[ExI] "meat"

[Damien Broderick]

Most of the people posting here seem to have no notion how depraved 
it is to speak of human bodies as "meat".

I wish you'd all get over this nerdish affectation.

Meat is dead, hacked-up flesh. My body isn't meat, it's me, and yours 
isn't meat either. It's a living person. The jeering philistinism of 
calling our bodies "meat" reminds me of insensitive oafs who disdain 
van Vogh's paintings as "daubing" or Shakespeare as a "scribbler".

Yes, sometimes it's hard not to distance yourself from your frail 
flesh when some of your organs start to break down, or viruses make 
you sick, or when a consumerist culture flings endless hyperstimuli 
images of toned, buff, beautiful humans at you, making you (for 
values of "you" that I'm sure include at least some people in these 
discussions) squirm with self-disgust inside your overweight unfit 
short-sighted geekish pizza-and-Coke-fed body. I think we'd be better 
off trying to maximize our sense of self-reliant embodiment rather 
than indulging in abjection and denial.

None of this diatribe implies that *only* mammalian, conscious 
embodiment deserves respect. But if we wish to see respect for minds 
instantiated on different kinds of substrates, when they finally 
arrive, we'd do well to start by getting rid of the cheap sneers at "meat".

Now the peanut gallery can start yipping about "political correctness."

Damien Broderick