Cappuccio M. & Froese T. (2014) Introduction. In: Cappuccio M. & Froese T. (eds.) Enactive cognition at the edge of sense-making: Making sense of non-sense. Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills: 1–33. Fulltext at https://cepa.info/2478
This book asks the sciences of the mind to test their own boundaries, demanding that they account for a number of cognitive and experiential phenomena that are at the edge of the very possibility to cognize. We believe that this is a foundational challenge for the enactive approach to the mind, and, moreover, it is a challenge that – if actually won – might offer a persuasive theoretical framework even to those who have so far been skeptical about enactivism’s capacity to deal with higherlevel cognition.
Cappuccio M. & Froese T. (2014) Enactive cognition at the edge of sense-making: Making sense of non-sense. Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills. Reviewed in Constructivist Foundations 10(3)
The enactive approach replaces the classical computer metaphor of mind with emphasis on embodiment and social interaction as the sources of our goals and concerns. Researchers from a range of disciplines unite to address the challenge of how to account for the more uniquely human aspects of cognition, including the abstract and the nonsensical.
Review: Hoburg P. (2015) Specifying Revolutionary Sense-Making. Constructivist Foundations 10(3): 422–425. Available at http://constructivist.info/10/3/422
Cappuccio M. & Wheeler M. (2012) Ground-level intelligence: Action-oriented representation and the dynamics of the background. In: Radman Z. (ed.) Knowing without thinking: Mind, action, cognition and the phenomenon of the background. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke: 13–36.
Excerpt: In what follows, we shall argue that the defiantly nonrepresentational conception of ground-level intelligence developed and defended by Dreyfus himself, and by others who share his general approach, is ultimately unable to do justice to the distinctive dynamics of background, precisely because that conception, at least partly as a consequence of its representation-shunning character, fails to encompass the particular, transformative, background-involving embodied capacity so strikingly illustrated by the King’s routine.
Cappuccio M. L. (2017) Mind-upload: The ultimate challenge to the embodied mind theory. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16(3): 425–448. Fulltext at https://cepa.info/5725
The ‘Mind-Upload’ hypothesis (MU), a radical version of the Brainin-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 (EM), 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?