"Your body is not a machine" is a phrase that I've been hearing over time and I just simply cannot agree with this statement. There have been many discussions about how society today treats its body as a machine and that it is not the right way to go as it is simply more than that.
YOU, as a person, are more than a machine. That is a fact that I am sure of. You are consisting of a body and a soul and the intertwined processes.
The body in itself however, consisting of all its elements is just matter. But matter always has to have a form, as Descartes described, so that it serves a certain function.
This is the same for a machine: matter that is put in a certain form so that it serves a certain purpose, a function. But for it to work, it needs soil.
For a body to work, we need soil too. Input and output. You give something, you get something back.
And sometime when it does not do what you want, then there should be some issue with the machine that does disturb certain processes. The only difference is that a machine can be de-montaged to find the issue. However, the body is more complex to be cut open to search for the issue.
If this is the only difference, why shouldn't I perceive the body as a machine, a carrier of a soul?
Imagine if this belief would be applied by everybody; it would mean that there would be more attention to the soul. Because as long as the machine works, it become part of the periphery meaning there is more space for other things.
If all the attention that now goes to the body -including the looks- shifts to the soul, it would mean that the search to who we are and what we want is much shorted than it is now.
And if we find out what our needs are, we will use the body as a medium to fulfil these needs. Just as the car is a medium to get from A to B.
In the end it goes back to one thing: 'your body is a machine!'
