It all arose when I casually mentioned to someone that I did not much care for invasive & intrusive examination of human remains, even when they were thousands of years old and when the owner and his or her heirs were clearly not going to get upset about it. The response was that, ah well, you atheists have only got your body for once, for the one outing, and with no life to come. Us true believers, having immortal souls, can be much more relaxed about our carcasses, our earthy & earthly wrapping. At the time I said that this was nonsense, but on further reflection, both waking and awake, I am not so sure.
My view of the world is illustrated. The chap inside the football, intended as a sort of bathysphere with port holes, might be called a homunculus, and does service as my soul. The bathysphere is the shell which we build around our soft inner parts and which we exhibit to the outside world. Portholes mainly for looking out, probably one-way glass, but we might allow a bit of peeking in. To some extent we can choose what model of bathysphere we want to live in; to some extent we can choose what we are going to be.
Apart from the homunculus, the bathysphere is filled with some kind of nourishing stuff which keeps the show up and running & on the road. Viewed from the right angle, it would be quite hard to separate out the soup from the homunculus, but he remains a convenient and comforting fiction. There is an enduring something inside; not just soup.
Most of us take a dim view of outsiders trying to peek in from the outside, or, worse still, poking endoscopes in from the outside (in the way that special forces are said to get up close and personal with holed up terrorists). We have chosen what we want to show the world and we don't want the world taking liberties. At least, not until we are ill and need a bit of maintenance work done.
By extension, I take a dim view of outsiders speculating in a public way about what exactly makes me tick. I want to be known by my works, such as they are, not by my soup. My guess is that a lot of creative people - the sort that make a living from their creations that is - might well take the same view. They might want people to buy and read their novels (or whatever), not to speculate about what infantile misadventures drove their odd use of certain words and phrases. Furthermore, the soft inner parts are soft and too much poking around is apt to do damage. Too much truth can be troublesome, just as too little. I associate to an old painter, I think in 'Point Counter Point', who has wound up with an excellent nurse to look after him in his decline, but daren't tell her so for fear of spoiling things. A tricky area, where it is sometimes hard to strike the right note. I associate also to a science fiction story I read many years ago in which certain gifted people could join their minds together and work as a team, with the team being a much bigger deal than the sum of the parts. Some paragraphs were given over to the strange feeling of having one's mind open to someone else's in this way. The total loss of privacy. But thinking about it now, it would not be total. Someone else might be able to see what you are thinking, but I don't think, at least not at the present state of the art, they are going to be able to see very far into the soup. Far too murky.
And alive, I take a dim view of outsiders poking about in either me or my affairs when I am dead and gone. I won't be here to care then, but I do care now and that, I think, should be enough. One also worries about the time of transition when one is losing one's grip on things, and the social workers are starting to swarm around the bathysphere, trying to peek in through the portholes in a very offensive sort of way - even when one might be thought to be in need of their help. Leaving people alone when they are dead give's one more confidence that one will be respected alive.
So taking a big leap, I don't like spreading dead neolithics out on a slab for our amusement on the Discovery channel.
I seem to recall that Attila the Hun went to a lot of trouble to make sure that no-one disturbed his slumbers, having himself buried in the bed of a river temporarily diverted for the purpose, and having the rather large burial party slaughtered after the event, just to make sure.
Perhaps the way to provide material for medical students (and other with a serious requirement), would be for far-apart countries to have reciprocal arrangements. It doesn't really matter what they might do thousands of miles away.
The musing above best described as work in progress.
Reference 1: for a rather different take on the subject, see http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/autonomy.html.
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