Alan Levinovitz

We should be telling people who get long COVID, hey, don't worry.

Most people naturally remit.

That should be the first thing clinicians say.

But they don't.

They say other stuff, scary stuff.

Like this is a chronic condition that for most people is with them for the rest of their lives.

Because as embodied human beings, we feel our minds and we feel our minds as distinct from our bodies.

And sometimes we can change our minds.

It's another version of the free will question.

So body-mind is a different version of one of the most intractable questions in philosophy.

And it comes up in all cultures.

You have the soul in lots of cultures.

You have the idea of a person persisting in the afterlife or being reincarnated.

I can't think, honestly, I mean, maybe there's some, but the vast majority of cultures that I've studied have some version of a ghost in the machine.

And they also have...

explanations of causality that are neither physical nor mental.

This goes to the book I'm currently working on.

They call them supernatural.

And again, I've seen people sort of clipping interviews that happen, being like, he thinks it's just demons, but it's not actually what I'm saying at all.

But what we do have in a lot of cultures is people saying, okay, this is not caused by a broken limb, this pain you're having.