Embodied Minds in Action
Abstract
In Embodied Minds in Action, Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese work out a unified treatment of three fundamental philosophical problems: the mind-body problem, the problem of mental causation, and the problem of action. This unified treatment rests on two basic claims. The first is that conscious, intentional minds like ours are essentially embodied. This entails that our minds are necessarily spread throughout our living, organismic bodies and belong to their complete neurobiological constitution. So minds like ours are necessarily alive. The second claim is that essentially embodied minds are self-organizing thermodynamic systems. This entails that our mental lives consist in the possibility and actuality of moving our own living organismic bodies through space and time, by means of our conscious desires. The upshot is that we are essentially minded animals who help to create the natural world through our own agency. This doctrine--the Essential Embodiment Theory--is a truly radical idea which subverts the traditionally opposed and seemingly exhaustive categories of Dualism and Materialism, and offers a new paradigm for contemporary mainstream research in the philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience.
... We fully agree that the notion of a "master narrative" can help to elaborate and extend the idea that we're oppressively mindshaped-and more speci cally, mechanically and constrictively thought-shaped-by ideology: narratives shape how we organize, process, and attend to information. However, habits and what we call affective framings also operate at an essentially non-conceptual, pre-re ectively conscious level, even when no narratives come into play (Hanna and Maiese 2009;Maiese 2011). This gives rise to interesting questions about how a ective framings relate to narratives. ...
... More generally, a duality, that is, a categorical, irreducible distinction between two di erent kinds of facts or phenomena, properties, concepts, propositions, or principles, doesn't necessarily entail a dualism, that is, mutual contradiction or exclusion, between two di erent kinds of facts or phenomena, properties, concepts, propositions, or principles. This is because duality can also be smoothly combined with complementarity, as, for example, in our solution to the mind-body problem (Hanna and Maiese 2009), and also our view about the complementarity of top-down and bottom-up sociality, as we framed it in our response to Worry #3. ...
... We fully agree that this might seem to be a minor point, but actually is extremely important in understanding what we were trying to do in MBP. We fully concede that MBP is not a philosophical treatise, theoretically armed at all points to repel all actual or possible philosophical critics or opponents, like Marx's Capital-or, for that matter, like Embodied Minds in Action (Hanna and Maiese 2009), to which MBP is a sequel. On the contrary, MBP explicitly expresses "our radical "philosophy of philosophy," which unabashedly asserts it to be a critical and re ective enterprise that is at once intellectual, practical, essentially embodied, and fully a ective" (Maiese and Hanna 2019: xii). ...
In accordance with the constructive, enabling approach to responding to critical commentaries, we’ve identified eleven more-or-less distinct “worries” that the commentators have expressed about MBP, and have attributed each such worry to one or more of the commentators; correspondingly, we’ve responded to the worries one-by-one, by construing them as critical inputs to the work that we’ve been doing, both before and after the publication of MBP, for the purposes of grounding, elaborating, and extending that work toward The Shape of Lives to Come project. Then, we conclude by briefly describing The Shape of Lives To Come project and how our commentators’ worries have made creative contributions to this new work-in-progress, by shaping our philosophical thinking in organic, generative ways.
... Neither logically possible or conceivable non-animal persons, disembodied persons, or divine persons, nor actual artificial persons (personae) or actual collective persons, created by human convention, are real persons in this sense. For human real persons, like all real persons, are essentially embodied minds [21], esp. chs. ...
... First, the mental act or state of recognizing oneself or another real person as having dignity is not originally or primarily an act or state of self-conscious, or reflective, report, belief, or judgment. On the contrary, it is originally and primarily an act or state of pre-reflectively conscious emotional perception, or what Michelle Maiese and Robert Hanna have called affective framing [21], Sect. 5.3. ...
... 5.3. More precisely, on this view, emotional perception consists in an essentially embodied, conscious, feeling, desiring, passionate intentional agent's representing the world via her desire-based readiness to choose or act intentionally, and, in the midst of that readiness, being disposed to have feelings about the world, or others, or herself, in certain specific ways; and the mental content of such acts or states of emotional perception is essentially nonconceptual [21], ch. 5 [30,31], ch. 2]. ...
AI Ethics is a burgeoning and relatively new field that has emerged in response to growing concerns about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on human individuals and their social institutions. In turn, AI ethics is a part of the broader field of digital ethics, which addresses similar concerns generated by the development and deployment of new digital technologies. Here, we tackle the important worry that digital ethics in general, and AI ethics in particular, lack adequate philosophical foundations. In direct response to that worry, we formulate and rationally justify some basic concepts and principles for digital ethics/AI ethics, all drawn from a broadly Kantian theory of human dignity. Our argument, which is designed to be relatively compact and easily accessible, is presented in ten distinct steps: (1) what “digital ethics” and “AI ethics” mean, (2) refuting the dignity-skeptic, (3) the metaphysics of human dignity, (4) human happiness or flourishing, true human needs, and human dignity, (5) our moral obligations with respect to all human real persons, (6) what a natural automaton or natural machine is, (7) why human real persons are not natural automata/natural machines: because consciousness is a form of life, (8) our moral obligations with respect to the design and use of artificial automata or artificial machines, aka computers, and digital technology more generally, (9) what privacy is, why invasions of digital privacy are morally impermissible, whereas consensual entrances into digital privacy are either morally permissible or even obligatory, and finally (10) dignitarian morality versus legality, and digital ethics/AI ethics. We conclude by asserting our strongly-held belief that a well-founded and generally-accepted dignitarian digital ethics/AI ethics is of global existential importance for humanity.
... 2. Whether a caveat lector sentence like THE SENTENCE is a universal sentence-type or a particular sentence-token, it is nevertheless a physical phenomenon. Now, the act or process of reading is an essentially embodied phenomenon of conscious and self-conscious intentionality, like all forms of rational human cognition (Hanna, Maiese 2009;Hanna 2011;2015). And a caveat lector sentence like THE SENTENCE is inherently the intentional object of that specific mode of intentionality. ...
... Hanna, Maiese 2009;Hanna 2011;2015;2022;2023a;2023b;2023c;2023d;2023e;2023f;2023g;2023h;2023i;2023j;2023k;2023l;2024.Robert HannaCaveat Lector: From Wittgenstein to The Philosophy of Reading ...
Against the grain of Analytic philosophy’s general avoidance of the fact or phenomenon of reading, and starting out with Wittgenstein’s compact investigation into “the part the word [‘reading’] plays in our life, therewith the language-game in which we employ it”, in this essay I explore the nature of reading, and thereby initiate what is in effect a new philosophical sub-discipline: the philosophy of reading.
... In addition to the sum of the component parts, what is needed for a complete explanation is the integrated information of these component parts. But even if consciousness is not explanatorily or epistemically reducible to neurophysiological states, type-identity theory entails that it must nonetheless be ontologically or metaphysically reducible (Hanna and Maiese 2009), and therefore "nothing but" these neurophysiological states. Indeed, Mun is careful to note that semantic dualism is not a kind of property dualism since it holds that mental features are identical to physical features. ...
... This sort of emergence merely captures our scienti c inability to predict certain kinds of physical properties. For example, our scienti c knowledge of hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms alone will not enable us to predict their chemical bonding as H 2 O. Nonetheless, the property of being di-hydrogen oxide is literally identical with the relational interaction of hydrogen and oxygen, and not ontologically emergent from it (Hanna and Maiese 2009) or anything over and above it. Likewise, conscious experiences are type-identical to neurophysiological states and have no causal power aside from these material conditions. ...
Mun’s proposed taxonomy of theories of emotions highlights important commonalities and differences among a wide range of philosophical and psychological accounts and provides an astute mapping of the theoretical landscape. My critical comments focus primarily on the metaphysical account of the mind-body relation that Mun presents, and the implications of this “semantic dualist” account for three of the book’s central topics: (1) conscious experience, (2) underived intentionality, and (3) what it means to provide an embodied cognitive theory of emotions.
... But suppose instead that the external substratum Kant is talking about is strictly proximal: suppose that the external substratum is none other than my own living organismic human animal body in actual space. Then Kant is saying (i) that my conscious mind is necessarily and completely an embodied mind, or what I've been calling an essentially embodied mind (Hanna and Maiese, 2009;Hanna, 2011), and (ii) that in order to individuate myself psychologically, as an individual empirical self, and as a unique member of my own species, then I must ascribe each of my mental states directly to my own living organismic human animal body in actual space. Or, in other words, the ascription of my mental states to my own living organismic human body individuates my mental states, and constitutes me as an individual empirical self, by locating my mental states uniquely. ...
... 1-4). But even if, as I've argued, the conception of phenomenal consciousness that's assumed by all those anti-functionalist arguments is false (Hanna and Maiese, 2009;Hanna, 2011), nevertheless if EEKST is true, then necessarily, consciousness in creatures like us is essentially embodied, so metaphysical computational-functionalism about human consciousness is false and indeed synthetic a priori impossible. ...
By “essentially embodied Kantian selves,” I mean necessarily and completely embodied rational conscious, self-conscious, sensible (i.e., sense-perceiving, imagining, and emoting), volitional or willing, discursive (i.e., conceptualizing, judging, and inferring) animals, or persons, innately possessing dignity, and fully capable not only of free agency, but also of a priori knowledge of analytic and synthetic a priori truths alike, with egocentric centering in manifestly real orientable space and time. The basic theory of essentially embodied Kantian selves was spelled out by Kant over the course of slightly less than two decades, between 1768 and 1787, but above all, it flows from an empirical realist and metaphysical reading of the “Refutation of Idealism” that Kant inserted into the Postulates of Empirical Thought section in the 1787 edition of the first Critique. In my opinion, all rational but also “human, all-too-human” creatures like us are, synthetic a priori necessarily, essentially embodied Kantian selves. Let’s call that the essentially embodied Kantian selves thesis, or for short, EEKST. If EEKST is true, then it’s synthetic a priori impossible for the selves of creatures like us to exist independently of our own living organismic animal bodies or beyond the deaths of those bodies, whether temporarily or permanently, by any means whatsoever. Indeed, the very ideas of disembodied selves, their survival after death, and of human immortality, while minimally logically consistent, are in fact conceptually empty and incoherent, even over and above the synthetic a priori impossibility of such things, since the term “myself” indexically picks out an essentially embodied Kantian self, all of whose core features require grounding in a particular living organismic animal body. According to the recent and contemporary movement of transhumanism, the selves of creatures like us can not only exist independently of our bodies, as functional systems of representational content that are inherently able to be implemented or realized in digital-mechanical technology and uploadable to servers, but also to survive accidental or natural human death in server-limbo, then be downloaded into technologically enhanced partially mechanical humanoid bodies or even into wholly artificially-created completely mechanical non-humanoid bodies, survive in these new implementations or realizations for an indefinitely long time, repeat that process, and possibly even become immortal. Transhumanism is in fact metaphysically equivalent to Swedenborgianism, which Kant so effectively criticizes and wittily derides in his 1766 book, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics. Moreover, and more importantly, if EEKST is true, then, just like Swedenborgianism, transhumanism is not only conceptually empty and incoherent, but also synthetic a priori impossible. And what’s more, it’s also existentially and morally reprehensible. In short, then, the belief in transhuman selves is nothing but a reprehensible noumenal fantasy or Hirngespinst.
... The essential embodiment thesis (EE) about the mind-body relation says that human minds are necessarily and completely embodied, and identical to the complex dynamic, spontaneously activating, intentional-action-guiding, global structures of suitably complex living organisms belonging to the human species, i.e., human animals (Hanna and Maiese, 2009). With regard to the hypothesis we develop, EE is important because we cannot neatly distinguish between our bodily state and occurrent biochemical processes and the formation of beliefs and/or desires. ...
... So far, we have provided a summary sketch of the relation of thought-shapers and actions-shapers to an individual action space. However, as per EE, human minds are necessarily and completely embodied, and identical to the complex dynamic, spontaneously activating, intentional-action-guiding, global structures of suitably complex living organisms belonging to the human species (Hanna and Maiese, 2009). If we combine TTS and EE, we have to explain, at least, how action-shapers are not just the result of rational deliberation or self-conscious mental action. ...
Not all our intentions translate into actions, as our capacity to act may be influenced by a variety of mental and biochemical factors. In this article, we present a comprehensive account of how neuro-immunological processes affect our intentional abilities and our capacity to act. We do so by extending the theory of thought-shapers (TTS) through the notion of action-shapers and combining this theory with the essential embodiment thesis (EE). This thesis about the mind-body relation says that human minds are necessarily and completely embodied. Action-shapers dynamically constitute the action-space of individuals, affecting their capacity to take action or to select one course of action over another. We highlight the effects and interactions of neuro-immunological effective processes in the body to demonstrate how they shape the action-space. In this article, we consider neuro-immunological effective processes that influence the gut-brain axis, chronic stress, high levels of sugar intake, the amygdala and the effects of prolonged stress. We investigate the effects of these processes on the perception and on the capacity to form intentions and act on them. We conclude the paper by providing a concise account of action-shapers, in which we attempt to summarize the line of argumentation and provide suggestions for further research.
... For the general compatibility of physicalism to panpsychism and panprotopsychism see:Chalmers (2015),Montero (2015). 19 See:Hanna and Maiese (2009). 20 I owe to both of the anonymous referees the suggestion to consider the relation of one-term physicalism to other theories of mind-body problem.Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. ...
... Intentional actions (understood as movements directed to a goal) frequently are distinguished from unintended movements (movements that are not directed to a purpose and are therefore involuntary). According to Hanna and Maiese (2009), only intentional actions count as cognitive experiences for an organism (namely, only these actions participate of the perceptive processing of the surroundings). Therefore, only movements directed to a goal are intentional. ...
This paper makes a phenomenological distinction between constitutive intentional movements and intentional actions. A phenomenological understanding of embodied and situated relations between living beings and their worlds shows that intentional movements do not imply an implicit or explicit experienced “what for” that organizes and directs what an organism does. We question the immanent teleology of autopoietic enactivism and the agentive semiotics theory. This discussion allows us to separate the idea of intentionality from objectives, goals, and agendas. This yields a different way of understanding the behavior of living beings based on the phenomenological notions of intentional body, intentional movement, animation, and the time-consciousness structure.
... Therefore, to properly secure a motivation-involving account, it seems necessary to go back to the theoretical drawing board and start again from first principles, such that motivational involvement is not already ruled out by preexisting commitments before it can get properly formulated. This move will not fit everyone's inclination, as some proponents of the enactive approach prefer to settle for a kind of mind/brain identity theory that is phenomenologically enriched [60], embodied [61], and situated [62]. However, there are also those who are feeling more adventurous and aim to make room for the possibility that our motivations play a distinctive role in shaping behavior, especially by developing enactive ideas in the direction of a libertarian philosophy of human freedom and agency (e.g., [39,52,63]). ...
Cognitive science is lacking conceptual tools to describe how an agent’s motivations, as such, can play a role in the generation of its behavior. The enactive approach has made progress by developing a relaxed naturalism, and by placing normativity at the core of life and mind; all cognitive activity is a kind of motivated activity. It has rejected representational architectures, especially their reification of the role of normativity into localized “value” functions, in favor of accounts that appeal to system-level properties of the organism. However, these accounts push the problem of reification to a higher level of description, given that the efficacy of agent-level normativity is completely identified with the efficacy of non-normative system-level activity, while assuming operational equivalency. To allow normativity to have its own efficacy, a new kind of nonreductive theory is proposed: irruption theory. The concept of irruption is introduced to indirectly operationalize an agent’s motivated involvement in its activity, specifically in terms of a corresponding underdetermination of its states by their material basis. This implies that irruptions are associated with increased unpredictability of (neuro)physiological activity, and they should, hence, be quantifiable in terms of information-theoretic entropy. Accordingly, evidence that action, cognition, and consciousness are linked to higher levels of neural entropy can be interpreted as indicating higher levels of motivated agential involvement. Counterintuitively, irruptions do not stand in contrast to adaptive behavior. Rather, as indicated by artificial life models of complex adaptive systems, bursts of arbitrary changes in neural activity can facilitate the self-organization of adaptivity. Irruption theory therefore, makes it intelligible how an agent’s motivations, as such, can make effective differences to their behavior, without requiring the agent to be able to directly control their body’s neurophysiological processes.
... Such shaping can occur more negatively, by means of mechanical, constrictive thought-shapers, or more positively, by organic, generative thought-shapers. TTS, which is empirically testable, is embedded within (a) a fundamental metaphysics of the mind-body relation and mental causation, the essential embodiment theory (Hanna and Maiese, 2009), and (b) a general theory of how social institutions shape people's lives for worse or for better, the mind-body politic (Maiese and Hanna, 2019). Against that theoretical backdrop, these five articles begin to reveal both the potential dangers of thought-shaping, and how thought shaping might be implemented in a more constructive way. ...
... Such shaping can occur more negatively, by means of mechanical, constrictive thought-shapers, or more positively, by organic, generative thought-shapers. TTS, which is empirically testable, is embedded within (a) a fundamental metaphysics of the mind-body relation and mental causation, the essential embodiment theory (Hanna and Maiese, 2009), and (b) a general theory of how social institutions shape people's lives for worse or for better, the mind-body politic (Maiese and Hanna, 2019). Against that theoretical backdrop, these five articles begin to reveal both the potential dangers of thought-shaping, and how thought shaping might be implemented in a more constructive way. ...
... see Maiese and Hanna, 2019) and an essentially embodied conception of the human mind (e.g. see Hanna and Maiese, 2009). Now the ideological allure of the first or enlightenment lite/shallow enlightenment interpretation of enlightenment is so powerful that you may find it hard to believe that there even is a second or radical enlightenment/heavy-duty enlightenment interpretation of enlightenment. ...
In this essay, I argue that broadly Kantian philosophy – by which I mean philosophy inspired by Kant’s work, but neither dogmatically restricted to Kant’s own texts nor in any way committed to Kant’s own philosophical errors or personal prejudices – is profoundly relevant to the world of today, insofar as it can promote radical enlightenment. Radical enlightenment, in turn, is daring to think, write, speak, and freely act for ourselves, not only as individuals but also collectively via our social institutions, in order to change the world for the better. This should be sharply contrasted with enlightenment lite, or shallow enlightenment, which restricts critical thinking to narrowly-defined, coercively controlled social and political norms, according to Frederick the Great’s famous dictum: “argue as much as you like about whatever you like, but obey!” In effect, then, enlightenment lite or shallow enlightenment is nothing but “free thinking” inside a barbed-wire playpen. My argument has three parts. First, from the standpoint of Kantian radical enlightenment, I critically analyze the early twentieth-century neo-Kantian philosopher Leonard Nelson’s account of Socratic dialogical method. Second, I formulate a broadly Kantian, radically-enlightened conception of philosophical conversation, phildialogues, that corresponds constructively to my critical analysis of Nelson’s account. And third and finally, I argue that contemporary Kantian philosophers not only can but should implement and practice phildialogues, for the betterment of humanity.
... The full journey is being detailed in a monograph I'm presently writing, "Yankee Go Home": Implications of the Cognitive Sciences for Western-Influenced Thought and Theology. 5 I am influenced here byChemero 2009;Clark 2008;Edelman 2006;Fauconnier and Turner 2002;Hanna and Maiese 2009;Lakoff and Johnson 1999; and Verela et al. 1991. ...
A lot of us were around, enough to encounter protests rallied
around a then-common theme: “Yankee Go Home!,” “Imperialists Go
Home!” As a young boy I remember our school bus cautiously driving
through one freshly-ended rally. Through my window, I was looking at
people not much older than I as they carried their expressive placards
and banners. Some, noticing our busload primarily of white faces,
yelled the slogans of those banners directly at us. I didn’t understand.
Imperialists? The Bataan Death March, Corregidor Island…those were
the stories of Imperialism. General MacArthur, good on his promise,
returned, crushing Imperialism. What was so bad about me, about
America? We were the heroes. We now were the helpers. Why should
they want us to leave?
... Over the last few years, enactivist perspectives (Colombetti, 2014;Colombetti & Thompson, 2008;Hanna & Maiese, 2009;Hutto & Myin, 2013) have been adopted by psychologists (see, for instance, Da Rold, 2018;McGann, De Jaegher, & Di Paolo, 2013;Pouw & de Jong, 2015) placing the interaction between a concerned actor and their environment at the centre of a theory of embodied and situated cognition and agency. Within the enactivist framework, affectivity plays an important role; however, there is no direct reference to the specific distinctions between emotions, mood, and other varieties of affect as discussed in the psychological literature. ...
In this paper we draw from Gilbert Simondon's work in order to develop a conceptual perspective on moods as transitory, dynamic, and holistic affective processes, manifesting the persistence of pre-individual tensions throughout processes of individuation. In defending our proposal we focus on two features of mood experiences that have traditionally proven conceptually challenging: (1) the intentionality of moods and (2) their phenomenal status. By revisiting Colombetti's theory of moods as affectively scaffolded and Slaby's theory of moods as disclosive postures we show how a Simondonian approach might enrich current enactive as well as phenomenological theorizing about moods.
... This means that there is no distinction between intentional and unintentional movements in relation to constitutive activity (cf. this distinction in philosophy of mind, Hanna and Maiese, 2009) because in animation, a movement, even if involuntary, involves sensory and kinesthetic [163] experiences, by virtue of which even a bodily subjectivity is being constituted: to move implies, in its most minimal forms, a self-giving. ...
According to Simondon,, individuation is a phenomenon of differentiation and integration that occurs in all kinds of individuals, from the non-biological to collective ones. However, each level of individuation includes different challenges, depending on the complexity of the relations with the surroundings. In the psychical, the individuation process deals with relationships between consciousness and the materiality. I connect Simondon’s interest in understanding psychical life through individuation with a more phenomenological concern for understanding consciousness as a phenomenon of a lived body: here, what Simondon calls subconsciousness offers the connection between phenomenology and individuation. In phenomenological terms, subconsciousness is connected to the pre-reflective level of consciousness through animation (namely the kinetic/kinesthetic, sensorial, affective and emotional manifestations of the living).
In this chapter, I argue that the affirmation and recognition that complementarity, entanglement, and nonlocality pervade manifest natural reality at all basic scales finally enables us to reject the paradoxically problematic layered world picture, characteristic of metaphysical materialism or physicalism, and also part-&-parcel of the mechanistic worldview, and replace it with the inherently non-paradoxical, non-problematic, and original and paradigm-shifting no-layered scalar dynamic world picture that’s part-&-parcel of what I call the rubber sheet cosmos.
In this chapter, I argue that there’s an intelligible and defensible broadly Kantian neo-organicist solution to Zeno’s paradox of motion, as epitomized by the famous Dichotomy paradox, that doesn’t appeal to supertasks. Moreover, this broadly Kantian neo-organicist solution also explains why the popular solution in terms of supertasks and the infinitesimal calculus is fundamentally philosophically misguided and indeed fallacious.
In this chapter, I argue that if we assume that the Standard Models in contemporary physics are physico-mechanically incomplete, and if we also assume that all rational human animals are primitive sources of natural creativity via their free agency, then, by means of an appeal to a non-deterministic version of Bohmian mechanics, together with the thesis that all rational human animals are primitive sources of natural creativity via their free agency, we can complete quantum mechanics.
In this final chapter, I return to where I began in Chap. 2, with the metaphysical continuity of mind and life, and show how human rationality, consciousness, and free agency are not only (i) metaphysically continuous with organismic life and with non-living uncomputable, negentropic, irreversible, processual, purposive, self-organizing, and time-unidirectional or time-asymmetric, non-equilibrium thermodynamic organic systems, from the Big Bang forward, but also (ii) primitive, irreducible facts about the natural universe, just like the four fundamental forces—gravitation, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force. Indeed, I even claim that consciousness is a fifth fundamental force. Then I conclude the book by showing how the neo-organicist approach to cosmology has an essential elective affinity with what Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog call top-down cosmology.
Even despite A.S. Eddington’s stern warning to the effect that any serious theoretical challenge to the universality of The Second Law of Thermodynamics will end in “deepest humiliation” (Eddington, 1929: p. 74), in this chapter I argue that The Second Law is only a special law of nature, and not a universal law of nature.
Is it plausible to hold, as I do, that natural mechanical systems have no efficacious causal powers of their own, and only inherit any and all causal powers that they do have, in a metaphysically-&-ontologically derivative, secondary, shadowy, skeletal, and therefore epiphenomenal way, from the inherently more concrete and richer organic systems in which they’re necessarily embedded and from which they’re derived by natural or nomological strong supervenience—i.e., the explanatory inversion thesis, as applied specifically to natural mechanical systems? In this chapter, I do my level best to answer that hard question affirmatively.
We design, create, and use tools to change the world, for better or worse; but in so doing, our tools also change us, for better or worse. An important elaboration of this truth is what Otto Paans and I have called the theory of thought-shapers, or TTS for short (Hanna R, Paans O, Cosmos Hist 17(1):1–72, 2021). In this chapter, I apply TTS to early twentieth century physics, and in particular to the Kuhnian-paradigm-shifting, revolutionary physics provided by the Special Theory of Relativity and the General Theory of Relativity (SRT-GRT) and Quantum Mechanics (QM), roughly one hundred years ago.
What I’ve been calling the explanatory inversion thesis says that all mechanical systems whatsoever, whether formal or natural, are explanatorily and ontologically dependent upon, and indeed nothing but systematic abstractions from, fundamentally organic systems, and not the other way around. In this chapter, I apply the explanatory inversion thesis to formal science, and in particular, to mathematical logic.
In this chapter, I do four things. First, I briefly and compactly re-present and re-motivate what Michelle Maiese and I, in (Hanna R, Maiese M, Embodied minds in action. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009), call the essential embodiment theory of the mind-body relation and mental causation (Sect. 2.2). Second, I equally briefly and compactly present and motivate three later significant elaborations and extensions of the essential embodiment theory: (i) an original and paradigm-shifting theory of free agency that I call natural libertarianism, (ii) a correspondingly original and paradigm-shifting conception of nature and the formal and natural sciences that I call the neo-organicist worldview, and, as directly entailed by the neo-organicist worldview, (iii) the metaphysical doctrine of liberal naturalism (Sect. 2.3). Third, I even more briefly and compactly critically compare-&-contrast the essential embodiment theory with an increasingly popular contemporary theory of the mind-body relation that’s commonly known as Analytic panpsychism (Sect. 2.4). And fourth and finally, I conclude the chapter with something I call a semi-autobiographical quasi-Whiteheadian postscript (Sect. 2.5).
In this short chapter, I argue that just as the inherent logico-mechanical Gödel-incompleteness of Principia Mathematica-style systems of mathematical logic needs to be completed by the capacity for mathematical intuition possessed by rational human animals, so too contemporary physics, according to the Standard Models of cosmology and particle physics, is itself inherently physico-mechanically incomplete and needs to be completed by a robust neo-organicist metaphysics of rational human animal free agency in particular and a neo-organicist worldview more generally.
It is argued that political realists have framed internationalized relations by way of an implicit appeal to what is called the ‘agent-exclusion principle.’ The agent-exclusion principle holds that in cases where agency is nested, agency at one level precludes or displaces agency at another level. This paper interrogates the truth of the agent-exclusion principle by reformulating it as an agent-exclusion problem: when agency is nested, is it the case that agency at one level necessarily excludes agency at another? Or is multi-level agential co-presence possible? By problematizing the agent-exclusion principle in this way, I can leverage the considerable effort that has been put into understanding and resolving the agent-exclusion problem in other domains to better understand its expression in the context of globalized relations. In particular, a critical evaluation of the agent-exclusion principle motivates, against the political realist, the rejection of state-centric realism but also points to the impossibility of a cosmopolitan world state. I conclude with a reflection on the significance of these findings for scholarship globally in higher education.
The first chapter is dedicated to the problem of consciousness and its relationship to the self. The aim of the chapter is to illustrate the shift from the problem of phenomenal consciousness to the self in contemporary consciousness studies. The chapter will also show how the problems of the non-conscious and the unconscious infiltrated the study of consciousness. The section defines the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness and shows that the problem of the self has come to the foreground of consciousness studies. In addition, the analyses of the minimal self established a fruitful dialogue between phenomenology and philosophy of mind. This chapter also discusses the no-self approaches. These approaches deny the importance of the self and regard it as an illusion generated by the brain or mental capacities.
An abbreviated history of marriage helps motivate the question of whether ancient Roman marriage and contemporary love marriage could qualify as stages of the same (token) institution despite carrying significantly different functions, deontological powers, and constitutive rules. Having raised the question of institutional identity over time, I proceed to answer the question by appealing to Kurt Lewin's notion of genidentity. Lewin intends the notion of genidentity to track the spatiotemporal unfolding of different physical and biological processes, such as ontogenesis. I extend the notion of genidentity to the institutional sphere by identifying two ‘re-anchoring mechanisms’ that would describe the conditions under which institutions with different characteristics could nevertheless qualify as the same institution across time. First, formal institutions can be re-anchored by way of a self-amending secondary rule. Second, informal institutions can be re-anchored by leveraging the inherent indeterminacy of the exemplars that indexically define them. I then argue ancient Roman marriage and contemporary love marriage are genidentical in virtue of the actions of a (mostly) informal re-anchoring mechanism.
The status of cognitive states as natural kinds in causal explanations is threatened by reductive arguments purporting to show how such ‘higher-level’ states are place holders for the complex causal explanations involving the fundamental kinds of the physical sciences. This chapter lays the ground for a counter to reductionism, clarifying the debate by answering the questions of what reduction involves, and what the nature of the stuff to which everything is argued to reduce is. The ‘Special Sciences’ debate between ‘autonomous’ domains heterogeneously realised and reductionist arguments based on supervenience, causal exclusion, and physical causal closure. The concept of event is analysed, rejecting the property instantiation account, undermining a major premise in the reductionist argument. Arguments for physicalism and causal closure are reviewed and refined.
In this paper I offer a reconstruction of one of Husserl’s various anti-materialist arguments. Husserl hints at this argument in Ideas II & III where he exposes essential differences between mental and material reality ( Realität ). At its core, Husserl claims that mental entities by their very essence can never be in the same qualitative condition at different times. By sharp contrast, for purely material or physical entities such a cyclical development is not essentially excluded. Accordingly, I will speak of Husserl’s argument from irreversibility . I argue that this argument is modal in nature, and that it can be used to make a case against materialism based on the necessary supervenience of the mental on the physical. My primary goal is to elucidate this argument, and to offer a logical reconstruction using basic modal logic and contemporary notions of supervenience. I conclude that Husserl’s argument is formally valid, and that it can even held to be sound, although the premise regarding the necessary irreversibility of the mental requires further clarification.
One of the persistent debates that has animated thinkers concerns the nature of consciousness. Is it merely an epiphenomenon that can be reduced to matter or does it belong to a different ontological domain? In recent times, this question has been reformulated as the hard problem of how material brain states can give rise to the mental states that we seem to experience. One of the answers to the hard problem has been to deflate the question and simply deny that there is a problem. This chapter argues that this approach often associated with Dennett and embraced by Siderits is problematic within the framework of Buddhist philosophy given the latter’s strong insistence on observing how things appear to the mind. This essay further argues that Buddhism offers resources to deal with the hard problem through the Madhyamaka philosophy, which argues that it does not make sense to think how things are and that we should be content to deal with how things appear. In this perspective, the task of explaining consciousness is neither to eliminate appearances à la Dennett nor to discover what the mind really is in itself, but to learn how to correlate better the various appearances though which the mental is given (the first and third person perspectives). In this way, the hard problem ceases to be a mystery and becomes an object of scientific inquiry that relies on the ever tighter observation of the neuro-phenomenological correlation between first and third person perspectives.
While developments of a shared intellectual tradition, the enactivist approach and the organizational account proffer importantly different accounts of organismic normativity. Where enactivists tend to follow Hans Jonas, Andres Weber, and Francisco Varela in grounding intrinsic affordance norms in existential concern, organizational theorists such as Alvaro Moreno, Matteo Mossio, and Leonardo Bich seek a more deflationary account of these normative phenomena. Critiques directed at both of these accounts of organismic normativity motivate the introduction of the precedential account of organismic normativity, which I nevertheless locate within the enactivist approach, broadly construed. After detailing empirical evidence that would seem to vindicate the precedential account, I explore some of its implications.
Deacon develops a minimal model of a nonparasitic virus to explore how nucleotide sequences came to be characterized by a code-like informational at the origin of life. The model serves to problematize the concept of biological normativity because it highlights two common yet typically implicit assumptions: (1) that life could consist as an inert form, were it not for extrinsic sources of physical instability, and (2) that life could have originated as a singular self-contained individual. I propose that the origin of life, the genetic code, and biological normativity more generally, lead us to reject this passive individualism.
'Forms of Life and Subjectivity: Rethinking Sartre’s Philosophy' explores the fundamental question of why we act as we do. Informed by an ontological and phenomenological approach, and building mainly, but not exclusively, on the thought of Sartre, Daniel Rueda Garrido considers the concept of a "form of life” as a term that bridges the gap between subjective identity and communities.
This first systematic ontology of "forms of life” seeks to understand why we act in certain ways, and why we cling to certain identities, such as nationalisms, social movements, cultural minorities, racism, or religion. The answer, as Rueda Garrido argues, depends on an understanding of ourselves as "forms of life” that remains sensitive to the relationship between ontology and power, between what we want to be and what we ought to be.
Structured in seven chapters, Rueda Garrido’s investigation yields illuminating and timely discussions of conversion, the constitution of subjectivity as an intersubjective self, the distinction between imitation and reproduction, the relationship between freedom and facticity, and the dialectical process by which two particular ways of being and acting enter into a situation of assimilation-resistance, as exemplified by capitalist and artistic forms of life.
This ambitious and original work will be of great interest to scholars and students of philosophy, social sciences, cultural studies, psychology and anthropology. Its wide-ranging reflection on the human being and society will also appeal to the general reader of philosophy.
Musical Sense-Making: Enaction, Experience, and Computation broadens the scope of musical sense-making from a disembodied cognitivist approach to an experiential approach. Revolving around the definition of music as a temporal and sounding art, it argues for an interactional and experiential approach that brings together the richness of sensory experience and principles of cognitive economy. Starting from the major distinction between in-time and outside-of-time processing of the sounds, this volume provides a conceptual and operational framework for dealing with sounds in a real-time listening situation , relying heavily on the theoretical groundings of ecology, cybernetics, and systems theory, and stressing the role of epistemic interactions with the sounds. These interactions are considered from different perspectives, bringing together insights from previous theoretical groundings and more recent empirical research. The author's findings are framed within the context of the broader field of enactive and embodied cognition, recent action and perception studies, and the emerging field of neurophenomenology and dynamical systems theory. This volume will particularly appeal to scholars and researchers interested in the intersection between music, philosophy, and/or psychology.
In this article, we use Gilbert Simondon’s work on psychic and collective individuation in order to develop a process theoretical framework for studying human experience in context. We argue that experience should be conceptually understood as coextensive with the processual becoming of an individual human being. We further develop this by taking into account two complementary trajectories of becoming: psychic individuation and collective individuation. We will show how this can help us to understand the situatedness and collectivity of human experience.
This paper aims to conceptualize the phenomenology of attentional experience as ‘embodied attention.’ Current psychological research, in describing attentional experiences, tends to apply the so-called spotlight metaphor, according to which attention is characterized as the illumination of certain surrounding objects or events. In this framework, attention is not seen as involving our bodily attitudes or modifying the way we experience those objects and events. It is primarily conceived as a purely mental and volitional activity of the cognizing subject. Against this view, the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty shows that attention is a creative activity deeply linked with bodily movements. This paper clarifies and systematizes this view and brings it into dialogue with current empirical findings as well as with current theoretical research on embodied cognition. By doing this, I spell out three main claims about embodied attention: the transcendentalism of embodiment for attention, the bodily subjectivity of attention, and the creativity of embodied attention.
In this paper, I argue that activities as crossing the road, riding a bike or going through a door involve body representations with non-conceptual mental content. Firstly, I discuss some key objections to the notion of body representations for action, in order to draw out their main consequences. Then I introduce an approach to the content of body representations involved in the guidance of everyday action, which seems to satisfy crucial demands in exchange for moving away from conceptual views on mental content. I conclude by discussing a potential objection to that proposal and presenting some thoughts on the relationship between conceptual and non-conceptual content in this field.
https://www.organonf.com/journal/murillolara/
By means of what we call reverse social engineering, one starts out with a vision of human life that actually satisfies true human needs and then, from the bottom-up, designs social institutions whose structure and dynamics promote the satisfaction of such needs. We propose that the best way to design a constructive, enabling institution is to reverse engineer it from the concept of enactive-transformative learning. Building on the work of Jack Mezirow and other transformative learning theorists, we argue that enactivism and the essential embodiment thesis jointly offer a new way to conceptualize the intended effects of such learning. From a phenomenological perspective, personal transformation can be understood as affective reframing; and from a neurobiological perspective, the development of new mental habits can be understood as the reconfiguration of highly integrated patterns of bodily engagement and response. This framework allows us to see enactive-transformative learning as a deep form of cognitive-affective change, one which alters students’ essentially embodied existential orientation. Moreover, an examination of transformative learning provides us with a general model for how to scaffold imaginative problem-solving, collective wisdom, and the development of flexible mental habits. Examples of strategies that afford affective reframing and emancipatory self-transformation include learning-centered pedagogy, activist pedagogy, and expressive arts.
What we call political philosophy of mind fuses contemporary philosophy of mind and emancipatory political theory. On the philosophy of mind side, we draw from our own previous work on the essential embodiment theory and enactivism, together with work by Jan Slaby, John Dewey, Pierre Bourdieu, and J.J. Gibson. On the emancipatory political theory side, we draw from Kant, Schiller, Kierkegaard, early Marx, Kropotkin, Foucault, and Frankfurt School Critical Theory. We begin with the claim that human minds are necessarily and completely embodied, and inherently enactive, social, and environmentally embedded, and proceed from there to argue that social institutions partially determine and literally shape our essentially embodied minds, and thereby fundamentally affect our lives. Our focus is on social institutions in contemporary neoliberal societies, specifically higher education and mental health practice. We hold that although these social institutions shape our essentially embodied minds in a destructive, deforming, and enslaving way, it’s possible to create social institutions that are constructive, enabling, and emancipatory. According to our proposed enactive-transformative principle, enacting salient changes in the structure and complex dynamics of a social institution produces corresponding salient changes in the structure and complex dynamics of the essentially embodied minds of the people belonging to that institution.
Neoliberal ideology has infiltrated mental health practice and now guides the provision of mental health care. As a result, market values like individualism, self-reliance, and consumerism shape what is regarded as a rational, responsible, and “normal” mode of human agency. Mental health and illness are understood in relation to an ability to participate in society as a wage earner and consumer. We begin by discussing how the “disease model” of mental illness both reflects and advances a neoliberal agenda. We then examine how the logic of mental health practice, and its associated rhetoric of “responsibilization” and “resilience,” help to form a neoliberal mode of subjectivity. It does so by encouraging subjects to engage in self-regulation and self-governance, whereby they adjust their own affective framings so as to conform to social demands and shared expectations. This “medicalized,” over-individualized approach to mental health centrally involves commodification, mechanization, coercion, the incentivization of desire, and false consciousness. As a result, people are alienated from their true human needs and find it increasingly difficult to attain genuine mental health. Due to its destructive and deforming impact on patients and practitioners, and in view of the basic true human need for mental health, the social institution of mental health care qualifies as a fundamental example of collective sociopathy.
According to the mind-shaping thesis, humans minds are necessarily and completely embodied; that is, they are neither merely brains, nor extended minds, yet all social institutions saliently frame and partially determine the social-dynamic patterns of essentially embodied consciousness and agency. Such literal mind-shaping is causal, partially determined by means of self-reflexive feedback loops, and irreducibly normative. According to the collective sociopathy thesis, many contemporary social institutions literally shape our essentially embodied minds and lives in destructive and deforming ways. Inside neoliberal social institutions, in particular, shared practices, enculturated expectations, and language work together to solicit habits of mind that impede human flourishing. Nevertheless, according to the collective wisdom thesis, some institutions are constructive and enabling in the sense that they make it really possible for us to self-realize, connect with others, liberate ourselves, and be deeply happy. To unpack these ideas, we look to insights from the enactivist approach in philosophy of mind and to the notions of affective framing, participatory sense-making, habit, and affordances. And on the emancipatory political theory side, we look to early Marx’s notion of social production and Ashley Taylor’s notion of robust solidarity.
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