Thread: A Brief Guide to Embodied Cognition: Why You Are Not Your Brain (SciAm)

The editor is kind of vague and contradictory (he gets philosophically muddled), but the actual stuff it describes is fascinating.

The history of philosophy is not one of the materialisation of answers, but of the dissolution of questions. All philosophical problems of epistemology will vanish once we have been able to thoroughly look within our own brains.

As pointed out in the comments, 'embodiment' (kind of a silly term but whatever) isn't limited to the individual.



This painting is by Esref Armagan, a man who was blind from birth.

The point is that you are also affected by the 'embodiment' of all of your ancestors, through your genes. It's not just nurture. Those who were best orientated (by random chance) to interpret their environments survived. The visual system, for example, is the result of hundreds of millions of years of 'ancestral embodiment' (I hasten to stress that this all sounds unfortunately like New Age waffle but is fact solidly defined). If a human brain were put in a different universe, they would still retain whatever elements of rationality and the like are derived from that (rather than developing a rationality purely from the embodiment of their environment). The exact balance is of course an age old question; to what extent is language such, for example? Like I say, some day we will be able to answer this empirically.

The main point though is that, whether it's from ancestry or from the individual, all thoughts are the result of 'embodiment', or to use the better, traditional term, plain old empiricism. The sphere of human intellect is limited to the sphere of our existence; we do not gain any of our powers of rationality from some kind of preternatural source as is held by the weakest of rationalists (which is still most people).

Originally Posted by Xei

The history of philosophy is not one of the materialisation of answers, but of the dissolution of questions.

woah, that was cool lol

This article just seems to be emphasizing the significance of metaphors to cognition, anything new?

Originally Posted by Wayfaerer

woah, that was cool lol

If you liked that, check this out:

Dissolving the Question - Less Wrong

Also, I just saw this article a while ago before I saw this thread. It made me really happy because my philosophy teacher is one of those rationalists who think we have innate "preternatural" ideas.

The title of the article is misleading but the metaphor experiments are interesting.