Phil 492: Merleau-Ponty The Ambiguity of Being-in-the-world: Phantom Limb and Bodily Intentionality

[bowleggedbear]

Thanks for making this video. It's helped me size up the relevance of Ponty's work on my own.
I have spent 15 years developing a pain management approach that involves calibrating (through trial and error of many body based visualization experiments) what I've called "miscalibrations of the body map".

I am not a cognitive scientist or philosopher, but a massage therapist. My work has shown the value of a larger schema of proprioception and skin sensitivity in the automatic directions the mind gives the body, and how a mix of physical trauma and sensory adaptation contributes to a sort of disassociation (miscalibration) of the body's sensory map.

I've been looking for thinkers who've touched on the same work, as well as scientists who've researched the topic. Ponty's concept of horizon seems to be close. One thing I think my work makes a huge mess of is the reliability of these horizons. I've had great and unusual success helping chronic pain by releasing parts of the body, through contact and visualization, including phantom limb pain. Every trauma runs the risk of drastically altering those autonomic directions. I describe these miscalibration rules like "ghost playdough" because they can move perceptions and distort them so drastically. The results are desensitized except where the results create an active signal that pops up above the baseline of sensitivity. Only having a reliable biofeedback method for detecting hidden tension has made my work possible. Turns out detecting latent tension is very difficult 😅

[frederickanderson]

What about the out of body phenomena.

[MD-cxyt]

want to know more about this philosopher

[kh.]

Thank you so much for this! please make more videos on Merleau-Ponty. Also, could you please explain his statement "the Body understands"? and talk more about his rejection to Cartesian Dualism.
One last question and I hope you reply. Is it against Merleau to say that we have a body and we are a body?