Book review

Embodiment in Cognition and Culture

John Michael Krois, Mats Rosengren, Angela Steidele and Dirk Westerkamp (Eds). 2007. Embodiment in Cognition and Culture Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Reviewed by Christina Behme, Philosophy Department, Dalhousie University

During the 1960s-80s, research concerning consciousness and cognition focused mainly on 'the mind'. Functionalists, especially, insisted that how mind is instantiated in a body is essentially irrelevant. With few exceptions (e.g. Nagel 1974, Searle 1980, Jackson 1982) multiple realizability was accepted as the only game in town in cognitive science, AI research, and philosophy of mind (e.g. Putnam 1967, 1988, Dennett 1971, Fodor 1983, Pylyshin 1984, Shoemaker 1984). This picture has changed considerably and embodiment research has gained importance for AI and philosophy of mind throughout the last few decades. It now includes work from a wide range of disciplines within cognitive science (e.g. Clancey 1997, Clark 1997, Damasio 1999, Lakoff & Johnson 1999, Gallagher 2005, Pfeifer & Bongard 2007). Today, AI researchers and philosophers also look beyond the boundaries of their traditional fields for inspiration.

This volume is a collection of papers given at a 2004 conference entitled The Body and Embodiment: Intersections of Imagery, Literature, and Science. Experts from fields as diverse as biology, medicine, literature, art history, religious studies, and philosophy present their research highlighting the conceptual links between the natural sciences and cultural studies. "The essays show that the concept of embodiment can link the humanities and the sciences in a productive way, leading to further investigations" (Introduction, p. xiii). The resulting, somewhat eclectic, mixture will probably be read in its entirety only by book reviewers. But lay readers and professionals of many fields will find individual essays stimulating and thought provoking. The diversity is illustrated by the fact that the editors divided the volume into seven parts (Systems, Images, Form, Rhythm, Therapy, Catharsis and Symbolization), each containing two essays, and that even these pairs do not always cover similar issues (e.g., modeling pre-life forms vs. embodiment of higher cognition in Part 1, or psychosomatic medicine vs. laughter research in Part 5). Since a detailed discussion doing justice to all essays would require writing another book, I will focus in this review on two essays. The choice of these two is based on personal interest and in no way reflects on the quality of the remaining essays.

Terrence Deacon and Jeremy Sherman's essay The physical origins of purposive systems (pp. 3-25) provides an emergentist, constructionist alternative to the current telos-eliminating conception of biological causation. Their goal is to overcome the conviction that because we can't get something (telos) from nothing (non-teleological components) it has to be either teleology all the way down (a view only defended by panpsychists) or any apparently goal-directed behaviour can eventually be reduced to merely physical mechanisms. Insisting that there is a third alternative, the authors argue that biological adaptations "involve irreducibly teleological features and yet emerge from evolutionary and self-organisational processes that are themselves non-teleological" (p.6). They provide a model that shows how "a purposive molecular system might arise de novo in the absence of prior life" (p.8). This model (based on Deacon, 2006) describes a simple molecular system ("autocell") consisting of the reciprocal linkage between an autocatalytic cycle and a self-assembling encapsulation process. As long as there is a sufficient supply of substrate any (purely physio-chemical) disruption of the encapsulation would initiate the production of additional catalytic and capsule components that will spontaneously re-assemble into one or more autocell replicas. It is possible that newly formed autocells encapsulate new components and form new 'lineages' of autocells. Over many generations these autocells could 'evolve' into more efficient ('better adapted') and more complex forms. The authors suggest that this model shows how biases that are initially based on shape effects and bonding predispositions of chemical components can result in self-maintaining synergistic systems with adaptive functional organization that are subject to selectional forces. "[A]utocells show how natural selection, with its tendency to build ever-more-complicated end-directed systems can arise from mere chemistry" (p. 21).

The authors forestall the predictable objection that it is questionable whether this kind of simplified evolution could eventually even generate human-like purposive capacities by stressing that their analysis "doesn't offer a simplification of [teleological] complexity but rather a road map into it ...it provides us with at least one unambiguous example of how end-directedness - teleodynamics - can come into being spontaneously, and so provides a plausibility demonstration where none previously existed" (p. 24). While not everyone will accept this example as unambiguous, it will take more than reliance on long held intuitions to show that purposive systems could not have come into existence through mechanisms similar to those suggested by Deacon and Sherman.

Gerhard Danzer's essay Body, mind and psychosomatic medicine (pp. 185-193) explores the importance of the human body for the health of the soul. Danzer shows that the move from substance dualism (and focus on the rational soul) to monism (and inclusion of body in the treatment of mental illness) has a long tradition in psychosomatic medicine (Freud, Adler) and philosophy (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty). This transition allows physicians to "diagnose the material, the biological, the physical, the social or also the mental without declaring one of these dimensions to be the dominant one" (p.188). Seeing the importance of embodiment for all aspects of human flourishing allows the physician to appreciate the fact that any form of illness represents a restriction or loss of personal freedom. Danzer describes the close interconnectedness of physical and psychosomatic symptoms in any ill person and explains how illness can lead for the patient "to experience himself as an object" (p.189), a tendency that unfortunately often is exacerbated by the fact that "our system of medicine locks [patients] into the object role" (Ibid.). It becomes evident that gaining a better understanding of sickness also has profound implications for the healthy human who is in search of the meaning of his/her life. We need to accept ourselves as subjects and objects in order to be able to attain a certain degree of personal freedom and lead an emotionally stable life. Otherwise we run the risk of identifying ourselves with what we possess, instead of what we embody. Danzer urges that we need to acknowledge the complexity of the individual "interplay between biology and biography, between determinism and freedom and between the individual and the environment, all of which express themselves in the body" (p. 190). While it is certainly possible to disagree with Danzer about some of his interpretations, he provides compelling arguments for a more integrated approach to mental illness (and health).

The remaining essays encompass "a wide field of inquiry into the relationship between biological, affective, cognitive and cultural processes" (p. xvi) and cover pictorial embodiment, the effects of reading aloud, rhythm in the arts, and the effects of laughter. Embodiment is the thread that loosely links these contributions and it will be up to the reader to decide whether or not "the collection as a whole provides additional insights that are more than its parts" (Ibid.).

Bibliography

Clancey, W. 1997. Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge and Computer Representations. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Clark, A. 1997. Being There: Putting Brain Body and World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Damasio, A. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt.

Deacon, T. 2006. Reciprocal Linkage between Self-organizing Processes is Sufficient for Self-reproduction and Evolvability. Biological Theory 1, 136–149.

Dennett, D. 1971. Intentional Systems. Journal of Philosophy 68, 87-106.

Fodor, J. 1983. The modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gallagher, S. 2005. How the body shapes the mind. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Jackson, F. 1982. Epiphenomenal Qualia. Philosophical Quarterly 32, 127–136.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. 1999. Philosophy In the Flesh: The Embodied Mind And Its Challenge To Western Thought. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Nagel, T. 1974. What Is It Like To Be a Bat? Philosophical Review 83, 435–450.

Pfeifer, R. & Bongard J. 2007. How the body shapes the way we think: a new view of intelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Putnam, H. 1988. Representation and Reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Pylyshyn, Z. 1984. Computation and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Searle, J. 1980. Minds, Brains and Programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, 417–457.

Shoemaker, S. 1984. Identity, Cause, and Mind. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Links

© 2002-present ICLA; all rights reserved.
Site admin information and contact