I think this is a good question that embodied theorists have largely decided to ignore and that we should think carefully through in how to answer it. One thing it may show is that some embodied theories actually have a quite poor understanding of the body. If we see the body as the physical-mechanical device that the surgeon would operate - the object before us - then indeed embodied cognition becomes a troublesome proposal. Can blind people think less, or of lesser quality, because they miss sight? However, if we see it as the phenomenological lived body we are on safer ground - embodiment here is not so much about moving physical body parts through space rather than about a 'being-in-the-world'. Starting from the lived body I do think that even in a 'scientific' version of embodiment (how the physical object that is the body is important in the way we think) I would lean with you towards the idea that already micro-level movements (movements of the eye) are embodied actions that may ground cognition, or even selective neural activation that increases the sensitivity of the body to receive a stimulus  - let's say a certain neural pre-activation in the arm or legs that is as it were expecting the incoming signal) is also already a form of embodied action that is only possible if you have the body and is most importantly not rooted within a detached inner 'model' of the body or the environment.

Dear Domenico,

As people like Ken Aizawa and Fred Adams have been pointing out for a decade or more, 'embodiment' has no real scientific meaning. It is a nice poetic term but in the causal dynamic terms of physical science it is either trivial or wrong. It is trivially true that motor activity contributes to the inference of (some but not other) external dynamic patterns by the sensory system. Eye movements are the paradigm. But the extension of this to suggest that action constitutes perceptions, rather than contributes to prior cause is incoherent in any serious analysis.

The second option is the correct one. Hawking would continue to be just as aware of the world if he had no movements. The appreciation of music requires no motor activity. People regularly perceive the world under curarisation during artificial ventilation. I have myself memories of experiences while under light anaesthesia. It is an answered question. However, some poetic souls like to pretend it is not!

Awareness can be quantified. Whereas witnessing of inner contents such as thoughts and emotions require no motility, witnessing of external content depends on motility, sometimes heavily.

Thus indivduals with severe disabilities are clearly less aware. A genius like Hawking may have found ways to compensate this obviously. Assuming that reading scientific literature on a pc would be his top priority, he may have been able to follow his field of interest in a very efficient way.

Hi Hans Ricke, thanks for your answer.  I'm surprise that even emotion would'nt require any motility. 

Hi Jonathan Edwards, thnaks for your answer. What do you think of Jelle van Dijk's response.  He is saying that 

"Starting from the lived body I do think that even in a 'scientific' version of embodiment (how the physical object that is the body is important in the way we think) I would lean with you towards the idea that already micro-level movements (movements of the eye) are embodied actions that may ground cognition..."

Dear Domenico,

Saccadic and microscopic movements are essential to the identification of differences in the outside world and all our knowledge is inferred from differences. But that has been known for centuries. I do not see what the term 'embodied' adds to our understanding. What does it mean? What is it that is embodied and what does it mean to be embodied? I have been asking people this for ten years and nobody can give the word a useful meaning. It seems to lie in the realm of poetry.  

The truth that I think is hidden under all this recent empty jargon is that inside the human body there are experiencing dynamic units much like what Descartes and Leibniz envisaged as 'souls' - which of course belonged with bodies. I do not say this because I think we want some magic extras to add to physical science but because physical science is incoherent without them. Souls are the 'physicalist' solution if you like. The tricky thing is working out what physical dynamic units they are. They would appear to have necessary dynamic relations to bodies, but that is just physics, not poetry. 

The red herring is suggesting that somehow bodily actions constitute experience. We have a vast body of evidence indicating that bodily actions like eye movements are antecedent causal factors necessary for generating the sort of experiences we have, but let's not call that 'embodiment'.

Dear Jonathan:

You say: "As people like Ken Aizawa and Fred Adams have been pointing out for a decade or more, 'embodiment' has no real scientific meaning."

Apparently these scholars have been warming up to the concept of embodiment during the second half of the past decade.

I have on my desk, as I write this post, a copy of Lawrence Shapiro's book Embodied cognition (Routledge, 2011). I concede that Shapiro's treatment of the concept is more critical than most, but he takes it seriously. In the front matter there is a page with "Praise for Embodied Cognition", where Adams and Aizawa give their opinions on both book and concept:

"Embodied Cognition is sweeping the planet and Larry Shapiro has just written the first comprehensive treatment of this exciting and new research program. This book is now and for years to come will be unquestionably the best way for students and researchers alike to gain access to and learn to evaluate this exciting, new research paradigm in cognitive science."

-- Fred Adams, University of Delaware, USA

"Embodied Cognition is an outstanding introduction to this increasingly important topic in cognitive science. Written in a clear and lively style, with a critical approach, it is a strong contender for the most useful introductory text on any topic in all of cognitive science, and a genuine conribution to the scientific and philosophical literature on embodied cognition."

-- Kenneth Aizawa, Centenary College of Louisiana, USA

Perhaps you are exaggerating just a bit, esteemed colleague?

P.S. Thanks for putting the "soul" concept on the table; it clarifies your position, which I respect, even if I don't share it. We're all just groping about in the twilight here; what is fascinating is that there is more light now than we had a few decades ago.

Dear Domenico:

Hawking has a body, albeit with major limitations, plus high tech extensions of that body which surely integrate with his consciousness as our organic bodies, and our tools amd instruments, integrate with ours. Thus I don't think that this case poses a serious problem to enactivism and related emerging paradigms. But your question surely merits further thought and perhaps a more specific formulation that we could get a better grip on. It would be interesting to hear Hawking's thoughts on this!

Dear David,

I think I stand by my statement. Ken and Fred HAVE been pointing this out, at least in the sense that the word embodied has usually been used. They also have a sense of humour and timeliness. Presumably they think Shapiro''s book handles the sociological phenomenon of 'Embodied Cognition' as well as any. Maybe they have joined the band using the term but that does not alter the fact that they have frequently provided the reasons why it has no scientific value.

Domenico,

If reduce motility would reduce thinking then we would expect great athlete to have amazing thinking in proportion of their amazing motility.  I never heard any representative of the embodied perspective embracing such a view.   According to the embodied perspective thinking is making use of the body control mechanisms for motility.  In  the case of Hawkings  some part of its sensory-motor system don't work but it is not totally broken down in spite of its low motility. Someday may become blind because the optic nerve is damaged but this is only .1 % of the visual system and a blind person can still use his visual system to think.

Dear Jonathan:

That Adams and Aizawa "have joined the band using the term" is testimony to the growing robustness of the embodiment paradigm as a whole. I think it is futile to issue blanket condemnations --or praise-- for the concept in general, rather than to sort through what is useful and what should be modified in the light of all the new work that is being done. In many fields this transdisciplinary perspective is providing a fertile framework for understanding essential aspects of our humanity. Rather than discard the concept, I suggest that a more productive approach would be to put on our critical goggles and weed out the embodiment pseudoscience from the embodiment science. In this way we might advance together, rather than drawing a line in the sand and denying the validity of whatever is being done on the other side.

Respectfully yours,

David

P.S. I have been sharing the working bibliography I put together for art students interested in embodiment theory on my ResearchGate profile and on other threads here. I'll post the link again for anybody that wants to take a look at some of the newer contributions to the field, as well as the older, "classical" works.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303374480_Art_in_the_embodied_mind_a_bibliography_updated_20_May_2016

It continues to grow and evolve; I'll post another update in early 2017.

Data Art in the embodied mind: a bibliography (updated: 20 May 2016)

OK David, what the heck does it mean?

I might add that I am sitting drinking a glass of light Orvieto having listened to Andy Clark's first Chandaria Lecture on Embodied Cognition. He gave no clue as to what 'embodied' contributed to the analysis. It would seem to contradict his own claim for 'extended mind' not being confined to body.

Dear Jonathan: There are plenty of definitions and interpretations of embodiment in the bibliography I posted a few hours ago. It's far too much to absorb in one sitting (or even in one year of diligent reading), so I suggest focusing on one text at a time. I don't know what you have already read or heard, so I won't make any recommendations that could be misinterpreted as being condescending. It's all very interesting, at least to me.

My own take is forthcoming; I'm new to this field. The only thing I've published is a conference paper on embodiment and art education, prepared for a meeting of directors and professors of art departments in Mexico, and it's in Castilian (often called Spanish, with disregard for the other languages spoken in Spain). I'm working on a paper on the enactive aesthetics of ancient Mesoamerican art, focusing on reptilian iconography and drawing on studies of primate evolution, among other things.

Maybe you can help us separate the wheat from the chaff, if you can manage to appreciate the wheat in spite of its embodied flavor!

P.S. Maybe Shapiro's book (the one I cited yesterday on this thread) would be palatable to you, Jonathan, as he even-handedly lays out the strengths, weaknesses, and current debates surrounding this emerging paradigm, keeping what he calls a "score card" where he compares gains made by both proponents and critics of the concept of embodied cognition. This is the sort of critical analysis I was talking about, that I find more fruitful than either uncompromising denial or naive acceptance.

It sounds as if you also cannot tell me what the heck embodiment means, David. 

Talk of emerging paradigms is the modern fluff of popular science. I have extensive acquaintance with the work that gets put in this pigeonhole : O'Regan, Nöe, Hohwy, Frith, Clark, Thompson, Gallagher, Haggard, Walport, and so on and on. I can see that forward models and predictive coding are of some use as broad metaphors, but I am pretty sceptical about any of these people really understanding how things are implemented in neural tissue. All of it seems to me to be basically a way of hiding away from a proper causal dynamic analysis of the sort Descartes gave us. Something in the brain gets some signals that are manifest to it , or it is 'conscious of'. Those signals are based on differentials so the preparation of them requires motor activity but that should not be confused with something at the end getting the signals. If nothing gets the signals there is no meaning; they do not even qualify as signals.

The whole thing to my mind is a pretence that there is some other way to explain than Descartes. And it makes no sense. Descartes got the receiving unit wrong but we can sort that out - as long as we accept that there are such units. 'Embodied cognition' is a cover for denying the only possible form of explanation. And even Ken and Fred may have missed the point I fear.

I looked at the introduction to Shapiro's book on Amazon. It is the usual straw man stuff, even if it may be an overture to some useful description of the science (which is probably why Adams and Aizawa are happy to endorse it). It is a word play. There are two readings of each statement in the exposition of the three main tenets of 'EC'. One reading is valid but as old as the hills - known to Bishop Berkely and William James. The other reading, which is what seduces the reader from outside neurobiology, is just plain wrong, as Aizawa has repeatedly shown clearly, at least for tenet 3. We do not need, or want, science to be packaged into these poetic paradigms that hide double meanings.

Embodied Cognition will be the next Aunt Sally once the fashion has changed. Everyone will suddenly realise it was a mistake, like bell bottomed trousers. Forget it.

Jonathan,

'' but I am pretty sceptical about any of these people really understanding how things are implemented in neural tissue.''  

None of them have proposed how things are implemented in neural tissue.  They are not physiologists.  They have mostly worked on the phenomenal side of the equation and proposed models whose focus is to be consistent with this phenomenal side.

''something at the end getting the signals. If nothing gets the signals there is no meaning; they do not even qualify as signals'' 

Is it necessary to make the assumption  that such nexus exist?   I am an ''I'' and I feel to be an united actor.  My phenomenal reality is ONE while it supported by a 10000 billion cell community with possibly with as many individual cell consciousness which are not mine.  Does this united phenomenal reality, that is ME, my reality,  necessarily requires a physiological nexus?  Does the phenomenal evidences require it? I don't think so but I think that it  requires an attentional mechanism/agency modulating learning/physiological growth and coordinating the whole organism (cells community) into a single action/purpose/intent/consciousness.

''The whole thing to my mind is a pretence that there is some other way to explain than Descartes.''  Yes it is exactly this.

''Descartes got the receiving unit wrong but we can sort that out - as long as we accept that there are such units. ''

Lets assume that the receiving physiological homoculus do exist?  How does it decide what to do.  Receiving information is one thing, analysing it is another and choosing what action from this analysis is another one and coordinating it is another one. Physically I am precisely nowhere.  I am about my action and my action is not precisely located.  My life is about the action of my life.  I do not know what my life could be about if it is not about doing something.  I do not precisely know what I am doing but I am conscious , mostly emotionally of what I care about and this is guiding my doing.  Looking back at my life and doing, I try to discovered what it was about and from this orient it better.  I cannot avoid dealing with my relation with the whole social history and history the whole universe and more and more realize my relation with the whole and the point of that is against to better orient my action to serve the development of the bigger human community to which I belong.  So I do like the cells of my body do towards me.

Dear Louis,

Quite a few people embracing 'embodied cognition' are physiologists - like Hohwy and Frith. O'Regan purports to be doing physiological studies.

Yes it is necessary to assume a receiving nexus. Otherwise there is no event of signalling a complex pattern. A complex pattern is only signalled if the pattern as a whole is received. If there is an event of experience it must obey the laws of locality of physics. It is all very cut and dried, despite the fact that so many scientists and philosophers ignore it.

You have no evidence of a phenomenality that is 'yours' that is separate from that of individual cells. You live in a culture where this is assumed but the assumption has no basis (unlike the one above!). What is 'an attentional mechanism'? This seems to me to be sleight of hand wordage by people like Northoff.

The receiving unit responds according to its functional rules. There is no such thing as 'deciding' beyond that. And since there are billions of receiving units following their rules, each set to a different function, very sophisticated response patterns are possible. There is simply no difficulty here.

What is this 'I' that is nowhere? It is a fiction thought up by philosophers as far as I can see. You have a body in a place and within that body there are presumably sites of subjectivity - why should they be nowhere? That would be incompatible with natural science and could yield no testable theories. What explanatory power could it have?

Dear Jonathan,

''A complex pattern is only signalled if the pattern as a whole is received.''

 This sentence was sent by you to me.  I received it.  But it makes sense to me only because it is refering to an enormous amount of information we both share and received through our biology and enculturation and that is not sent by you.  So I can make sense of this sentence without you sending most of what it means.  Contradicting this sentence.  I received only a tiny tiny fraction of the pattern it means.

''If there is an event of experience it must obey the laws of locality of physics. ''

I am not totally sure that the laws of locality of physics is more than a confused abstraction.  I leave that topic aside because it would bring us somewhere else.  Lets assume that it is true that there is such physical principle.    But physiology is a totally different science than physics.  The scale of the objects and events is totally different and the concepts and processes are very different.  My conscious living experience seem to sometime to be occuring within my body but not always.  I may dream and in that dream be floating above that body.  And sometime when I am intensely into my thought , I am not that much aware of my body but mostly aware about the imagined reality I am exploring.  But from my conscious experience, I always have the impressing it is occuring to me, I am the whole of it.   Is this occuring needs to be at one physical location?  What is a physical location? A infinitely small coordinate position with respect to a 3D reference frame (This cannot have physically meaning given the uncertainty principle)?  A specific point located into my brain? A state of a complex system of my brain occupying certain physical locations?  

''You have no evidence of a phenomenality that is 'yours' that is separate from that of individual cells.''

I don't but I don't have a phenomenality that is phenomenality attache to a individual cells' .  We are huge cell colonies.  This is a biological fact.  But the cell are huge colonies of molecules.  This is a chemical fact.  These molecules are colonies of atoms and these of particles.  Why stopping at the cell?  If the cell can legitimatly exist as an individual, what not the colonies of cells forming a human body?   My cells are involved into the processes supporting my action I am aware about them.

''What is 'an attentional mechanism'?''

We can direct our attention and this determine our conscious experience.  Most of the time our attention is triggered by external events making us pay attention to them.  Sometime we do things into an automated mode and are totally unaware of doing them.  We are only aware of what we attended. Attention and Consciousness goes hand in hand.  We switch from one task to the next based on a switching task mechanism: this is the attention mechanism and we can phenomenally observe its doing.  The shortest time scale of conscious events is 1/10 second. No consciousness events/happening is taking place below that scale.  To be aware of anything has to be a construction taking some time to take place.  Using the phenomenologist term of a conscious event: presentation.  Some call microgenesis the process of construction of a presentation.  The visual microgenesis process takes place into one systolic cycle of 1/10 second.  This visual microgenesis is constrainted by the luminance patterned projected on the retinas. I hypothesized that it correspond to the classification of a pattern along a tree of classification process and the choices that make the classification decision from generic to the actual classified pattern is at the end of the systolic cycle fully instantiate from the root to the leaf.  That leaf can only be reach and instantiated through this path and its instantiation is the conscious event of that pattern.   It is my version of :

''There is no such thing as 'deciding' beyond that.''

For the whole microgenesis process to even started the attentional mechanism had to have trigger the schema of action that was appropriated for this particular living situation. 

Dear Louis,

Your first analogy is non sequitur. I said nothing about meaning and speech is quite different from signals sent in brains. I am simply saying that if there is something that experiences a complex pattern in your brain it must get that whole pattern.

The law of locality may be an abstraction idea but it is quite precise and without it you cannot do physics because physics has to register all predictions in time and space. The formulation of locality at the quantum level is quite different from the classical aggregate level but is if anything even more precise and complete. Physiology is not different from physics. It is physics applied to biological processes. I am a biophysicist so I think I should know! The scale is irrelevant; physics goes from huge to tiny and simple to complex.

Dreaming about floating about has nothing to do with floating about, as you know. All our experiences are symbols for a world that are created inside. Sometimes they are reliable, sometimes in dreams they make no sense. We cannot locate our thoughts precisely because we have no sense organs to locate events inside the brain - we have no need to. That has nothing to do with whether or not the thoughts actually have a location, which they have to to be part of physical science. And of course experience is part of all physical science as observation so there is no divide here - just a spectrum of ascertainability.

There are very simple reasons for stopping at the cell. The neuron has a very rich informational input from up to 10,000 other cells which we have every reason to think carry inferences about the world. Any smaller and you have no structure with that number of independent inputs that would make any sense. Moreover, neurons have outputs that contribute to behaviour in the same way. Individual organelles or molecules do not. Molecules may have experience but there is no way its pattern could be communicated to speech centres. Patterns of neuronal input can readily be communicated to speech centres through the neural synapse system. The answer is very straightforward.

I did not really catch what you meant by 'we direct our attention'. What is this act inside a brain? Is there a caretaker inside shining a torch? I am familiar with the  neurophysiology but I am sceptical of the concept of 'directing attention'. Attention just happens as a result of the behaviour of vast numbers of nerves.

Best wishes

Jo

Dear Jonathan,

 ‘’Physiology is not different from physics. It is physics applied to biological processes. I am a biophysicist so I think I should know! ‘’

Michael Polanyi ( a distinguished physical chemist):

‘’ Just link up two of three of the atoms of physics, and their behavior becomes so complex as to be beyond the range of exactitude. How supremely unreasonable it appears then, to claim that, by precise measurements and mathematical treatment, i.e. physical exactitude, a vital knowledge and command of such objects as living organisms and social bodies should be found. All these fields of high complexity gain real profit only from the discovery of specific tendencies of behavior incorporated in their functional outlines.

Chemistry, indeed, leads us so far away from physics, (or let us say, that physics appears, when we look at chemistry, so far remote from everything else in the world) that the description of chemical substances and the art of dealing with them lies quite near, by comparison, to the types of human behavior and the art of commanding human behavior. The mythological language of the alchemists persists in chemistry and is still characteristic of its most vitalelement.’’

http://www.polanyisociety.org/Ltr-Vlu-Inexact-18-3.pdf

I first identified attention in the phenomenal domain of our experience.  Our attention , as the name sudgest, is both the trigger that engage us in a particular action and which guide us to what is important in our task.   ‘’ What is this act inside a brain?’’’’  It is not an act.  Any action involves a self-monitoring of its convergence towards its goal and attention is only required when this convergence is failing.  That is the time the caretaker to intervene. Only then new way of acting, new learning is required and decision about the task need to be done.  This process is what attention is doing.   Attention is very close to be the proverbial ‘’I’’ that is acting.  It is learning itself.  It is where ''I'' begin to exist exactly at the point where as I am I  ''fail'' and so direct me for me ''to live''.  It is my axis of growth.

Sorry to have missed out on the discussion for a few days; I was away at a conference and left my notebook at home so I could focus on direct contact with people.

Jonathan, I find the statement "It sounds as if you also cannot tell me what the heck embodiment means, David" rather arrogant, even aggressive, in the context of an academic discussion. The bibliography was my answer; I had hoped you would have gotten the point, which is fairly obvious if you think about it. Goading is dangerously akin to trolling, which is not the best way to engage with an online community. Excuse my frankness, but some things just have to be pointed out when our dear colleagues cross the lines of civil discourse. Please take this as advice from a friend.

I'm disengaging from the conversation for a while, to get back to wriitng a couple of conference papers (it's congress season and I overloaded myself with commitments as usual). Thanks, Domenico, for launching this lively discussion, and to all the participants who have shared their views. (Edit, 18 hours later: I seem to have failed to disengage from this conversation.)

Dear Louis,

Plane sounds like a scientists who makes muddled attempts at metaphysics on the side. I thin he is wrong. Chemistry used to be separate from physics and it became fashionable to say one could not be reduced to the other - and until 1920 that was true. But now that we have quantum theory all chemistry is quantum theory and so physics and the reduction is complete. We may not have the computers big enough to make predictions for very complex molecules but that is just a practical issue. Moreover, ever since statistical dynamics we have found ways of dealing with the regularities within complexities with great accuracy. It is not the eighteen decimal places of quantum theory but it can easily be five or six. even when I make marmalade my thermometer measures precisely to three decimal places. This old idea that one discipline does not reduce or bridge to another is an anachronism. Presumably Polanyi is rather old?

Dear David,

My question of what the heck does embodiment mean was not in any way intended as aggressive. It was simply a light hearted expression of my frustration with people refusing to pin down a meaning. Last night Andy Clark gave his second Chandaria Lecture on Embodied Cognition and it was still totally unclear to me what use the term had. In fact he said so himself, that in a sense the difference between the embodied position and the non-embodied position of Jacob Hohwy is essentially trivial and semantic. Yet he wanted to persuade everyone that embodied was better. 

Shapiro give three principle in his introduction that might seem to pin the concept down. However, the one that seems to me wrong - the absence of any need for internal representations - clark says he thinks is wrong too. There is no consensus and moreover the enthusiasts seem to slide from one position to another in mid lecture.

What I did get usefully from Clark talk was the point that Hohwy, who is perhaps the most interesting scientific theorist in this field, thinks as I do that embodiment is the wrong conceptual framework. At least there are some people in the field who seem to have their feet on the ground. My suspicion is that most people who talk of embodiment want the term to legitimise some sort of avoidance of an internal account of perceptual representation, in the way that O'Regan does. I am quite clear that O'Regan is wrong with his 'enactive' theory. Embodiment just seems to be all things to all men. Academic study does better without such terms.

I see that Polanyi died forty years ago - which seems to support my surmise.

Dear Jonathan:

Thank you for rephrasing your statement as a question. Still, if that was lighthearted, I hope we never see your heavyhearted side!

Broad, all-purpose definitions can become obstacles in research, limiting the creative process of the incubation of novel ideas for testing. This is why dictionaries are insufficient and researchers usually state what they mean by their key conceptual terms, to avoid sterile semantic debates.

Each research agenda has specific conceptual requirements that are determined in part by the researcher's personal and disciplinary perspectives. Working definitions, when done in a thoughful and original way, are tailor-made for these requirements. This explains the diversity of definitions of embodiment, a perspective that has gone beyond consciousness theory, spilling over into overlapping fields like linguistics, anthropology, education, aesthetics, etc.

In aesthetic research, I find the embodied, enactive perspective especially potent. The idea of people as biological organisms interacting with their environments permits research to advance beyond the traditional Western philosophical perspectives that have stifled the integration of this field with the exciting advances in other areas that look at human experience. The transdisciplinary integration of knowledge, in which advances in one area are used to test hypotheses, postulates, and theories in another, is at the core of the scientific endeavor.

We won't get very far in our understanding of our cultural production if we don't make an effort to acquire at least a basic understanding of, for example, primate evolution, including how our complex visual system was determined by enaction, the latter term in the sense of a "history of structural coupling that brings forth a world," working by means of "a network consisting of multiple levels of interconnected sensorimotor networks," which functions properly when "it becomes part of an ongoing world (as the young of every species do) or shapes a new one (as happens in evolutionary history)" (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1993: 206-207, 213).

We are not brains in jars, nor are we conscious ethereal entities inhabiting bodies. We are living beings, part of the vast, integrated web of life on Earth, which has shaped us and which we have shaped. Backing up and looking at this larger perspective (which is often overlooked, in spite of it being so obvious) is breaking down barriers between disciplines and contributing to the integration of scientific knowledge. If the "embodied" and "enactive" perspective is bringing this about, this is a positive development, as I see things at present. It will eventually be overshadowed by some new, perhaps equally productive paradigm, but it is far more than a fad, and it has already contributed to the expansion of our collective understanding of our species and our relations with one another, with the living Earth, and with the universe (please see the bibliography I provided four days ago for details, and for complete references to the works and authors mentioned in this post).

If you would like to get at the essence of embodiment theory, dig beyond the authors you mentioned ("O'Regan, Nöe, Hohwy, Frith, Clark, Thompson, Gallagher, Haggard, Walport, and so on and on"). Look at the work of Merleau-Ponty, a precursor, then at the influential, defining book by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1993 [1991]), as well as the writings of Lakoff and Johnson (particularly 1999). As for Shapiro, reading the introduction won't suffice to assimilate the concept of "embodied cognition," not even his take on it, as was evident from your brief critique. Judging a book by its introduction is a small step beyond judging it by its cover. It's like attempting to criticize a journal article after reading the abstract. It doesn't work.

People have taken the "embodiment" idea in many directions, creatively exploring its potential, over the last quarter of a century or so, and now it looks like we are in the midst of a process of talking things over and seeing what kind of consensus can be built from this recent flurry of ideas. This is why I called embodiment an "emerging paradigm." Emerging paradigms are not "the modern fluff of popular science" (your words), but a fundamental process that characterizes the way human beings do what we call "science."

If "seeming to be all things to all men" (how about if we tone down the hyperbole and say "seeming to be many things to many people") is grounds for discarding a term currently employed by many researchers as a conceptual tool, we would have to throw out "consciousness" and "mind" as well, not to mention the much older, hallowed, and highly polemic concept of "soul."

As I mentioned earlier on this thread, it would be more productive to focus on individual works, and the ideas they contain, than to attempt to disqualify an emerging paradigm by dousing it with vitriol. Rhetorical attacks using devices like hyperbole and dysphemism to (apparently) disqualify ideas that clash with one's personal belief system won't convince critical thinkers. This sort of strategy may occasionally be successful as a means of swaying the masses in political debates, but that is not our context here; a higher level of discourse is called for in an academic forum.

Respectfully,

David

"Hi Hans Ricke, thanks for your answer. I'm surprise that even emotion would'nt require any motility. "

I was not pointing at emotions but at witnessing them. Do you think witnessing emotions requires any movement?

Dear Johnathan,

Polanyi's letter was written  in 1936. He was then well aware of the quantum theory given that he was  working from 1926 as chemistry professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin until1933 when he had to flee .  So he was by then using quantum theory although we was not a contributor to that theory.  

''We may not have the computers big enough to make predictions for very complex molecules but that is just a practical issue. ''  Yes it is quite a practical issue.  Such practical issue force us to invent new concepts that are practical and so science can stay empirical.  

Your expression ''muddle'' when you applies it to such a clear mind  is funny but I understand that it may appear so from your end of the   philosophical spectrum.

It also appear that from your point of view the expression ''embodiement'' is totally obscured.  ''Embodiment just seems to be all things to all men. Academic study does better without such terms.''  Although it is a position that has managed to clarify a bit for myself.  Large philosophical orientation cannot easily be described in a few words; I personally disagree with all the main contributors of that position but I agree with the general orientations. I appreciates more the early contributors and I appreciate more the cybernetic system theory approaches especially those that are about theoretical biology such as those Von Uexkull (a follower of Leibniz) and his successors such as Maturana and Varela.   The philosophers in that school that are not enough grounded in biology are less of interest for me.  The greatest appeal to this general viewpoint consist in not restricting the focus of the inquiry to the interior of the body but to focus on the interaction of this body (when the interaction door is open then the whole world out there show up in this interface from the organism's perspective; this is Von Uexkull notion of Umwelt).  This force to see the structure of the body and its control in light of this interaction.  When it comes to conscious experience, this one is primarily explain within the biological framework of interaction.  Since the uniquely human capacity of language are late evolutionay speaking, they have to be explained in the light of the lowers interrationist aspects.  I personnally moved in this philosophical direction totally unaware of this paradigm in the 1990's.  I was initially committed to the main stream cognitivism approach to visual perception well described by Marr in his book: Vision

A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information. Basically it is a Cartesian approach to vision: The vision process basically reverse the imaging process and build up 3D representation of the scene.  At some point, I realized that this is not only computationally impossible in principle, computationally impossible in practice because of the speed at which it has to be accomplished, but even if it could be accomplished, the results would be a representation that would be useless for action.  THen I search for a new way to see vision and I found the Gestaltists and Gibson (I did not know then but he was heavily influenced by Von Uexkull).  Both focus on the structures in the images without any concerned for inversing the imaging process.  Then I began to see the image analysis process the way a physicist would see it: the task of understanding a world by discovering its invariant structures. Then I conceived vision as based on a physics of the image world and then I investigated what a physics is?  I reviewed the progress of the geometrical thinking at the end of the 19th century and that led to the two parallel revolution in Physics at the beginning of the 20th century.  The mathematics of invariant, of symmetry , group theory, is called geometry.  Then I searched for a geometry appropriated for the image world, and once I found it, I could use it for finding the image invariants.  I will cut the details but what I realized  is that focusing in finding the image structure without any concern for the imaging process itself and its inversion, and what type of 3D surfaces are out there creating these structures, I did not miss anything important.  The reason being that whatever structure is destroyed through the imaging process, the one remaining are not the product of accident, are not created by the imaging process which only destroy and do not construct, what remain belong to the 3D surfaces.  Another realization was that what is important is not to represent them but to find them.  What is fundamental in that task is to construct it exactly along the hiearchy of the image structures and so the representation is not an artificial one but the very structure of the structure finding apparatus.  So the representation are not explicit in the nervous system but implicit.  And this focus on image structure finding apparatus without explicit representations provides a perspective on imagination and dreams: it is the self-enactment of this apparatus withou any stimulus. So the transition to language and art can now be conceive as a natural development of a new mode of working of the mammalian imagination: the artistic mode.  The rest is history.  In the case of my own investigation he started one day when I reflect about what vision is?  My initial answer was Marr's answer: vision is like a mirror , it inverse the imaging process and it enters the world of surface out there into our brain.  But I end my investigation by a new conception of vision, an Aristotlean one (the first philsopher biologist, the first philosopher of embodiement and late follower of the poets, the masters of words) where the mirroring of the world is much deeper and actually similar to its construction and in the cases of image the construction is inverse to the diffusion (deconstruction) of an image, the process of gradual eracing of all its structures.  The geometry that allow this is based on the diffusion equation, an equation similar to Shrodinger equation.  The parameter of diffusion, is the spatial scale and correspond to the time of diffusion.  The structural organisation is tree whose node are the symmetry breaking points of the morphogenesis process of the formation of the object surface.  The classification that naturally emerged is a philogenetic one.  I know this is all muddled stuff!

Hi Jonathan,

I am amazed that you seem to claim that attention "just happens". I know that you are familiar with the concepts of top-down and bottom-up attention. So while the later can be regarded the way you suggest, top-down attention is quite different. By ridiculing and bringing in a homunculus director you do not offer an argument for a complete dismissal of directed attention. Maybe you disliked, like many, a teacher's call to pay attention. Nevertheless such situations offer the possbility of a conscious choice: to deny the call or start shifting the attention. I guess we as scientists direct our attention in many cases. Hawking will do the same. 

So your generalisation is unfounded. You would have to make a case for each situation when top-down attention is the case, that the indvidual has not caused this by means of a conscious decision.

Cheers

Hans

Louis:

Thanks for mentioning Gibson's "ecological approach," which is a major antecedent of embodiment theory in general.

Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1993: 203-204) say that Gibson's perspective is an "example of a virtually monistic system," as opposed to a dualistic system that treats "the world as pregiven and the organism as representing or adapting to it." Both approaches deny mental representation of parts of the environment, but the difference is in the latter authors' concept of enaction, by the structural coupling of the organism and its (our) environment.

Yesterday I was reading Anthony Chemero's book Radical embodied cognitive science on a bus (returning from a congress on indigenous writing in Mesoamerica), and I found it interesting that this author (2011: 85-102) proposes that Gibson's "ecological psychology" can be used as a theory (or "guide to discovery") for testing Chemero's "radical" brand of embodiment theory, thus putting it on even ground with competing theories like computational and representational perspectives. (Chemero explains that not all embodied perspectives are nonrepresentational; thus his use of the adjective "radical".) In the following chapters he goes on to do this (but I haven't read that far yet).

The search continues...

Warm regards,

David

David,

Gibson has been very important for my own Ph.D..  It is only ten years later that I discover the work of Von Uexkull.  Jan Koenderink has speculated that Gibson most probably borrowed from Von Uexkull.  Gibson is unique in many respect but the core approach is even better express through Von Uexkull Umwelt conception which is general biological interface notion.  It is better because the environment is not a given for an organism, it is better seen as an Umwelt.  Von Uexkull is a combination of Leibniz and Kant for biology.  The notion of coupling emerge naturally from the notion of umwelt .  Gibson has objectified the environment and his notion of affordance is too much objectified.  Maturana evolutionary drift is a better notion than the notion of adaptation . 

I do not know anything about Chemero's "radical emboided approach.  Recently I discover 

Thomas Reid (1710-1796); he  rejected this representationlalism non sense. 

'It were easy to show, that the fine arts of the musician, the painter, the actor, and the orator, so far as they are expressive... are nothing else but the language of nature, which we brought into the world with us, but have unlearned by disuse and so find the greatest difficulty in recovering it. (p. 53)[8]

That without a natural knowledge of the connection between these [natural] signs and the things signified by them, language could never have been invented and established among men; and, That the fine arts are all founded upon this connection, which we may call the natural language of mankind." (p. 59) [9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Reid

Hi Hans, sorry for not reacting before. 

You asked: Do you think witnessing emotions requires any movement? 

My answer is yes. Being alive emplies being in movement, and one has to be alive to be witnessing. 

Thanks Luis. I downloaded a text by Uexküll a week ago and found it very insightful (and pioneering, as you point out). Many thanks for the tip. Here is the complete reference and link for anybody who may be interested:

Uexküll, Jakob von

1982 “The theory of meaning,” in Semiotica (International Association for Semiotic Studies), vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 25-82 (http://www.codebiology.org/pdf/von%20Uexk%C3%83%C2%BCll%20J%20(1940)%20The%20Theory%20of%20Meaning.pdf, access: 23 October 2016).

Dear Jelle, Jonathan, David Charles, Louis, Hans

Tanks you so much for contributing to this debate.

I have been practicing martial arts, mostly karate, for some decades, and what I have learned is that to improve, you need an opponent. The better the opposition to oneself, the better are the chances to improve. There are several styles of combat, each conveying a different perspective. What I have learned, among others things, in my practice it is the necessity of making unity with the opponent (oneness rather a dual opposition) to control him better or to defeat him if that is the solution. The unity is a quest, never a given and the other as an opponent, exists only if one has the means to oppose or, ideally, to unify with him. Oneness with the other can be understood has a kind of structural coupling with the other, but a structural coupling which one always have to do and redo, here and now, from one fight to the next one. I try to understand the competing epistemological paradigms the same way...

Dear David,

Uexkull is considered with Peirce and Morris as the forerunner of bio-semiotics, i.e. a  biology interpreted as a sign systems .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosemiotics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_von_Uexk%C3%BCll

Domenico:

The important thing, I think, is to keep an open mind, and to be enactively flexible when a new (from a personal perspective) experience challenges what one imagines one "knows."

Luis:

Thanks for the links. On with the search!

Postscript:

Connect the audio output device, turn up the volume, and click here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzb-VmUCaxM

Plan B, in case the latter link becomes inactive:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dErG0hC_nVQ