Mind embodied and embedded
Abstract
1 INTIMACY
Among Descartes's most and consequential achievements has
been his of the mental as an independent ontological
domain. By taking the mind as a substance, with cognitions as its
modes, he accorded them a status as self-standing and determinate on
their own, without essential regard to other entities. Only with this
metaphysical conception in place, could the idea of solipsism-the
idea of an intact ego existing with nothing else in the universe-so
much as make sense. And behind that engine have trailed the sorry
boxcars of hyperbolic doubt. the mind-body problem, the problem of
the external world, the problem of other minds, and so on.
Although the assumptions have been under fire, off and
on. at least since Hegel-including with renewed intensity in recent
years … the Cartesian separation that is still so pervasive as to be almost invisible.
In particular, inter-relationist accounts retain a principled distinction between the
mental and the corporeal-a distinction that is reflected in contrasts
like semantics versus syntax, the space of reasons versus the space of
causes, or the intentional versus the physical. (Notice that
each of these contrasts can be heard either as higher versus lower’
level" or as inner versus outer 'sphere‘.) The contrary of this separation-or battery
of separations-is not inter-relationist holism but
something that I would like to call the intimacy of the mind's embodiment and
embeddedness in the world. The term 'intimacy' is meant to
suggest more than just necessary interrelation or interdependence but
a kind of commingling or integralness of mind, body,and world-that is,
to undermine their very distinctness. The challenge is as much
to spell out what this could mean as to make a case for it. Indeed, no
sooner does such a possibility seem intelligible at all, than ways
bring out its plausibility and significance turn up everywhere.
There is little original in what follows. The strategy will be to bring
some well known principles of systems analysis to bear on the mind-
body-world 'system' in a way that refocuses questions of division and
unity, and then to canvas a selection of investigations and
proposals - some fairly recent, others not-in the light of this new focus.
The hope is that these superficially disparate ideas, none of them new,
will seem to converge around the theme of intimacy in a way that
illuminates and supports them all. Sorting and and aligning issues in this
manner has sometimes been discussed under titles like 'embedded
computation’ and 'situated cognition'.