A novel approach to the mind: Embodied Cognition
The philosophy of the mind has puzzled thinkers of all ages, from all streams — from biochemists to neuroscientists to philosophers, each one providing varied answers on how the mind works, and why it does what it does. So far, all of our answers have fallen incomplete, or leave gaping holes in our understanding, proving that, though we have many answers for the universe, we are not very good at understanding ourselves. For some, the problem of understanding our brains is one that may never be truly resolved; for others, the solution is understandable, but is not yet within our grasp, and can take years of research to find a feasible solution.
Embodied cognition is the idea that the mind is connected to the body; that the mind co-evolved with the body and with the surrounding environment, and that the brain solves problems and understands its surroundings thanks to a complex relationship built between mind, body, and the environment.
Cognition and the Philosophy of the Mind
The idea of cognition and the way the mind works is a question that has been dealt with in philosophy for centuries since philosophy was first established in ancient Greek societies. Philosophical questions revolved around the idea of knowledge, of morality, of beauty, of the natural world, and of the mind — philosophy of the mind, therefore, revolved around questions of thought, consciousness, sensory experience, and perception.
The difference between philosophy and a more scientific approach, like empirical psychology, is that of the nature of the question — philosophy tends to ask broader questions about the phenomena, while empirical philosophy may stick with contingent facts and theories about actual people and animals, and whether these theories can be proved in multiple settings. For example, empirical psychology may deal with questions around the kind of chemical that is released when people fall in love (oxytocin), or the region of the brain that lights up when a person begins to speak (Broca’s area). Philosophers, however, would tend to ask questions about language itself, whether the Broca’s area can be manipulated to disrupt the flow of language, how language and communication can take place if one’s Broca’s area is damaged, and so on. Or in the case of love, whether the introduction of oxytocin can result in feelings of love, and how authentic these feelings are, and so forth.
Monism
The idea of monism revolves around the mind and the body being dependent on each other, on not being separate entities. This view was first advocated in Western philosophy by Parmenides, in the 5th century BCE, and was later furthered by Baruch Spinoza in the 17th century. Philosophers have argued for a variety of theories around monism, with two major theories being materialism and phenomenalism.
Materialism is the belief that the only things that exist in the world are material objects and physical matter, like the body and the brain. The mind, and consciousness, therefore, are not separate entities but are caused by physical processes in the central nervous system — this theory pushes forward that human beings are complex organisms, but are no different from other life-forms. The mind is not a special addition, but a product of nerve signals in the brain.
Phenomenalism, on the other hand, believes in the opposite — that physical objects and events can be reduced to mental objects, properties, and events. This theory takes the view that the body is merely a perception of the mind, that the mind is the only thing that truly exists, and everything else depends on the perception of the mind. Philosophers who’ve argued for phenomenalism can point to case studies of patients who perceive their bodies to be fully functional despite severe damage. For example, patients who have suffered from a stroke with damage to the right hemisphere of their brains are unable to move their left arms. In an experiment, three of these patients were asked to move both hands and reported that they were able to move their right and left hands equally well, despite evidence to the contrary (a mirror was placed in front of them). Both these views espouse the basic idea of the mind and the body being one singular entity.
Mind-body Dualism
In sharp contrast to the idea of monism is that of mind-body dualism — the idea that the mind and the body are two inherently separate, different entities, and was first popularised by Descartes in the 17th century. Descartes saw this as a two-way interaction, however, and argued that the mind basically controls the body, but the body does have influence over the otherwise rational mind, to explain fits of passion and emotion. However, it is assumed that the relationship between the mind and the body is mostly one-directional.
Most philosophies of the mind have followed this trajectory, viewing the mind as indivisible and separate from the body (McNerney, 2011). The general idea of dualism is that there are two fundamental principles; when it comes to mind-body dualism, the general consensus is that there is a distinct difference between mental and physical states, with the ‘mind’ contrasting the ‘body’ (Howard, 2020).
There are a few arguments around mind-body dualism, one popular argument being that of ‘qualia’. The argument goes like this:
Suppose there is a scientist named Mary who is born and raised in a box, without any colour. She is given access to all the information possible on colours (not all the information we have, all the information possible) and she learns everything there is to know about colours. Let us now suppose that she is let out of this box, and sees a red flower for the first time. It is supposed that she will learn something that she did not before, the experience of seeing the colour red. Theorists have argued that with this problem, Mary is not learning a new fact, but a way of grasping something she was already aware of, though others argue that this experience itself should be a property in its own right(Howard, 2020). This argument is used to push for the fact that there is a distinct difference between experience and knowledge — what the body understands, and what the mind processes.
Embodied Cognition
Embodied cognition revokes the idea that the mind and the body have different properties and experiences, and does away with the notion that a mind is an isolated unit. The history of embodied cognition is relatively short, and its roots can be drawn to 20th-century philosophers, including Martin Heidegger and John Dewey, among others. In an argument of embodied cognition, consider the following phenomena:
- The idea of body language, of the fact that a part of communication lies not in words but in tones and bodily gestures (Mcneill, 1992).
- The performance of cognitive tasks by using our bodies or our surroundings to — in a particular sense — off-load storage and simplify cognitive processing (Donald,1991). For example, the act of taking notes to remember a lecture, or even having reminders set in smartphones.
The hypothesis behind embodied cognition is the idea that ‘cognition is mediated by representations expressed in the vocabulary and format of sensory and motor representations’ (Mahon, 2015). The understanding that cognitive representations are not abstract, but are modality-specific — for example, when patients or participants read the word ‘kick’, the motor representation of the leg is activated, or when the patient sees the word ‘hammer’, information on how to manipulate a hammer is brought up. Research on embodied cognition has inferred, therefore, that the format for corresponding concepts is, at least partly, modality-specific. Mahon (2015) raises one interesting point that could favour the argument for embodied cognition — namely, that during many demonstrations of conceptual processing, sensorimotor activation was involved, hinting that a default posture of the conceptual system is engaged with the sensorimotor content. Basically, when a lexical concept or word is engaged, the phonology of that word is also automatically retrieved (eg: when we read the word ‘kick’, motor representation is activated). For Mahon, this concept seems logical, and he writes; “we do not consider which lexical concept to select simply for the consideration’s sake, but ultimately to produce a word” (Mahon, 2015) — basically, that sensorimotor processing is a consequence of thinking, but also that thinking consists of more than sensorimotor processing.
Embodied cognition is fascinating because of its close proximity to language, its evidence that the body and the environment around us have shaped our thinking and our cognitive processes, which is evident in the way we use our metaphors.
Metaphors and Embodied Cognition
Embodied cognition can attempt to provide some answers to the questions between metaphors and cognition; the use of figurative language does play a role in cognition, and the way human beings express themselves is heavily dependent on our physical standing and our surroundings. For example, many of the common and basic concepts used in human thought and reason reflect a sense of physicality — front and back, up and down, inside and outside. These basic concepts that are reflected in the physical world are also used to structure our metaphors; the ideas of happiness and sadness are expressed as feeling ‘up’ or ‘down’ (Clark, 2008). Even the concept of ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ are represented with up and down; heaven rests far above us, while hell lies far below our feet. Another example is that of love, and the discussion of love as a journey — Lakoff (1987) and Johnson (1987) looked at the conceptualisation of love in terms of movement, of journeying to a different domain — a point that is emphasized by the existence of a body, of physicality, and of the experience that human beings have in a material, physical world.
To further this point, let us try and conceptualise this idea from another perspective — what if we came across aliens whose bodies did not resemble ours, who did not experience the world the way we did? Would their world-view, their understanding of the universe, be different? This concept is one that Ted Chiang addresses in his short story, “Story of Your Life”, where the main character, a linguist, is brought on by the military to try and understand an alien language — in this world, aliens have visited Earth. These aliens are not humanoid but differently shaped; they have eyes around their ‘head’ so there is no sense of ‘front’ or ‘back’, and this circular view, this idea of totality, is infused into their language, their writing, and their culture — for example, we learn from the linguist that their writing style is circular, that sentences feed into each other to create a paragraph that can be read from any direction because that is how these aliens see the world. The short story is a fascinating read, and an interesting idea to note when we analyse our own language patterns, taking note of how riddled language is with physicalities.
The study of metaphors in embodied cognition is a burgeoning field, and one that, too, is riddled with questions — for example, how bodily metaphors are understood by those whose bodies are different from ours, or for those who’ve suffered some type of brain damage — for example, a tumor in the left hemisphere can impact the way the brain sends out signals to the body’s nervous system, changing the way we control our bodies.
Conclusion:
There are key points that embodied cognition cannot (so far) explain, where mind-body dualism rises up to provide a suitable ‘explanation’ of sorts. The kind of high-level, conceptual, abstract thinking that human beings undergo, where people can imagine concepts and ideas that do not relate to the body, where there is a clear divide between thought and action, is where most questions that interest and excite philosophers lie.
Mahon (2015) concludes his paper with what I think is a fitting statement to the gaps that are yet to be filled, to truly understand human cognition: “It is the independence of thought from perception and action that makes human cognition special — and that independence is guaranteed by the representational distinction between concepts and sensorimotor representations”.
Of course, one cannot make the claim that embodied cognition is the be-all and end-all of cognitive science and the philosophy of the mind. Rather, this line of thinking helps expand on how we view the mind in relation to the brain and helps answer some questions while raising others. Though we are still groping in the dark, new lines of thinking can help shine a light on concepts and phenomena that we weren’t able to understand, while also hopefully providing another layer of understanding on what we already know.
References:
Clark, A. (2008) Pressing the Flesh: A Tension in the Study of the Embodied, Embedded Mind? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol 76, Issue 1. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2007.00114.x
Donald, M., (1991), Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mahon B. Z. (2015). What is embodied about cognition?. Language, cognition and neuroscience, 30(4), 420–429. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2014.987791
McNerney, S. (2011). “A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain”. Scientific American. Retrieved from https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/a-brief-guide-to-embodied-cognition-why-you-are-not-your-brain/
McNeill, D. (1992) Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Robinson, H. (Fall, 2020) “Dualism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/dualism/>.
Wilson, R. A. and Foglia, L. (Spring, 2017), “Embodied Cognition”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/embodied-cognition/>.
