Am I Machine, Meat Suit or Chemical Soup?

When it comes to health, the metaphors we use matter

Machine, meat suit or chemical soup? creative commons images from RawPixel.com

Most of us are used to thinking of our bodies as a machine. (A pity it doesn’t come with an Owner’s Manual, maybe?) We’re taught that our hearts pump blood, our stomach is our fuel tank, and we visit our health providers for a ‘roadworthy’ or ‘tune up’ every so often. I called my bi-annual gynaecology exam and pap smear my ‘grease and oil change’. We don’t always consider the subtle medical consequences.

Years ago, when I had some trouble with my gait, a physiotherapist told me, “I don’t think its mechanical, I think its electrical" and more or less wiped their hands of me. I eventually found a neurological physiotherapist who diagnosed a post-injury weakness in a couple of obscure hip muscles, and after a few months of diligent and targeted exercise, I was walking normally. Metaphors matter.

Grind culture wants you to believe you’re a machine

The machine metaphor has infiltrated medicine and culture, especially modern capitalist grind culture. Machines often work better if they are kept running, or at least used regularly. They are only meant to stop (briefly) when they run out of fuel. The original textile mills of the Industrial Revolution worked better – with less breakdowns and more profit – when the new machines worked all the time, so there were day and night shifts, and workers were penalised for slowing or stopping the machines.

If a machine doesn’t work smoothly, predictably, efficiently and reliably, what good is it? A machine is meant to keep going. A machine is designed to keep going. The machine metaphor puts us in the driver’s seat. It also makes us the origin of any problem with the workings.

There is an old aviation joke that airplanes of the future will be fully automated, needing only a team of three: a computer, a human and a dog. The computer will fly the plane. The human will feed the dog. The dog’s job is to bite the human if they try to touch the computer.

We see a similar focus of blame when something goes wrong with any mechanical or electronic item: the first question the Help Desk will ask is, What did you do? The medical establishment is not so very much different.

Realising this, we try to ‘unplug’ from our smartphones and the demands they carry to us 24 hours per day, and to get back into our bodies as a way to handle stress and anxiety. But your body is not a car, if you wreck this one, you can’t simply buy another to transport your mind around.

The Enlightenment, obsessed with either/or, decided you were a meat suit

The other metaphor is that we’re a mind operating inside a ‘meat suit’. Author Terry Pratchett said being human is “the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape”. The 2015 Pixar film Inside Out played with this idea to explore the role of emotions that ‘drive’ us. This is a nod back to Descartes and other philosophers who saw the mind as a small human (a homunculus in Latin, the classy intellectual language of the time) who saw the world imperfectly from the ‘cockpit’ somewhere in the brain. The search for which bit of the brain ‘runs’ which bit of the body has been going on more or less ever since, hampered only by reality.

You are not separate from your meat suit, and brain transplants, thankfully, are the stuff of fiction from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein to Lois McMaster Bujold’s Jackson’s Whole colony where clones are ‘grown for life-extension purposes—not their lives, the lives of their ‘originals’, who will have their brains transplanted into the clone bodies, while the clones’ brains. memories and personalities are classed as “medical waste.” Ray Bradbury also plays around with the idea of body as separate from and perhaps inimical to the mind that occupies it in his memorably creepy short story Skeleton. It also informs other classic science fiction like Bladerunner, where the unstable minds of so-called 'replicants’ (engineered people) are made more stable when given ‘real’ human memories.

Medicine and wellness culture view the body as a chemical soup, likely missing a few crucial ingredients

It all goes back to the ancient Greeks and the Doctrine of the Four Humors, the idea that you need to balance the various components of the body. Medicine largely abandoned the humors once Germ Theory came along as a cause of sickness. I still regularly see hints to it in Wellness culture, particularly what has been called the Wellness Industrial Complex (including the growing and largely unregulated world of supplements and nutraceuticals).

You have probably taken a pill for something in the past year. Maybe a multivitamin or a pain killer or, if you live in Melbourne, an antihistamine. You may need a pill to balance your brain chemistry, or your hormones, to lower your cholesterol, raise your vitamin D or to stop your blood forming clots where they can block arteries.

It would seem that a pinch of this or a cup of that will turn us from a lack lustre bowl of slop into a refined bisque worthy of a Michelin star or three.

In case you hadn’t noticed, I like a good metaphor. It can help to simplify an idea just enough that we can grasp its essentials. Most of us can laugh at the idea we “have too many tabs open” when we’re multitasking. The problem is it can also oversimplify an idea, so we feel like we understand more than we do. Metaphors also carry emotional overtones an undertones that get carried over from the metaphor to the thing we’re comparing it to.

A machine is a thing, but a living human body is a person. Things are there to be used: people are not, or shouldn’t be.

So the next time you feel like you’ve run out of gas or your battery is running low, remember that machine metaphors imply you ‘should’ be able to operate all the time, given regular fuel or a reliable current… and maybe remind yourself that its only a metaphor, its not actually how bodies work.

Thank you for reading, your time and attention are a gift.

Over to You

• Are you a machine, a meat suit or a chemical soup? Why?

• Notice the metaphors you use for your body and how it works. Jot them down, or do a brain dump of things you say or hear other people say.

• What negative or inaccurate assumptions does each metaphor carry? For example, if your brain is a computer, then you only need ‘sleep mode’ when you don’t want it doing anything important. Yet sleep is an active process for a human body, and an essential process. Without sleep you will die. Without sleep your computer might eventually crash, but it can be restarted.