provides the ability to use the body to communicate messages
- The aesthetically role which could be described as the "visual" subset of communication

In the early stages of the human kind  as known from anthropology, the functional role of the body was critical for survival and was a key on establishing the social organization. It's sensible to guess that in those ages group leadership and mating resulted from body-centric activities like fighting, as it still happens today for many animal species. Body communication had also a fundamental role, gestures and unstructured sounds took millenniums to evolve into graphical, verbal and written communication, communication involving different regions of the world is still a challenge today. The aesthetical had a role mostly for mating / sexual attraction

What about today ? A lot has changed. In industrialized countries the body's functionsal role lost most of it's relevance. Nowadays gathering and producing (transformation) activities are mostly machine based. The majority of human labor as shifted to services and cultural activities. Body communication for inter-personal relations was surpassed by telecommunication facilities, on the other end, for massive communications, we have the private and social media leveraging body communication, specially for entertainment. The aesthetical role got a major boost, specially from the "body modification" industry, in such a way. that in many cultures, the "body" is now primary associated with it's aesthetical form.

Maybe a better wording for the restricted view of the body on this reflection would be the "outer body". I do not believe on the existence of a physical or metaphysical link between my "outer body" and "my mind". Yes, my mind gets feedback from my "outer body" and from other peopl'es "outer bodies". But is up to my  mind to select the relevance of such feedback in relation to the many other kinds of feedback that it receives.