Brain.


We used to sell sheep brains at the butchery where I worked after school; a white plastic tray, a mess of dented grey stuff, an offering I never worked out the attraction of. Brains away from the body are just walnuts in formaldehyde, a left-over, a subject for cryogenics. The brain in the body can't even be said to be the place of the mind, that curious feeling of subject cannot be pointed to on an anatomical chart. Already we are elsewhere...
Substance.

But then the chemicals in the brain play such a big part in our personality. A substance like LSD or Ecstasy are `mind' drugs only in so much as they alter the brain. We all know an acid casualty, or a SSRI  (prozac, zoloft, aropax) user, a lithium user, a self-anaesthetising alcoholic. A triangle exists; brain-substance-mind.

SSRI; Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitor. Effectively increases the Serotonin level in the brain.
Prosthetic.

There are other relationships which are not so obvious and the one we're looking at here is brain-technicality-mind, or more accurately, body/brain-prosthetic-subject. The quality or type of prosthetic is as important to us as the quality of the body or subject.  The kinds of prosthetics we choose and the way we use them reflects our personality and sociality - and shapes it as much.

Drugs, like the SSRIs, are a prosthetic in that they enhance the the bodily functioning much like a bionic limb - serotonin is a naturally occurring bodily entity that is enhanced. Ecstasy works in a similar way whereas LSD is, in these terms, a `foreigner'.
Prosthetics and Subject are unified in the imagination...
Some brain functions are taken over by the prosthetic of the Computer...