I’ve spent years researching what it means to be alive. This is what I’ve learned | Melanie Challenger | The Guardian

Our bodies both generate and direct energy to preserve our own organisation. In this sense, it is the body that is synonymous with selfhood.

This is no longer a philosophical claim. In cognitive science, Lawrence Barsalou’s influential account of “grounded cognition” argues that thought depends on perception, bodily states and situation. In neuroscience, Antonio Damasio’s “somatic marker” hypothesis, tested through the Iowa Gambling Task, shows how bodily feeling helps guide decision-making before explicit reasoning catches up. More recent work shows that the brain is constantly predicting and regulating signals from the heart, gut, lungs and viscera.

The intelligent actions of organisms, then, arise from the imperatives of whole bodies that must preserve their own conditions for existence. Holistic processes like homeostasis are more decisive than minds, and the body drives many critical state changes, including aspects of gene regulation.

Ultimately, little of intelligence can meaningfully be said to be controlled by a separable thinking part that you might identify as who you are. Instead, intelligence is the sum of minute reformations across the associated regions of our bodies. In fact, mind often enters late, receiving and integrating acts the body has already begun.
— Read on www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/30/alive-body-life-experience