A challenge to the idea of embodied consciousness
There's little reason to doubt that consciousness is influenced to some degree by the whole body. As a starting point, consider the features of consciousness identified by the IIT project. One of them is point of view, or intrinsic perspective.
So even if a person experiences a state of disembodiment, as when under the influence of mind altering substances, there's still a sense of engaging the world from a point of view, so this would qualify as a kind of embodiment.
A challenge to going further and saying that consciousness is entirely arising from the whole body starts with observing one of the ways that humans differ from other animals. In general, the dna and phenotypes of animals reflect the environments they're in. This means that if a flock of birds moves to the arctic, they won't survive unless they adapt physically. Humans have covered the globe without requiring any significant changes in body. This is usually explained by pointing to psychological adaptation, which involves changes in tool use, agricultural and hunting practices, animal husbandry, etc.
If consciousness is strictly a bodily function, we'd have to explain how it is that the body doesn't adapt, but the mind does.
So even if a person experiences a state of disembodiment, as when under the influence of mind altering substances, there's still a sense of engaging the world from a point of view, so this would qualify as a kind of embodiment.
A challenge to going further and saying that consciousness is entirely arising from the whole body starts with observing one of the ways that humans differ from other animals. In general, the dna and phenotypes of animals reflect the environments they're in. This means that if a flock of birds moves to the arctic, they won't survive unless they adapt physically. Humans have covered the globe without requiring any significant changes in body. This is usually explained by pointing to psychological adaptation, which involves changes in tool use, agricultural and hunting practices, animal husbandry, etc.
If consciousness is strictly a bodily function, we'd have to explain how it is that the body doesn't adapt, but the mind does.
Comments (48)
There is an important distinction that needs to be made between consciousness and contents of consciousness.
Contents can adapt and do, but consciousness itself in uninfluencable (I know thats not even a word) so it doesn't adapt except for its contents.
P.s Maybe I didn't understand you challenge.
How would you describe the difference?
Quoting frank
You havent mentioned affect, emotion, feeling and mood. These are considered bodily by embodied approaches to cognition, and there is no consciousness that is devoid of affect. Cognition is constrained, enabled and structured by a background of emotion-perception correlations, that manifest themselves as a changing background of implicit representations of body states.(Ratcliffe 2002)
Clarification: By consciousness I don't only mean awakening consciousness but whole levels of consciousness, known and unknown.
Quoting frank
Consciousness is not caused, contents are.
Consciousness is not dependent on time and space, contents are.
Contents are epiphenomena, they can be created and/or ended, Consciousness is not subject to this kind of change (although it could be subject to a subtler evolution).
There are many other differences that are implied by these.
Mood is definitely influenced by bodily function. I work in healthcare, so I routinely use emotion, feeling, and mood to assess things like CO2 level in the blood. Of course I have to confirm my suspicions by testing because the same combative mood that might reflect hypercarbia, might also be a result of frustration or pain. So we have a multiple realizability issue here. There's no way to map a particular mood to any particular part of the body.
Could you be more specific? I'm not following. Can you have consciousness without any content? Can you have content without consciousness? If there's a relationship, what is it?
Yes that's the goal of meditation and maybe some other rituals. Consciousness is not depended on contents for its existence but it needs contents for expression in the physical world.
Quoting frank
No. Contents need a cause.
Quoting frank
Consciousness is the blackboard (emptiness/space) upon which contents are written.
Its not clear that the mind has adapted when the examples given are exclusively performed by bodies.
The body does adapt, in that the strength of connections in your brain changes every time you learn something. It's simply a matter of us not being able to see and note the microscopic changes in brains hidden behind skulls. The changes to our bodies are there, and can be measured under the right circumstances, but it is easy to overlook such changes because they are hardly obvious.
I think this is the view of British Empiricists, but I don't know how to line it up with the idea of embodied consciousness.
So you would agree that if "embodied consciousness" refers to the belief that consciousness arises from the whole body, then it must be wrong, since the human body doesn't adapt to diverse earthly environments, but we adapt psychologically. You're saying all that's left is to assert that consciousness is associated with brain states. I agree with that. I don't think any serious philosopher would object to that. :up:
It's not a psychological adaptation, it's a technological one. When it's cold I put on a jacket. When it's hot I sit around in my lounge chair naked. Here's a picture:
[hide="Reveal"]Why in God's name are you looking here.[/hide]
I think it would be a matter of simplistic thinking to assert either consciousness comes from the whole body, XOR consciousness comes from the brain. The brain plays a central role, but other parts of the body play a role in how the brain is functioning as well. Hormones, blood flow, and the oxygen and glucose content of the blood, are some of the aspects of how parts of the body outside the brain have an impact on consciousness. Then of course there are the sensory and motor nerves, with paths all over the body, which play a big role in how our consciousness develops.
A bathrobe and the dynamic of cultural evolution will help bring that technology into a better light.
Additionally, the embodied consciousness thesis is often bundled with that of embedded cognition (environmental factors are also integral to cognition). And there is extensive experimental evidence to that effect. If cognition isn't construed narrowly as just thinking, but is understood as a kind of enaction, then the theory of embodied consciousness really isn't that far-fetched. After all, think about how intimately the nature of our thoughts is entwined with the nuances of our physical form, the dexterity of our fingers, the nature of our other senses. Knowledge is the result of a "hunger" which is then satisfied. Imagine how different our thoughts would be if we were instead squid-like creatures who absorbed sunlight through an algae-symbiote living in our skin.
Neurobiology explains the embodied consciousness of an animal. Language and maths is what then promotes humans to the kind of selves that also live life through a social and technological lens.
So we have stuff like self-aware or introspective consciousness how things would look if we could see ourselves from the socialised point of view of a linguistic community,
We still live embodied in our neurobiological personal point of view. But then we add the perspective of ourselves as social actors embodied within a realm of culture and socially rational meaning.
So there is a faultline in the human psyche that just isn't properly realised even within mainstream psychology and cognitive neuroscience. It is only in sociology and anthropology does this extra level of situatedness simply seem the bleeding obvious.
I don't see the theory of embodied consciousness as far-fetched at all. From my perspective it seems pretty intuitively obvious.
Quoting apokrisis
Could you given an example from the work of a specific sociologist or anthropologist illustrating this extra level of situatedness missing from mainstream psychology? Can you think of any non-mainstream approaches in psychology that realize this faultline? What about embodied enactivist accounts that, following Merleau-Ponty, make intersubjectivity primary? For instance, Shaun Gallagher writes:
intersubjective (social and cultural) factors already have an effect on our perception and understanding of the world, even in the immediacy of our embodied and instrumental copings with the environment.
If that were true, then why do humans have a superior ability to adapt to diverse environments without any significant physical adaptation? And whatever the answer to this is, why do humans have this capability and few other animals do?
If I take the position of the embodied cognitionist, I'll have to explain why the traditional answer to this question, that is, that humans adapt psychologically, is wrong.
At the heart of my challenge is a form of multiple realizability recognized by Descartes in regard to wax. Why do we call a melted blob "wax" and a solid cube "wax"? Or as it relates to this topic:
The staple diet of the Guilford Indians was made from the acorns of white oaks, which were abundant where they lived. They would pound the acorns into blobs and then wrap them in the leaves of poison ivy, then bury these items in the sand under a running creek. A day or so later, they would take the items out and put them in a fire until the acorn dough turned black and had the consistency of charcoal. According to English observers, the result was sweet.
On the other hand, the Maasai of Africa eat milk, meat, fat, blood, honey, and tree bark.
So we have two very diverse adaptations. How do I explain how each of these takes place without any inferences? Without any concepts? With nothing but bodily engagement to the environment?
I think in order to adhere to this particular brand of embodied cognition, I'd have to posit some sort of bodily process that has not been discovered yet, but that would explain why there's no psychological adaptation going on.
Or, if I say that I don't have to explain anything because the Guildford Indians and the Maasai were both adapting physically, then I think I'll have to explain why humans have covered the globe in a way other animals haven't. What's special about us that our bodies adapt to diverse environments, but other animals have limited ranges?
Could we argue that the neuroplasticity that allows mice and cats to become wild is also responsible for human so-called psychological adaptation? Perhaps it's just that humans ended up with such big brains that a more primitive adaptability present in all mammals is more pronounced in humans?
Whether or not we decide that it's reasonable to explain complex cooking techniques by an extension of something more primitive, what I'll note is that we've moved to the realm of speculation, not observation of what's actually happening.
There's a problem with trying to go from Merleau-Ponty to any of the hard sciences. There's just no bridge from his observations about what we can and can't separate, and biology, or its scientific mother, physics. Science starts with a methodological naturalism where analysis is built-in. There's no room for synthesis. Or if you think there is, you'd have to explain how.
Science starts from whatever metaphysics informs it at the time, which is why there is no such thing as science as some specific methodology that encompasses all eras of empiricism. If there is no bridge between science and Mwrleau-Ponty, it is because the particular brand of naturalism that a science is in thrall to makes no room for Merleau-Pontys thinking. Varela, Thompson, Gallagher, Petitot and others claim phenomenology can be naturalized
once we transform and update our thinking about scientific naturalism so as to accommodate it.
What an astounding assertion. Do they have any predictions about which century this update will be downloaded?
Astounding? Not when it comes to biology, neuroscience or cognitive science
The newer naturalized models are already out there.Lynn Margulis work on symbiosis and the new synthesis updates biological thinking, and as far as physics is concerned, writers like Karen Barad, a physicist and philosopher, and Michel Bitbol, interpret quantum field theory in terms that move away from the old naturalism.
Ok, so maybe later in this century, but for now, all mainstream science starts with an analytic attitude. That means we can't connect Merleau-Ponty to science as it is today. We might be able to connect him with the science of 2070.
Quoting frank
Could be.
So the reason why your brain understands what is going on in your body is because of nerves which send communications to the brain. it is these nerves which allow your extended consciousness. People who have dead nerves in certain places of their body cannot feel anything there.
As for the body not adapting, how do you conclude that? Increased Melanin in Africa. Extra eye folds for glary environments in Asia. Less melanin for people in cloudy sun limited climates. Even more basic, you can tan your skin, scar, and get calluses. All of these are adaptations.
What sort of embodied cognition would you say you're defending?
What about phantom limb pain?
Good point. Even 20% of people born without limbs have phantom limb syndrome. What this tells us is the brain actively fires looking for limbs to use. Makes sense since even babies use their limbs all the time. The locus of thought is from the mind to the limb, not from the limb to the mind.
Nerve communication to the brain.
I don't disagree with the notion that there is intelligence involved in the automation of our motor skills, but it seems likely to result in confusion to refer to that automation as consciousness. I think there is no avoiding a degree of fuzziness, in trying to consider consciousness in isolation from the rest of the causal web, but nonetheless it is still worthwhile considering how our brains instantiate consciousness. There is certainly no shortage of things to be learned in doing so.
Quoting frank
That doesn't sound like a very well thought out way of modeling things to me.
It seems that if sensory input isn't coming in to the brain, the brain will create it's own hallucinatory input to compensate. People in sensory deprivation tanks hallucinate fairly quickly when deprived of external stimuli. What is the evolutionary benefit of this?
I'm not an evolutionary cognitive scientist, so what I say is as worthwhile as any other person's opinion here. If I had to guess from my limited knowledge, the human brain requires constant work to not be bored. Those cells in your brain need something to do, and like a muscle that hasn't moved in a while, it will atrophy otherwise. Further it could also be a stepping stone to imagining how to get out of your situation, like if you were buried somewhere for example.
Sensory deprivation tanks weren't part of the environment our ancestors were exposed to. There is no reason to think that there is an evolutionary benefit to how we respond, to an environment that played no role in the natural selection of our ancestors.
Quoting frank
We can see consciousness remains when the objects of consciousness change. I have a thought, then experience an emotion, then see a tree, then hear a song, then another thought. The contents change but consciousness remains. So, (for me, at least) it's easy to believe consciousness without content is possible. And, as TheMadMan points out, consciousness without content (i.e., pure consciousness) is a goal of meditation.
Here is the IEP entry.
What is the evolutionary benefit of consciousness?
See here. (Although that may require a subscription. If so, Google is your friend. I used "the evolutionary adaptiveness of consciousness".)
"then consciousness evolved gradually over the past half billion years and is present in a range of vertebrate species."
No conscious invertebrates? Don't they have to deal with lots of information flowing in?
The article also says...
To expand on that, it's a way of saying that visual data is processed in the eye of arthropod to yield a relatively low data output stream, but data reduced in a way that preserves salient features of the visual field.
So, in the case of those arthropods and vision, their brains don't have to deal with nearly as much data as vertebrate species do. Information processing is expensive in terms of energy consumption. There are lots of niches in which an energy efficient 'design' can hold it's own against more intelligent but less energy efficient designs.
Isn't it past your bedtime?
Merleau-Ponty's aim is of course to draw phenomenology closer to history and culture rather than neurophysiology. That is, when one endeavors to relativize, still further from the intersubjectivity, the Husserlian dimension of eidetics constituted in the (naturalistically) pure ego. Transcendental receives then a new meaning. In naturalism, for instance in physiology, the idea of transcendental is not possible.
And transcendental means here philosophically explicated realm of being which makes empirical e.g. neurophysiological observations and generalizations possible. All the data is still there but under the phenomenological suspension which means that the reflection is not guided by that data as already being reality. The existing data has become something that represents something from a certain viewpoint. Neurophysiological concepts are possibilities, not natural necessities, which means that they are results of acts where certain subjectivity has corresponding objectivities or realities. And through the idea of, always relative, freedom which is involved here the transcendental can be linked "essentially" to history and culture as well?
You could even say "it is obvious". A large --if not the largest-- part of consciousness depends on perception. And our perception depends on our senses.
Quoting frank
Right. Integrated Information Theory --it always helps if you give the full name-- is only a perspective. Which ignores the hard problem of consciousness.
Quoting frank
One does not have to take mind altering drugs to feel or be in a state of "disembodiment". One does not even need to be disembodied to feel and know that he is something more than his body and that his consciousness is only in part dependent on his body. One has only be aware of his body and that he is aware of himself and aware of being aware. One needs not take mind altering drugs or be in any kind of state of hallucination for that.
Quoting frank
Exactly. This is how humans differ from (other) animals: Humans can be aware of themselves and aware of being aware, as I said above.
Quoting frank
Exactly. Doesn't this alone create a problem to the perspective that consciousness arises from the body?
But of course there are many more ...
Even neuroscientists today admit that consciousness cannot simply be reduced to neural activity alone ...
Only a stubborn and insincere scientist will insist that consciousness is created and exists in the brain, without having to provide the least evidence (not theory) for that. Scientists who are claiming that personal experience alone is not trustworthy evidence of mental phenomena. And consciousness is something that can only be experienced!