Many cognitive scientists have recently championed the thesis that cognition is embodied. In principle, explicating this thesis should be relatively simple. There are, essentially, only two concepts involved: cognition and embodiment. After articulating what will here be meant by ‘embodiment’, this paper will draw attention to cases in which some advocates of embodied cognition apparently do not mean by ‘cognition’ what has typically been meant by ‘cognition’. Some advocates apparently mean to use ‘cognition’ not as a term for one, among many, causes of behavior, but for what has more often been called “behavior.” Some consequences for this proposal are considered.
Cosmelli D. & Thompson E. (2010) Embodiment or envatment? Reflections on the bodily basis of consciousness. In: Stewart J., Gapenne O. & Di Paolo E. (eds.) Enaction: Toward a new paradigm for cognitive science. MIT Press: 361–385. https://cepa.info/2350
This chapter discusses the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment and attempts to determine what needs to be specified so that one can properly imagine a brain in a vat. Daniel Dennett notes that philosophers often fail to set up their intuition pumps properly by failing to think carefully about the requirements and implications of their imagined scenarios. His suggestion is considered here and a careful look at the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment is proposed. The chapter puts the thought experiment to new use, namely, to address the biology of consciousness and to develop some new considerations in support of the enactive approach in cognitive science. Its main argument is that the brain-in-vat thought experiment, when spelled out with the requisite detail, suggests precisely that the body is not merely causally enabling for consciousness, but also constitutive.
Delarivière S. (2017) Explaining Top-Down Minds from the Bottom Up. Review of From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett, 2017. Constructivist Foundations 12(3): 369–372. https://cepa.info/4195
Upshot: The main topic of Dennett’s book is intelligent design and the design of intelligence, trying to make intuitive the processes of both, be it the top-down process of comprehension that designs with foresight and reasons or the bottom-up process of evolution that has, through blind trial and error, captured free-floating rationales and ultimately, through co-evolution (between memes and genes), achieved top-down intelligence, flipping its original design process upside down.
Markič O. (2012) First- and third-person approaches: The problem of integration. Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems 10(3): 213–222. https://cepa.info/4326
The author discusses the problem of integration of first- and third-person approaches in studying the human mind. She critically evaluates and compares various methodologies for studying and explaining conscious experience. Common strategies that apply reductive explanation seem to be unsatisfied for explaining experience and its subjective character. There were attempts to explain experience from the first-person point of view (introspectionism, philosophical phenomenology) but the results were not intersubjectively verifiable. Dennett proposed heterophenomenology as a scientifically viable alternative which supposed to bridge the gap between first- and third-person perspectives. The author critically evaluates his proposal and compares it to contemporary attempts to provide first-person methods.
In the worlds of philosophy, linguistics, and communications theory, a view has developed which understands conscious experience as experience that is “reflected” back upon itself through language. This indicates that the consciousness we experience is possible only because we have culturally invented language and subsequently evolved to accommodate it. This accords with the conclusions of Daniel Dennett (1991), but the “hermeneutic objection” would go further and deny that the objective sciences themselves have escaped the hermeneutic circle. The consciousness we humans experience is developed only within the context of crossing the “symbolic threshold” into language (Percy 1975; Deacon 1997) and one of the earliest and most important symbols we acquire is that of the self, or “the subject of experience.” It is only when we achieve self-awareness that the world, as such, comes to exist for us as an object (which contains categories and sub-categories of objects). Any consciousness imputed to prelinguistic stages of development is based on projection and guesswork, since we can know nothing directly of it. It can be said that any experience which does not separate an inner subject from an outer world is probably a continuum of sensation in which environmental stimulus and instinctive response are experienced as a unity; it may be “lived experience” but it is experience “lived” non-consciously. Relevance: Language as a cultural creation, thus human consciousness is culturally constructed.
Theories based on the Darwinian idea of “selection” as an evolutionary driving force may help to understand the workings and functions of human consciousness. The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett has argued that consciousness was developed as a means to increase the rate of survival. However, it is one of the central features of consciousness that it “feels like something” to exist. Thus there seems to be a subjective quality of conscious experience. In philosophy of mind, this has traditionally been termed “qualia”, and the term refers to for instance the sensation of red as opposed to the sensation of blue, or the complex feelings of pain or love. Any theory of consciousness must provide a satisfactory explanation of this phenomenon. Dennett claims that from a scientific perspective there is no problem of qualia. In our ancestors, qualia developed as a discriminative ability in order to structure the outside world, and did not entail any subjective qualities. In humans, however, the subjective qualities came along with linguistic abilities, because these provide man with the possibility to relate to himself as an agent, i.e. regard himself from the outside. Eventhough the discussion of qualia on this account can be dissolved, the question remains, whether Dennett has succeeded in explaining why there is a subjective quality of conscious experience, i.e. why it “feels” like something to be conscious.
This paper (1) sketches a phenomenological analysis of visual mental imagery; (2) applies this analysis to the mental imagery debate in cognitive science; (3) briefly sketches a neurophenomenological approach to mental imagery; and (4) compares the results of this discussion with Dennett’s heterophenomenology.