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The Consciousness of Embodied Cognition, Affordances, and the Brain

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Abstract

Tony Chemero advances the radical thesis that cognition and consciousness are actually the same thing. I question this conclusion. Even if we are the brain–body environmental synergies that Chemero and others claim, we will not be able to conclude that consciousness is just cognition because this view actually expands cognition beyond being the sort of natural kind upon which to hook phenomenal experience. Identifying consciousness with cognition either means consciousness exists at multiple levels of organization in the universe, or more work needs to be done to delineate conscious cognition from other synergies. Still, while radical embodied cognition does not solve any of the hard problems associated with consciousness, this perspective allows useful insights concerning phenomenal experience. Moreover, recent neuropsychological research in action selection and projection can help us refine notions of consciousness from this embodied perspective.

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Notes

  1. I became a philosopher because my father gave me a copy of a hot-off-the-press The Mind’s Eye for my 16th birthday. So, I owe my career to Dennett. You can blame him.

  2. Dennett also ties contemporary discussions to Jakob von Uexküll’s (1934) idea of “Umwelt,” an organism’s “behavioral environment that consists of all the things that matter to its wellbeing” (Dennett 2017, loc. 1367).

  3. At least, this is how Chemero views computationalism. He links the view to Hobbes’s Leviathan and the claim that rational thought (cognition) “is the processing of internal symbols that represent external objects (computation)…. Thinking is the manipulation of the mental representations (done via their causal, formal properties alone).” He sees computation in theories of mind “as the rule-governed manipulation of the formal symbols in what Fodor calls a language of thought” (2009, loc. 328).

  4. A reviewer points out that it is not clear what “co-determine” even means. I agree.

  5. Chemero and Silberstein describe one way of understanding neutral monism; of course, there are other ways to understand neutral monism in the literature. And several contemporary views do not tie experience to neutral monads at all (see, e.g. Ladyman and Ross 2007; Lloyd 2006; Sayre 1976; Tegmark 2014).

  6. “Moreover, it must be confessed that perception and that which depends upon it are inexplicable on mechanical grounds, that is to say, by means of figures and motions. And supposing there were a machine, so constructed as to think, feel, and have perception, it might be conceived as increased in size, while kee** the same proportions, so that one might go into it as into a mill. That being so, (we should, on examining its interior, find only parts which work one upon another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. Thus it is in a simple substance, and not in a compound or in a machine, that perception must be sought for. Further, nothing but this (namely, perceptions and their changes) can be found in a simple substance. It is also in this alone that all the internal activities of simple substances can consist” (Leibniz 1714, Sect. 17).

  7. We can contrast pink noise with white noise, which has equal energy on every frequency. The static we sometimes hear on the radio can be white noise. Pink noise instead has equal energy per octave. To our ears, auditory pink noise sounds much more natural and less jarring than white noise.

  8. Of course, the fact that many people find this to be an improbable position does not entail that the position is false. However, it does suggest that one should offer strong arguments in favor of the prima facie unlikely scenario. In other words, if Chemero’s arguments entail that panpsychism is true, then many would conclude that therefore one or more of his propositions have to be false.

  9. One important facet of nonlinear dynamical systems is that they are nested systems, and their components exhibit the same sort of dynamics as the system as a whole. Individual neurons and the ion channels in neurons also appear to have the same dynamical pink noise properties as the activity of populations of neurons (White et al. 1998; Yu et al. 2005). Yet it is doubtful that anyone would want to claim that ion channels are consciousness, based on their dynamic properties.

  10. In all honesty, I am not sure that Chemero really does wish to take this path, because as soon as he suggests his definition for cognition, he appears to take it back. Just a few sentences later, he asserts that, “there is no such thing” as Adams and Aizawa’s (2008) “mark of the cognitive;” there is no set of definitional characteristics for cognition (2009, loc. 2696/3178).

  11. These sorts of “herding” behaviors in humans are well documented in lots of different arenas, cf., Raafat et al. (2009).

  12. Rachel Kallen (personal conversation) is currently collecting data that suggests the difference between our entrainment with animate and inanimate objects is a difference in “rapport.” That is, we have rapport with our animate friends and we project through our inanimate tools.

  13. Early versions of the paper were presented to the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, to the University of Waterloo for their Brain Day, and at the Conscious Persons workshop at Calvin College. Many thanks to all the participants for their helpful and thoughtful comments, including especially Dan Dennett at the SPP, who pointed me to new literature. Special thanks are also due to Tony Chemero and Mike Silberstein for engaging with me on this topic, even though I disagree with them, as well as to the Mind-Cat group at UC and two reviewers. Their comments and suggestions were invaluable. I owe a special debt to my student Steven Nemcek, who inadvertently launched me into this project with his master’s thesis. Funding for this project was generously provided by the Templeton Foundation and the University of Cambridge New Directions for the Study of the Mind project, and a wonderful home for completing this article is due to a Collaborative Research Fellowship at the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

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  1. Departments of Philosophy, Psychology, and Psychiatry & Behavioral Neuroscience, Weaver Institute for Law and Psychiatry, University of Cincinnati, ML0374, Cincinnati, OH, 45221-0374, USA

    Valerie Gray Hardcastle

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Hardcastle, V.G. The Consciousness of Embodied Cognition, Affordances, and the Brain. Topoi 39, 23–33 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9503-7

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