Abstract
The strong embodied mind thesis holds that the particular details of one’s embodiment shape the phenomenological and cognitive nature of one’s mind. On the face of it, this is an attractive thesis. Yet strong embodiment faces a number of challenges. In particular, there are three prominent misconceptions about the scope and nature of strong embodiment: 1) that it violates the supposed multiple realizability of mentality; 2) that it cannot accommodate mental representation; and 3) that it is inconsistent with the extended mind thesis according to which mentality extends, not only beyond brain, but beyond body as well. In this paper, we seek to dispel these three misconceptions by explaining what strong embodiment does and does not entail.
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Notes
We consider Shapiro’s position in some detail in a previous paper on this topic (Dempsey and Shani 2013). The reader should also bear in mind that we explain and motivate SE at length in this previous work. Our aim in the present work is not to provide yet another definitive exposition of the core tenets of our position but, rather, to address and dispel some misconceptions concerning the theoretical commitments which our view involves.
We do not intend our use of the notion of coherence here to be equivalent to mere consistency.
Platform neutrality is Clark’s term for what Shapiro (2004) calls body-neutrality, namely, the idea that “characteristics of bodies make no difference to the kind of mind one possesses”, since, on such a view, “mind is a program that can be characterized in abstraction from the kind of body/brain that realizes it” (op. cit. 175). As a referee at this journal correctly points out, even staunch functionalists do not necessarily endorse the view that no physical constraints are relevant. Our point, however, is that, within certain constraints (e.g., on the timely execution of certain functions), a supporter of platform-neutrality will still maintain that an enumerable number of radically different bodies could, in principle, realize similar, or even identical, mental trajectories. This is the view against which we argue.
Indeed, this sort of duplication is predicated on compensating for differences in neurophysiology—that is, in modifying some of the relevant physical characteristics of the second “platform” to conform to the first see (Dempsey and Shani 2013) for an extended discussion.
Dennett’s intentional stance (1987), which amounts to endorsing (c) without being explicitly committed to (a) or (b), constitutes an instrumentalist analog of (1).
Another explanation, perhaps, is that Jacob infers an anti-representationalist stance from our emphasis on bodily phenomenology which puts us in the company of certain anti-representationlists like Gallagher (2005, referenced by Jacob). However, this would clearly amount to an argumentum ad hominem.
One of the critiques of the anti-representationalism of the behavior-based approach to robotics championed by such researchers as Beer and Brooks is that it concerns itself with severely limited types of intelligent behavior, and that once we are studying more sophisticated forms of intelligence, inner representations inevitably re-emerge (Clark and Toribio 1994). Interestingly, it is possible to discern signs of this re-emergence in some recent work on robotic modeling wherein inner representations are employed to achieve improved action-control (e.g., Gigliotta and Nolfi 2012; Mirolli 2014; whether or not the states described by such researchers qualify as full-fledged “representations” is a somewhat different issue).
This terminology is due to Clark 1997.
It is worth mentioning in this regard that recent studies suggest that emotions play an important role in representation, in action readiness, and in the representation of actions. For example, Ferry et al. (2013) show that emotional stimuli in the context of action perception (in particular, the perception of negative emotions in another subject while that subject is performing an action) elicit increased activity in action representation and regulation areas. See also Salzman and Fusi (2010) for the intriguing argument that cognitive and emotional factors are strongly coupled within unified representational complexes.
A more thorough explanation of the issue of normativity requires an extended discussion of the concept of autonomy, and of the emergence of functional normativity in general and of representation in particular within an autonomy-based framework (see, for example, Bickhard 2000b; Christensen and Hooker 2000; Kauffman 2000; Ruiz Mirazo and Moreno 2000, … deleted for blind review).
We allow for the possibility that if differently embodied creatures happen to share a sufficiently significant space of end-equivalent actions their respective meaning spaces might show a certain degree of similarity too (we thank an anonymous referee for raising this point). That is, a certain degree of similarity might exist on a sufficiently abstract level of description of the creatures’ meaning spaces, but this, we hold, falls far short of a strict identity between these respective meaning spaces.
Significantly, we believe that such studies accord well with the general thrust of the account we have presented. For example, the relevant literature on mental simulation often stresses that simulations contain not only specifications of the details of an action but also of its goal, of the means to reach it, and of consequences to the organism and its surroundings—all of which are anticipatory in character (see e.g., Gallese 2003; Garbarini and Adenzato 2004; Jeannerod 2001).
Of course, not all self-organizing systems relate to their environment in the way that even simple life forms do. Take, for example the Great Red Spot, an enormous high-pressure storm system on the planet Jupiter. This giant vortex is a stable structure persisting for hundreds of years through constant exchange of matter and energy with its environment. Yet, although self-maintaining in this limited sense, it lacks the capacity enjoyed by even the simplest of organisms to take active steps to maintain the boundary conditions of their preservation.
Of course, one can resist the claim that Otto’s notebook contains dispositional beliefs for many reasons. See Weiskopf (2008) where, among other things, it is argued that genuine (i.e., neurally constituted) dispositional beliefs are dynamically active in one’s cognitive economy, influencing other beliefs even when not intentionally recalled in a way that the contents of Otto’s notebook are not. See Shani 2013.
Mentalistic accounts of persons, in one form or another, have been dominant since Locke’s account of personal identity in the 27th chapter of Book II of his Essay. For a contemporary account of self that is thoroughly mentalistic, though in some sense consistent with materialism, see Galen Strawson 1997.
Descartes is here concerned with the “sensations of pain, hunger, thirst, and so on.” On the surprising number of what we would call mental or psychological phenomena, including memory and imagination, which Descartes takes to be dependent on the body, see Cottingham 1985.
Note that such demarcation is consistent with a self-organizing systems view of biological life that holds, among other things, that organisms, including sentient systems like ourselves, have envelopes that mark the barrier between the internal and the external, between the system and its environment (see, e.g., Fleischaker 1990, Maturana and Varela 1980).
Interestingly, one might say that phantom experiences represent cases in which one’s mind remains where the body is no more, in the sense that motion-related phenomenal content about one’s missing limb remains available (we thank an anonymous referee for this suggestion). As Peter Brugger’s work suggests, bodily action representations play an important role in generating phenomenal content. Even in cases of supernumerary phantom limb, even when congenital, activity in both the motor and somatosensory cortices may be active as if one were moving one’s limb. Brugger concludes that, “[s]tudies of phantom experiences, including those of supernumerary body parts, will certainly significantly contribute to the understanding of what it means to ‘own’ a body” (2003, 8). See also, e.g., Brugger et al. 2000.
Notice the contrast with Clark, according to whom it is “in principle possible that two beings could be different in respect of gross sensory apparatus and embodiment and yet, courtesy perhaps of compensatory differences in key aspects of downstream processing, end up realizing the same set of experience-determining functionally specified state transitions” (2008, 53).
According to what has been called twofold-access theory, the privacy implied by this first-person access need not be particularly mysterious. A sentient creature’s experience of the various states of its body can, of course, be studied from a third-person perspective, that is, from the perspective of the neurophysiologist, but the creature also has first-person access to those states, states which it lives through, enjoys or suffers (Feigl 1967). Only it has this sort of first-person, private access to these states because only it is subject of the vicissitudes of its own body. See Dempsey 2013.
Christine Overall (2009) considers their case among others in her.
See, for example, Derek Parfit 1984.
For the classical source of this sort of explication of embodiment, see Merleau-Ponty 2002.
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Dempsey, L.P., Shani, I. Three misconceptions concerning strong embodiment. Phenom Cogn Sci 14, 827–849 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9360-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-014-9360-4