Who Am I · 980–1037 CE
Ibn Sina (Avicenna)
He asked whether your mind is the same thing as your body - and used a floating person to test it.
Bukhara & Isfahan, Persia · lived 980 – 1037
Their big question
Are you your mind, or your body, or both?
Ibn Sina had memorised the whole Qur’an by ten and was running a hospital as a teenager. He wrote an enormous medical book, the Canon, used in universities for six hundred years.
Among his thought experiments is the floating man. Picture a person created in mid-air, eyes covered, unable to touch or hear anything. Would that person still know that they exist? Ibn Sina said yes - and that this shows the mind is not just the body.
He was also convinced the two are tangled together, which is why the argument is still being had today, in brain scanners instead of daydreams.
“The mind is not a thing we can point at.”
He did not mean it does not exist - only that you cannot find it the way you find a foot.
Three things worth knowing
- He wrote over a hundred books, some of them on a sickbed.
- His Canon of Medicine was a standard textbook in Europe until around 1650.
- He described how to test a medicine: give it to several people, in the same conditions, and watch. That is a clinical trial, a thousand years early.
Try it — think like Ibn
Try the floating-person test on yourself. Close your eyes for one minute and take away every sound and touch. Is there still something in there that just... is you? Describe it without using the word 'I'.
Ibn Sina examining patient — Unknown authorUnknown author. Source on Wikimedia Commons.