Michael Wheeler
School of Arts and Humanities: Philosophy
University of Stirling
Cognition at the Crossroads:
from Embodied Minds to
Thinking Bodies
Body Matters
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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
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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
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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
Extended
Functionalism
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Body-Centrism
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.
Thompson’s ‘Embodied
Hypothesis’
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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
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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
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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 rerepresentation 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
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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
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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
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“[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
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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 neoCartesian 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
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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
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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 selfproduced 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
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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 selfproducing 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
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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?
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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
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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
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This invites body-centrism, with its dependence on vital
materiality, as the reaction to the ‘disembodied’, neoCartesian 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
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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
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“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