Embodiment and Representation
2,386 views · Published 23 January 2008 · 7:53 · Indexed 9 October 2026
Channel: Footnotes2Plato · 2008 · Science & Technology
Embodying the mind unites our understanding of biology and epistemology. The activity of knowing becomes synonymous with the activity of living. Being alive is bringing forth a world, both ontogenically by learning and phylogenically through evolutionary history. This is in contrast to the representational approach, which has it that the brain and nervous system are an information-processor collecting data about the world through the senses as inputs, analyzing this data (thinking about it), and then spitting out correct motor responses as outputs. Perception is conceived of as a passive procedure: the light of the world passing through the crystal windows below our forehead undistorted and reflecting off the mirror hanging upside down at the back of our skull. Dennett has dismissed this kind of Cartesian Theater, but I don't think he has yet accepted that such a move requires that the representational metaphor be vanquished as well. The embodied approach tries to point out that perception is an activity, and that knowledge is action. The brain and body are one process, and part of this process is enacting a world (not retrieving a preexisting reality through the senses). The act of knowing is more creative than the representational approach lets on. The "world out there" is a cultural construct, an abstraction held together by the force of conversation, not by any transcendent ground, whether mental, material, or divine (our biological evolutionary history of structural coupling also plays a role in shaping reality, of course). Reality is groundless. It is an ongoing process always recreating itself. The subject and the object are involved in an endless dance, intimately related to one another, not ontologically divorced and out of touch. This has far reaching implications. For instance, the fact/value divide quickly becomes suspect, just as the rational/emotional, etc.
