Cognition at the Crossroads: from Embodied Minds to Thinking Bodies

Michael Wheeler School of Arts and Humanities: PhilosophyUniversity of Stirling

Body Matters One way of understanding the importance of

embodiment “depicts the body as intrinsically special, and the details of a creature’s embodiment as a major and abiding constraint on the nature of its mind: a kind of new-wave body-centrism. The other depicts the body as just one element in a kind of equal-partners dance between brain, body and world, with the nature of the mind fixed by the overall balance thus achieved: a kind of extended functionalism (now with an even broader canvas for multiple realizability than ever before)”

Clark, Pressing the Flesh

See also Wheeler, Minds, Things and Materiality; Embodied Cognition and the Extended Mind

Implementational Materiality

To the extent that the body is conceptualized as ‘no more than’ a bridge to new functional organizations, its materiality is implementational

Implementational materiality goes hand in hand with multiple realizability

For multiple realizability (at least of an interesting kind), a ‘raw’ compositional difference must entail a difference at the level of mechanisms and causal properties (cf. Shapiro, The Mind Incarnate)

Functionalism provides a well-established platform for securing multiple realizability and thus implementational materiality.

Vital Materiality The materiality of the body may

be said to be vital when bodily acts or structures make a nonsubstitutable contribution to cognition

Vital materiality is in tension with the multiple realizability of the mental

A Parting of the Ways

A disagreement over how philosophy and cognitive science should conceive of the body – as an implementing substrate or as a vital and irreplaceable determinant of cognitive life.

Extended Functionalis

mBody-

Centrism

Thompson’s ‘Embodied Hypothesis’

The embodied hypothesis: “the cognitive functions the nervous system implements can be realized only in systems having the causal properties of the biological nervous system”

According to Thompson, deciding between the embodied hypothesis and the thesis of multiple realizability requires “evaluating the empirical evidence – it cannot be decided on the basis of conceptual considerations alone”.

(All quotes from Thompson are from his ‘Reply to Commentaries’, unless otherwise noted)

Trading Explanations Clark and Thornton (Trading Spaces) argue that

some adaptive problems (e.g. avoiding small cylinders while staying close to large ones) involve regularities that are statistically visible only following a systematic recoding of the raw input data.

They suggest that the brain re-represents the input data and thus transforms the learning problem.

Scheier and Pfeifer (Exploiting Embodiment for Category Learning) demonstrate that the cylinder problem may be solved by a process in which a situated robot uses bodily motion to actively structure input (systematic circling behaviour induces cyclical regularities into the input data)

The agent, “by exploiting its body and through the interaction with the environment ... can actually generate ... correlated data that has the property that it can be easily learned” (Scheier and Pfeifer)

An Empirical Indeterminacy

Think of the re-structuring of the learning problem achieved by the bodily movements of Scheier and Pfeifer’s robot as functionally equivalent to the transformation of that problem effected by Clark and Thornton’s inner re-representation strategy.

That’s implementational materiality Alternatively, think of Scheier and Pfeifer’s

robots as providing a radical alternative to information processing as a way of solving the cylinder problem

That’s vital materiality!

Exploring Implementational Materiality: Extended Cognition

The extended cognition hypothesis (ExC): there are actual cases of intelligent action in which thinking and thoughts (more precisely, the material vehicles that realize thinking and thoughts) are spatially distributed over brain, body and world, in such a way that the beyond-the-skin factors concerned are rightly accorded cognitive status.

The qualification in parentheses solves the Flack-Hathaway Problem and shows why the relationality complaint against ExC (e.g. Thompson and Stapleton, ‘Making Sense of Sense-Making’; Di Paolo, `Extended Life’) is misguided.

Thompson: “it does not make sense to think of cognition as spatially located in the way that the ‘vehicles’ enabling cognitive processes are spatially located”.

Extended Functionalism Conventional functionalism provides a well-

established platform for securing in-the-head multiple realizability.

But functionalism may be formulated more broadly, e.g.: “what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part” (Levin, Functionalism).

This allows that the borders of the cognitive system may fall beyond the sensory-motor interface of the organic body.

So ExC, in a modal form, is straightforwardly entailed by a broadly formulated functionalism.

We still need to determine which functional differences matter when deciding what counts as cognitive, i.e., we need a mark of the cognitive

Cartesian Materiality “[P]hilosophers of mind have

come to see Cartesian dualism as the great enemy, but have underestimated what they have to contend with. Taking the putatively immaterial character of minds to create the only problem that there is for Descartes' account, they marry up the picture of the person with the picture of her brain and settle for a view of mind which, though material in its (cranial) substance, is Cartesian in its essence”. (Hornsby, The Physicalist Conception of Behaviour)

The Logic of Embodiment I

To borrow from Battersby (The Phenomenal Woman), this is a case of “an immaterial ‘I’ that is only lodged in the flesh”, of “a form… imposed on matter… by the mind in a top-down way”.

It’s a case of embodying thought. As standardly conceived, ExC, given its

dependence on (i) a pre-determined mark of the cognitive and (ii) implementational materiality, follows this same neo-Cartesian logic.

ExC’s claim to embodiment is limited to the way in which non-neural bodily movements and structures are now part of the realizing material substrate of cognition

Thompson’s Enactivism An autonomous system is a self-organizing system

in which the constituent processes (i) recursively depend on each other for their generation and their realization as a network, (ii) constitute the system as a unity in whatever domain they exist, and (iii) determine a domain of possible interactions with the environment (Thompson, Mind in Life, citing Varela)

Where successive environmentally induced perturbations to the autonomous system trigger only state changes that remain within that system’s bounds of viability, we have a history of structural coupling.

Sense-making is the process of enacting graded significance through adaptive autonomy, so autonomy is necessary but not sufficient for sense-making.

Cognition is sense-making

Autopoiesis and Materiality One might think that the phenomenon of

autopoiesis, alongside some sort of life-mind continuity claim, guarantees the vital materiality of the cognitive.

The autopoietic organization of the living cell is “autonomy in the biochemical domain” (Thompson, Mind in Life).

“What makes the system autopoietic is not its self-produced material boundedness as such, but rather that the relations constituting the system are relations between processes of molecular transformation, including those that make up the boundary” (Thompson)

Autonomy and Autopoiesis In Mind in Life, Thompson holds (for the most

part) that autopoiesis is sufficient but not necessary for autonomy

To “qualify as autonomous… a system does not have to be autopoietic in the strict sense (a self-producing bounded molecular system)” (Mind in Life)

The idea of autonomy already provides for a self-producing unity capable of a history of structural coupling

It is an enrichment of that very capacity for structural coupling, through the addition of adaptivity, that accounts for sense-making and thus for cognition.

So the materiality signalled by autopoiesis does not directly establish the vital materiality of cognition

Autopoiesis and Immanent Purposiveness

Thompson (Mind in Life) notes that, for di Paolo (e.g. ‘Autopoiesis, Adaptivity, Teleology, Agency’), “adaptivity needs to be established on the basis of autopoiesis; otherwise sense-making is not original to the system but merely attributed from the outside”

Without the connection to autopoiesis, the teleological structures of sense-making would not be original to the activity of the system because of the way the system is organized (i.e., immanent), but would merely be attributable to the system by some external observer.

On di Paolo’s view (of which Thompson approves), then, autopoiesis is necessary for immanent purposiveness, and thus for adaptivity, and thus for cognition.

Is this the argument for vital materiality?

Why is Autopoiesis Necessary?

Suggestion: autopoiesis grounds the idea that each part of a system displaying immanent purposiveness must be both a product and a producer of the other parts.

But already in an autonomous system, the constituent processes recursively depend on each other for their generation and their realization as a network

“Immanent purposiveness does not mean that the parts must produce each other in the autopoietic sense; it means that they must generate and realize themselves as a whole according to the definition of autonomy” (Thompson)

Maybe ‘necessary here means that each autonomous system must contain some autopoietic constituents.

This seems to be an empirical matter

The Logic of Embodiment II

The logic of embodiment characterized by implementational materiality may be ruled out if we think from the position of the female

“[The] subject-position of the ‘female’ [is] more integrally linked with embodiment… more tied to fleshiness than that of the ‘male’.” (Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman)

Perhaps what we need is a science of thinking bodies, not a science of embodied thought

The Logic of Embodiment III

This invites body-centrism, with its dependence on vital materiality, as the reaction to the ‘disembodied’, neo-Cartesian narrative .

But a logic of embodiment characterized by vital materiality flies in the face of some deep-rooted intuitions about multiple realizability

Moreover, there seems to be a tension with Battersby’s own claim that identity thought from the perspective of the female will also have a purchase on male identity

Perhaps what we need, then, is a science of thinking bodies without body-centrism

The Cartesian Box The neo-Cartesian narrative promotes the idea of

the body as a container or box for the mind. Is there an argument for this view? “It is natural to hold that perception is the

interface where the world affects the mind, and that action is the interface where the mind affects the world. If so, it is tempting to hold that what precedes perception and what follows action is not truly mental.” (Chalmers, Preface to Clark’s Supersizing the Mind)

So we might be able to refuse the body-as-container view if we could establish that perception and action are not mind-world interfaces

But if we don’t rethink the nature of the boundary, the result will be an extended container – i.e. a bigger box!

Thinking Out of the Box “Forms – apparent stabilities – are brought about

only because dissipative systems tend to remain in equilibrium or at a state of rest up to a certain threshold of destabilisation.... For my purposes, what matters is not the details of the theories, but the metaphysics that underlies many of these new topological models. For on at least some of these models ... forms are not fixed things, but temporary arrestations in continuous metastable flows, potentialities or evolutionary events. If we think about boundaries, then from the point of view of the new sciences, the boundaries of bodies need not be thought as the edges of 'three-dimensional containers into which we put certain things .. and out of which other things emerged'. The boundary of the body can also be thought as an event-horizon, in which one form (myself) meets its potentiality for transforming itself into another form or forms (the not-self).” Battersby, The Phenomenal Woman