The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience.

Traditionally, philosophers of mind have been guided by a brainbound approach: the mind, whatever it turns out to be, will be related to or identical with the brain. The body, under this approach, plays a merely instrumental role — it is what keeps the brain alive and healthy. Over the past few decades there has been increasing resistance to the brainbound approach, and a strongly supported push for taking a non-brainbound approach: the body is not merely instrumental, but (...) in many ways constitutive of the mind — the mind, whatever it turns out to be, is bodily in many fundamental respects. Thus, in explaining the mind, we must consider not only brain states, but also wider bodily processes. What those wider bodily processes are, and how they constitute certain mental states, are the key questions that we now face as non-brainbound philosophers of mind. -/- One avenue of investigation that many have taken in view to answering these two questions has been to look at bodily awareness and its relation to our sense of self. How does our body, and our awareness of our body more specifically, constitute our sense of self and our subjective experience of the world. A clear way of investigating this last question is to turn to pathological cases of body awareness, e.g. body dysmorphic disorder and anorexia nervosa. Anorexia nervosa is an interesting case. The DSM-5 distinguishes anorexia nervosa from body dysmorphic disorder — the former is classified as an eating disorder, while the latter is classified as a mental disorder. As I will explore in this chapter, this very manner of distinguishing among such pathologies admits of a traditional brainbound approach to separating the mind/brain from the body. Here I shall consider how a non-brainbound approach might give us different, and perhaps even better insight into cases such as anorexia nervosa, and I shall, conversely, consider how such body awareness disorders might serve to further strengthen the view that the right approach to understanding the mind is the non-brainbound approach. (shrink)

The extended mind view and the embodied-grounded view of cognition and language are typically considered as rather independent perspectives. In this paper we propose a possible integration of the two views and support it proposing the idea of “Words As social Tools” (WAT). In this respect, we will propose that words, also due to their social and public character, can be conceived as quasi-external devices that extend our cognition. Moreover, words function like tools in that they enlarge the (...) bodily space of action thus modifying our sense of body. To support our proposal, we review the relevant literature on tool-use and on words as tools and report recent evidence indicating that word use leads to an extension of space close to the body. In addition, we outline a model of the neural processes that may underpin bodily space extension via word use and may reflect possible effects on cognition of the use of words as external means. We also discuss how reconciling the two perspectives can help to overcome the limitations they encounter if considered independently. (shrink)

If we are physical things with parts, then accounts of what we are and accounts of when composition occurs have important implications for one another. Defenders of restricted composition tend to endorse a sparse ontology in taking an eliminativist stance toward composite objects that are not organisms, while claiming that we are organisms. However, these arguments do not entail that we are organisms, for they rely on the premise that we are organisms. Thus, sparsist reasoning need not be paired with (...) animalism, but could instead be paired with other accounts according to which we are composites. The embodied mind account—a version of the brain view—is one such account. Replacing the premise that we are organisms with the premise that we are embodied minds, in arguments that otherwise parallel those supporting animalist sparsism, yields an account according to which composite objects include thinkers, but perhaps nothing else. Since animalism has implausible implications about scenarios which are handled better by the embodied mind account, this approach is preferable to animalist sparsism. Furthermore, the role of mental features in sparsism makes embodied mind sparsism the more reasonable conclusion. Meanwhile, adopting sparsism allows the embodied mind account to dodge objections that may not be as easily avoided by it or other versions of the brain view if not paired with sparsism. These include objections about brains that are not persons, inorganic part replacement, and another form of part replacement that might seem to allow one to get a new brain. (shrink)

In Embodied Minds in Action, Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese work out a unified treatment of three fundamental philosophical problems: the mind-body problem, the problem of mental causation, and the problem of action. This unified treatment rests on two basic claims. The first is that conscious, intentional minds like ours are essentially embodied. This entails that our minds are necessarily spread throughout our living, organismic bodies and belong to their complete neurobiological constitution. So minds like ours are (...) necessarily alive. The second claim is that essentially embodied minds are self-organizing thermodynamic systems. This entails that our mental lives consist in the possibility and actuality of moving our own living organismic bodies through space and time, by means of our conscious desires. The upshot is that we are essentially minded animals who help to create the natural world through our own agency. This doctrine--the Essential Embodiment Theory--is a truly radical idea which subverts the traditionally opposed and seemingly exhaustive categories of Dualism and Materialism, and offers a new paradigm for contemporary mainstream research in the philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

Mark Johnson is one of the great thinkers of our time on how the body shapes the mind. This book brings together a selection of essays from the past two decades that build a powerful argument that any scientifically and philosophically satisfactory view of mind and thought must ultimately explain how bodily perception and action give rise to cognition, meaning, language, action, and values. A brief account of Johnson’s own intellectual journey, through which we track some of the (...) most important discoveries in the field over the past forty years, sets the stage. Subsequent chapters set out Johnson’s important role in embodied cognition theory, including his cofounding of conceptual metaphor theory and, later, their theory of bodily structures and processes that underlie all meaning, conceptualization, and reasoning. A detailed account of how meaning arises from our physical engagement with our environments provides the basis for a nondualistic, nonreductive view of mind that he sees as most congruous with the latest cognitive science. A concluding section explores the implications of our embodiment for our understanding of knowledge, reason, and truth. The resulting book will be essential for all philosophers dealing with mind, thought, and language. (shrink)

In this article I propose a new concept: The Embodied Mind of God. I also point out the benefits that can flow from using it. This concept is combination of two concepts broadly discussed in contemporary philosophy: „The Mind of God” and „The Embodied Mind”. In my opinion this new concept can be very useful in the area of Philosophical Christology, because one of the most important questions there concerns the mind of Jesus Christ (...) - Incarnate Son of God. I present my own model of Christ’s mind that is able to avoid at least part of the problems faced by christology and sheds the new light on some of epistemological issues. (shrink)

The heart-mind (xin 心) in Mencius is not merely a rational faculty but a complex that contains such physical, psychological, physiological and spiritual concretes as reason, sentiment, feeling, experience and belief knowing, the study of which in the contemporary world would involve a number of modern disciplines including epistemology, metaphysics, psychology, ethics and education. In the context of Mencius, the mind is already embodied at birth and continues to function as the integration of intellectual and practical, physical (...) and spiritual, and cognitive and behavioural qualities and activities. “Knowing” (zhi 知) in Mencius is an activity of the mind but it is not merely a cognitive process, and must not be confined to the epistemological field. It is enabled through preserving and nourishing the original mind by which a person comes to comprehend human nature and Heaven, and by which he or she becomes fully human. Therefore, the mind in Mencius is not a purely rational entity and the knowing is not merely an epistemic process. They can be understood only in terms of the embodied mind and the embodied knowing. (shrink)

Perception is, at least sometimes, something we do. This paper is concerned with how to account for perceptual agency (i.e., the active aspect of perception). Eilan divides accounts of perceptual agency up into two camps: enactivist theories hold that perceptual agency is accounted for by the involvement of bodily action, while mental theories hold that perceptual agency is accounted for by the involvement of mental action in perception. In Structuring Mind (2017), Sebastian Watzl aligns his ‘activity view’ with the (...) mental action route and develops the view that the mental activity of attending infuses perceptual experience with agency. Moreover, Watzl claims that his view can accommodate enactivist intuitions, while rejecting their claims about embodiment.In this paper, we scrutinize the relevant notion of mental action involved in the mental action route. We analyze the involvement of the body in overt acts of attention (like sniffing and smelling) and argue that a constitutively embodied account of mental action provides a better analysis of overt attention than a conjunctive account in which overt attention involves a bodily and a (separate) mental action. Furthermore, we argue that the standard cases of covert attention (such as the Posner paradigm) involve the body in multiple ways.In closing, we discuss the relevance of our analysis for the debate on perceptual agency and the embodied mind thesis. We conclude that the embodied mental action route to theorizing perceptual agency provides the best analysis of perceptual agency but comes with significant commitments about the embodiment of attention. (shrink)

Originally published in 1965. For hundreds of years the thinking of philosophers, psychologists, and theologians on the problem of the mind’s relation to the body was dominated by the Cartesian notion that mind and matter are distinct substances. That Descartes also held that there is a union of mind and matter, in a person, has largely been ignored. This may be because, as he admitted in his private correspondence, it is impossible to think of mind and (...) matter both as being distinct substances and also as being, in some sense, united. The fact of mind being united with matter in a person – our experience of ourselves as embodied minds – cannot be accounted for on Cartesian principles. This book rejects the panaceas of the Double Aspect Theory and the Identity Theory and investigates the possibility of accommodating this experience within a conceptual framework derived from Kant, the basis of which is the concept of mind, not as immaterial substance, but as a subject related, in experience, to its objects. (shrink)

Modern cognitive science cannot be understood without recent developments in computer science, artificial intelligence, robotics, neuroscience, biology, linguistics, and psychology. Classic analytic philosophy as well as traditional AI assumed that all kinds of knowledge must eplicitly be represented by formal or programming languages. This assumption is in contradiction to recent insights into the biology of evolution and developmental psychology of the human organism. Most of our knowledge is implicit and unconscious. It is not formally represented, but embodied knowledge which (...) is learnt by doing and understood by bodily interacting with ecological niches and social environments. That is true not only for low-level skills, but even for high-level domains of categorization, language, and abstract thinking. Embodied cognitive science, AI, and robotics try to build the embodied mind in an artificial evolution. From a philosophical point of view, it is amazing that the new ideas of embodied mind and robotics have deep roots in 20th-century philosophy. (shrink)

We understand the workings of the human body as a series of interdependent physiological relationships: muscle interacts with bone as the heart responds to hormones secreted by the brain, all the way down to the inner workings of every cell. To make an organism function, no one component can work alone. In light of this, why is it that the accepted understanding that the physical phenomenon of the mind is attributed only to the brain? In The Embodied (...) class='Hi'>Mind, internationally renowned psychiatrist Dr. Thomas R. Verny sets out to redefine our concept of the mind and consciousness. He brilliantly compiles new research that points to the mind's ties to every part of the body. The Embodied Mind collects disparate findings in physiology, genetics, and quantum physics in order to illustrate the mounting evidence that somatic cells, not just neural cells, store memory, inform genetic coding, and adapt to environmental changes-all behaviors that contribute to the mind and consciousness. Cellular memory, Verny shows, is not just an abstraction, but a well-documented scientific fact that will shift our understanding of memory. Verny describes single-celled organisms with no brains demonstrating memory, and points to the remarkable case of a French man who, despite having a brain just a fraction of the typical size, leads a normal life with a family and a job. The Embodied Mind shows how intelligence and consciousness-traits traditionally attributed to the brain alone-also permeate our entire being. Bodily cells and tissues use the same molecular mechanisms for memory as our brain, making our mind more fluid and adaptable than we could have ever imaged. (shrink)

This article discusses the corporeal component of the human mind. Uncertainty is a fundamental attribute of the human body due to which a body transforms itself into the body that allows to connect the world with the human mind. The process of overcoming the transcendental register of the human mind results in the ontological and anthropological shifts from ego to soma. Tracing the trajectory of these shifts we discover the bodily dimension in the human mind as (...) its constitutive transcendental ground. This dimension makes the mind not only open to the world but makes the world a part of the human mind. It prevents the mind from exerting power over the world, and gives rise to life vitality of the embodied mind. (shrink)

뇌과학자 안토니오 다마지오(Antonio Damasio, 1944 ～)는 스피노자의 신체론을 ‘신체화된 마음’으로 재구성하여 신경생물학적 해석을 한다. 뇌의 인지과정을 스피노자의 신체론에 근거하여 다루고 있는 그의 대표적인 책이 Looking For Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow And The Feeling Brain(2003)(『스피노자의 뇌』(2007)이다. 본 연구는 다마지오의 책 『스피노자의 뇌』에서 제시된 ‘신체화된 마음(embodied mind)’이론이 과연 스피노자를 올바르게 이해하는지를 비판적으로 검토한다. 연구자가 보기에, 다마지오의 스피노자 이해는 전체적으로는 크게 문제가 없어 보인다. 그러나 그의 전략적 방법에는 여전히 논란의 여지가 있다. 본 연구는 다마지오가 스피노자를 전체적으로 어떻게 이해하고 있는지를 살펴보고, 그의 전략적 (...) 모호성에 관해 평가할 것이다. (shrink)

Mark Johnson is widely regarded as a major figure in philosophical embodied cognition theory in the U.S., and as co-founder with George Lakoff of conceptual metaphor theory. These two theories, along with Johnson's deep rootedness in classical American Pragmatism, provide the themes for the analyses developed in both Embodied Mind, Meaning, and Reason: How our Bodies Give Rise to Understanding and The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought: The Bodily Roots of Philosophy, Science, Morality and Art. The two (...) texts together review and expand Johnson's earlier work, in the case of the newest book by further elaborating and providing expanded empirical support for work that by necessity began as rather more speculative than... (shrink)

Biological brains are increasingly cast as ‘prediction machines’: evolved organs whose core operating principle is to learn about the world by trying to predict their own patterns of sensory stimulation. This, some argue, should lead us to embrace a brain-bound ‘neurocentric’ vision of the mind. The mind, such views suggest, consists entirely in the skull-bound activity of the predictive brain. In this paper I reject the inference from predictive brains to skull-bound minds. Predictive brains, I hope to show, (...) can be apt participants in larger cognitive circuits. The path is thus cleared for a new synthesis in which predictive brains act as entry-points for ‘extended minds’, and embodiment and action contribute constitutively to knowing contact with the world. (shrink)

Animating Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological idea of the body as a pre-reflective organizing principle in perception, consciousness and language has become a productive and popular endeavor within philosophy of mind during the last two decades. In this context Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of an embodied mind has played a central role in the attempts to naturalize phenomenological insights in relation to cognitive science and neuropsychological research. In this dialogue the central role of art and aesthetics in phenomenology has been neglected (...) or at best treated as a peripheral phenomenon. In this article I argue that the failure to place art and aesthetics at the center of thought within phenomenology leads to a neglect of the expressive primacy of the body in movement. In the current naturalization of phenomenology the questions related to expressive movement are often consigned to the notions of motor intentionality or gesture. However, in his book How the Body Shapes the Mind the philosopher Shaun Gallagher interestingly concludes, based on experimental results, that bodily movements of gesture cannot be accounted for by the phenomenologically adapted notions of ‘body image’ and ‘body schema’. Symptomatically, Gallagher ends his chapter on bodily gesture with a section title asking the relevant question that remains unanswered within a phenomenology of mind: Expressive movement from the beginning? The search for an answer to this question points, in my view, to the possibility of a more radical understanding of the embodied mind based on the primacy of expressive experimentation rather than representational experience, which makes the question of art and aesthetics a core issue. Following the image of thought in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze I argue that art, as the production of sensation through experimentation, presents us with a mode of thinking that accounts for expressive bodily movement as a constitutive force in subjective thought and experience. (shrink)

How is it that thoroughly physical material beings such as ourselves can think, dream, feel, create and understand ideas, theories and concepts? How does mere matter give rise to all these non-material mental states, including consciousness itself? An answer to this central question of our existence is emerging at the busy intersection of neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, and robotics.In this groundbreaking work, philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark explores exciting new theories from these fields that reveal minds like ours to (...) be prediction machines - devices that have evolved to anticipate the incoming streams of sensory stimulation before they arrive. These predictions then initiate actions that structure our worlds and alter the very things we need to engage and predict. Clark takes us on a journey in discovering the circular causal flows and the self-structuring of the environment that define "the predictive brain." What emerges is a bold, new, cutting-edge vision that reveals the brain as our driving force in the daily surf through the waves of sensory stimulation. (shrink)

Thesis -University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2009.

Combines phenomenology with the "enactivist" approach to consciousness theory and recent emotion research to explore the way self-motivated action plans shape selective attention, exploration, and ultimately the mind's interpretation of reality - in philosophy, psychology, cultural awareness, and our personal lives.

Our thoughts depend on knowledge about objects, people, properties, and events. In order to think about where we left our keys, what we are going to make for dinner, when we last fed the dogs, and how we are going to survive our next visit with our family, we need to know something about locations, keys, cooking, dogs, survival, families, and so on. Researchers have sought to explain how our brains can store and access such general knowledge. A growing body (...) of evidence suggests that many of our concepts are grounded in action, emotion, and perception systems. We appear to think about the world by means of the same mechanisms that we use to experience it. Abstract concepts like ‘democracy,’ ‘fermion,’ ‘piety,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘zero’ represent a clear challenge to this idea. Given that they represent a uniquely human cognitive achievement, answering the question of how we acquire and use them is central to our ability to understand ourselves. This book argues that abstract concepts are heterogeneous and pose three important challenges to embodied cognition. They force us to ask: How do we generalize beyond the specifics of our experience? How do we think about things that we do not experience directly? How do we adapt our thoughts to specific contexts and tasks? It argues that a successful theory of grounding must embrace multimodal representations, hierarchical architecture, and linguistic scaffolding. Abstract concepts are the product of an elastic mind. (shrink)

I want to suggest that the major influence of classical arguments for embodiment like "The Embodied Mind" by Varela, Thomson & Rosch (1991) has been a changing of positions rather than a refutation: Cognitivism has found ways to retreat and regroup at positions that have better fortification, especially when it concerns theses about artificial intelligence or artificial cognitive systems. For example: a) Agent-based cognitivism' that understands humans as taking in representations of the world, doing rule-based processing and then (...) acting on them (sense-plan-act) is often limited to conscious decision processes; and b) Purely syntactic cognition is compatible with embodiment, or supplemented by embodiment (e.g. for 'grounding'). While the empirical thesis of embodied cognition ('embodied cognitive science') is true and the practical engineering thesis ('morphological computation', 'cheap design') is often true, the conceptual thesis ('embodiment is necessary for cognition') is likely false - syntax is often enough for cognition, unless grounding is really necessary. I conclude that it has become more sensible to integrate embodiment with traditional approaches rather than "fight for embodiment" or "against cognitivism". (shrink)

The dynamic approach to understanding of the human consciousness, its cognitive activities and cognitive architecture is one of the most promising approaches in the modern epistemology and cognitive science. The conception of embodied mind is under discussion in the light of nonlinear dynamics and of the idea co-evolution of complex systems developed by the Moscow scientific school. The cognitive architecture of the embodied mind is rather complex: data from senses and products of rational thinking, the verbal (...) and the pictorial, logic and intuition, the analytical and synthetic abilities of perception and of thinking, the local and the global, the analogue and the digital, the archaic and the post-modern are intertwined in it. In the process of cognition, co-evolution of embodied mind as an autopoietic system and its surroundings takes place. The perceptual and mental processes are bound up with the structure of human body. Nonlinear and circular connecting links between the subject of cognition and the world constructed by him can be metaphorically called a nonlinear cobweb of cognition. Cognition is an autopoietic activity because it is directed to the search of elements that are missed; it serves to completing integral structures. According to the theory of blow-up regimes in complex systems elaborated by Sergey P.Kudyumov and his followers, the idea of co-evolution is connected with the concept of tempoworlds. To co-evolve means to start to develop in one and the same tempoworld and to use the possibility – in case of a proper intergation into a whole structure – to accelerate the tempo of evolution. The cognitive activities of the human being can be considered as a movement (active walk) in landscapes of co-evolution when he cognizes and changes environment and is changed himself by the very activities. The similar conclusion can be drawn from Francisco Varela’s conception of enactive cognition. (shrink)

Predictive processing approaches to the mind are increasingly popular in the cognitive sciences. This surge of interest is accompanied by a proliferation of philosophical arguments, which seek to either extend or oppose various aspects of the emerging framework. In particular, the question of how to position predictive processing with respect to enactive and embodied cognition has become a topic of intense debate. While these arguments are certainly of valuable scientific and philosophical merit, they risk underestimating the variety of (...) approaches gathered under the predictive label. Here, we first present a basic review of neuroscientific, cognitive, and philosophical approaches to PP, to illustrate how these range from solidly cognitivist applications—with a firm commitment to modular, internalistic mental representation—to more moderate views emphasizing the importance of ‘body-representations’, and finally to those which fit comfortably with radically enactive, embodied, and dynamic theories of mind. Any nascent predictive processing theory must take into account this continuum of views, and associated theoretical commitments. As a final point, we illustrate how the Free Energy Principle attempts to dissolve tension between internalist and externalist accounts of cognition, by providing a formal synthetic account of how internal ‘representations’ arise from autopoietic self-organization. The FEP thus furnishes empirically productive process theories by which to guide discovery through the formal modelling of the embodied mind. (shrink)

This superbly written and finery argued philosophical essay has potentially revolutionary importance for understanding "human consciousness, " and its author has accordingly been celebrated by the likes of Oliver Sachs and Karl Pribram. Showing the relevance of neuropathology for understanding the unifying processes behind perception, memory, and language, Jason Brown offers an exciting new approach to the mind/brain problem, freely crossing the boundaries of neurophysiology, psychology, and philosophy of mind. Hard science and the study of the nature of (...) mind (including Buddhist perspectives) come together in new ways, and without advocating the reductionist "computational model" for the mind/brain relation which dominates cognitive science today. Brown finds that every event in conscious life passes through highly determinate stages in a fraction of a second. These repeat both the stages of individual growth and of the evolution of the species: Not only does ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny, but the emergence of every moment of awareness recapitulates them both. This process begins deep in the brain stem with the mere awareness of duration, proceeds through concept-formation and image selection, and terminates with the apprehension of an object in the external world. The external object acts as a realistic constraint on consciousness. But in conditions such as brain damage, dream, meditation, as well as creativity, the preconscious stages enter into direct awareness, giving us explicit glimpses of developmental and evolutionary process and presenting a startling reversal of common ideas about the development of mind. Concept and image do not derive from perception and sensation, theycome first. And the principle of consciousness, rather than being a latecomer on the evolutionary and developmental scene, is a potentiality throughout. This lucidly written book will not disappoint the many readers concerned with the great frontier of scientific exploration -- the nature of consciousness. (shrink)

The hard problem of consciousness lies in explaining what constitutes the subjectivity of consciousness. I argue that significant headway can be made on the problem from an embodied mind view, and particularly if we turn to William James’ theory of emotions. The challenge is one of explaining how bodily subjectivity arises from biological processes. I argue that the solution to this problem lies in our sense of interoception, and James’ theory which suggests emotional feelings are the cascade of (...) changing bodily states. Through James’ account, I show how the biological body can give rise to a bodily subjectivity in experiential consciousness, and thus move towards a solution of the hard problem. (shrink)

Embodiment, Vesey maintains, is the term applied to our experience of an unmediated movement of our body and an unmediated awareness within perceptual experience. Vesey argues for embodiment as the most satisfying explanation of the mind-body relationship chiefly by arguing against substance dualism as presented by the Local Sign theory of sensation and the Ideo-motor theory of bodily movement. The former is deficient because it rests on the false empirical assumption that all perceptual capacities are learned; the latter is (...) inadequate for more complex reasons, the development of which leads Vesey through his own theory of perception and movement. Vesey's own theory rests on contrast between causal, substance dualism and his own favored, non-causal, subject-object duality, which avoids an absolute dualism because of the internal relatedness of its key terms from the outset. The first half of the book presents a concise review and criticism of current non-dualistic views of the mind-body relation other than that of embodiment; here Vesey has a brief and somewhat unsatisfying skirmish with double aspect and identity theories.—E. A. R. (shrink)

La mente non è sempre esistita ma è stata inventata: inventata nel senso che, a un certo punto, qualcuno ha introdotto il concetto di mente. Chi lo abbia introdotto per primo è una questione controversa. Per esempio, Putnam a f f er ma c he , a nc he s e «i n que s t os e c ol os i pa r l a c ome s e l a me nt e f os s e qua s (...) i un’ i de a autoevidente», nondimeno la nozione attuale di mente «non è molto antica, o almeno la sua Ce r t o, «l e pa r ol e ‘ me nt e ’ e ‘ a ni ma ’ , o a l me no i l or o a nt e na t i egemonia non è molto antica».1.. (shrink)

Reexamines the Western philosophical tradition, looking at the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality, and the self.

The ‘Mind-Upload’ hypothesis, a radical version of the Brain-in-a-Vat thought experiment, asserts that a whole mind can safely be transferred from a brain to a digital device, after being exactly encoded into substrate independent informational patterns. Prima facie, MU seems the philosophical archenemy of the Embodied Mind theory, which understands embodiment as a necessary and constitutive condition for the existence of a mind and its functions. In truth, whether and why MU and EM are ultimately (...) incompatible is unobvious. This paper, which aims to answer both questions, will not simply confirm that MU and EM actually are incompatible. It will also show the true reason of their incompatibility: while EM implies that a mind’s individual identity is contingent upon the details of its physical constituents, MU presupposes that minds can be relocated from one material vessel to another. A systematic comparison between these conflicting assumptions reveals that the real shortcoming of MU is not the one usually discussed by the philosophical literature: it has nothing to do with MU’s functionalist or computationalist prerequisites, and is only secondarily related to the artificial implementability of consciousness; the real problem is that MU presupposes that minds could still be individuated and numerically identified while being reduced to immaterial formal patterns. EM seems committed to refute this assumption, but does it have sufficient resources to succeed? (shrink)

In his oft-cited book Descartes' Error, Antonio Damasio claims that Descartes is responsible for having stifled the development of modern neurobiological science, in particular as regards the objective study of the physical and physiological bases for emotive and socially-conditioned cognition. Most of Damasio’s book would stand without reference to Descartes, so it is intriguing to ask why he launched this attack. What seems to fuel such claims is a desire for a more holistic understanding of the mind, the brain (...) and the self. For Descartes however, here allowed to answer back, the question of accounting for the whole diversity of human potential experiences was what could not be left out of sight. Concerning the question of his neglect of the mind said to be "abysmally" detached from the body, it is claimed here that, in the light of Descartes' move which was to break with the scholastic practice of putting more and more things under the control of the soul, the program of using the reality of embodiment to understand the mind was one he actually started. An answer is also suggested to counter the charge that Descartes failed to account for the interaction of the two substances, the mind and the material body, by showing why and how Descartes actually believed in the substantial union of mind and body. Yet, he kept in the picture an ingenium, a faculty of pure understanding overarching a cybernetic model of the body-mind, of which we also here seek to appreciate the significance. This project of accounting for the mind-body interaction ended-up in a study the "passions," as emotions were then called. (shrink)

Maine de Biran’s concept of the embodied mind is most suitable to alert our consciousness today, while people are being exceedingly exposed to and submerged by comforting invasive virtual realities of metaverses that essentially minimize their _resistance_-potential to generate _will_ and _effort_.

This paper employs ethnographic research methods to study a Buddhist meditation practice that takes the walking body as its object. The mundane act of walking is transformed into a meditative object for the purpose of refining states of embodied consciousness. This meditation practice offers a glimpse of the relationship of body to mind, a fundamental concern within the philosophy of mind. The analytic focus of this paper is the practical nature of meditation work. Aspects of Buddhist Philosophy (...) are explored and compared to analytic themes within Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology. (shrink)

This is an in-depth review of "The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience" by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch.