Embodiment - Science topic

I believe that the concept of "Stephen Hawking, the Embodied Human Being" explores the idea that despite his severe physical limitations due to ALS, Stephen Hawking's identity and intellectual contributions were deeply rooted in his embodied experiences. His reliance on technology to communicate and move highlighted the interplay between mind and body, challenging traditional notions of embodiment. Hawking's life underscores that human experience and intellectual output are not solely determined by physical capabilities but are profoundly shaped by how individuals adapt to and navigate their embodied realities.

I am thinking of three dominant trends in pragmatic research: pragma-linguistics, socio-pragmatics, and cognitive pragmatics, each focusing on a particular facet of language use. Pragma-linguistics is championed by Austin and Searle, and is paradoxically known as lexical pragmatics. It studies the linguistic forms that characterize utterances, usually linguistic items and structures in which utterances in a given genre are encoded. Socio-pragmatics, associated with Geoffrey Leech, deals with the socio-cultural contexts in which utterances are used. The more recent trend, cognitive pragmatics, studies the link between cognition and linguistic meaning in context as studied by Nuyts (1992 and 2004), Marmaridou (2000), and others.

I hope this is useful.

I appreciate your time and consideration in advocating my contribution. Sharing knowledge is a common interest of us:

Nicola Halenko, Jiayi Wang, (Editors) 2024. Pragmatics in English Language Learning, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, ISBN 978-1-108-79493-0 Paperback, March 2024, "Look Inside:

Yours sincerely, Bulcsu Szekely

go to alphasignal and search for their latest addition which was a survey on LLMs

My perception and worldview are influenced by our physical attributes and characteristics in various ways. Here are examples of how different aspects of our bodies can shape our perspective:

Elena: Excellent points. Check out Slide # 29 of this revised PowerPoint about "Speech Acts." Thanks for your help!

Rosalia Rihadiani Identify with and support your views.

Language and culture go hand in hand. Language is actually a part of culture, but culture also depends on language for its transmission. Culture includes language. Language is a special cultural phenomenon, a concentration of values, ideology, morality, legal regulations, and aesthetic intentions of people's ideology, and language is a spiritual culture that was formed after the creation of human beings and with the creation of culture.

Here are two more PowerPoints related to embodiment and lexical processing. These PowerPoints are based on our two vocabulary books, in which we develop a methodology which is driven by the source, not the target, of the metaphor. We call our book, VOCABULARY PLUS: A SOURCE-BASED APPROACH.

Interesting question... However, I'm not entirely sure.. Recent research suggests that embodiment may produce a marked increased in neurofeedback performance. (See Juliano et al., 2020 for recent work on brain-computer interface and embodiment). Hope this helps?

Interesting topic.

Interesting topic.

One place to get a sense (census?) of things related to the Pezzulo paper is to do a forward literature search: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=14415125872999652537&as_sdt=400005&sciodt=0,14&hl=en

244 citations in 10 years. You can get a sense of the movement in the field by classifying these citations in various ways.

I'm not sure I have fully understood what you want. But why don't you use classic teleport, just as used by steamVR or GoogleEarth ?

You would drastically reduce your cybersickness in VR HMD, and it is still very enjoyable on computers (think of googlestreet map). Plus, you can make the teleportable areas slightly smaller than your room, so you wont have to manage collision with walls. You can just select non teleportable area to manage inside room collision.

In unity for example you can just use a raycast with a tag for teleportable area, so your users will not be able to teleport on each other or where you don't want them to teleport.

Clifton, J., & Palmisano, S. (2019). Effects of steering locomotion and teleporting on cybersickness and presence in HMD-based virtual reality. Virtual Reality. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10055-019-00407-8

Good answer Dharmesh K. Oza ...

zMy primary field is psychology and my book ismeant for a wide audience. As a result, much of what I say is anecdotal, based on my experience with North American animals. It is meant to help readers feel more direct link with animals in cognitive functions,

However, I find your aticle fascinating and comprehensive for one so short and will save it for future references I make about animals.

Dear Scholar

Measuring an arc with a rope ALWAYS gives error

----------------------------Your view is WRONG.

Here is one solution but I can NOT do this experiment

1 Colour reading

2.Draw a square and inscribe a circle in it on paper.

3. Immerse the square paper for 1 minute in a colour solution

4. Cut the circle from the paper and immerse similarly in colour solution

5. Read the colour density of square and circle using Colourometer

6. Square reading/ circle reading gives a value.

7. We have 2 pi values

Area of square/ area of circle

So we get one value from the expt.

8 Compare this reading with 2 pi values

SAY: 1/ quarter of 3.14159265358 = x

1/ quarter of 3.14644660941= y

9. Compare x and y with the experimental value and decide which pi value is NEARER to it

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Second Expt.

This time take a thin metal sheet

Repeat the above procedure: Square and circle

Find out resistance of square sheet and circle sheet

Square sheet offers more resistance than that of circle sheet

Take the Ratio and compare with 2 pi values

Again you will get which Pi value is right

Dear Yaghoub:

Some of the basic underlying principles of embodiment theory were proposed by biologists studying nonhuman animals, and can be applied to any species. I recommend looking at some of the seminal works in what is sometimes called biosemiotics, particularly the pioneering work of Uexküll, Maturana, and the latter scientist's disciple, Varela, who coauthored one of the classic, defining works in embodiment theory, The embodied mind, with Thomson and Rosch.

I have posted an extensive bibliography on my ResearchGate profile; the first thematic section includes studies on evolutionary cognition:

For the authors mentioned above, you may consult the following texts:

UEXKÜLL, Jakob von

1957 "A stroll through the worlds of animals and men, a picture book of invisible worlds [...] (1934)," in Instinctive behavior, the development of a modern concept, Claire H. Schiller, translator and editor, New York, International Universities Press, 1957, pp. 5-80 (http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic514568.files/StrollThroughTheWorlds.pdf, accessed: 23 December 2016).

1982 "The theory of meaning," in Semiotica (International Association for Semiotic Studies/Mouton Publishers), vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 25-82 (http://www.codebiology.org/pdf/von%20Uexk%C3%83%C2%BCll%20J%20(1940)%20The%20Theory%20of%20Meaning.pdf, accessed: 23 October 2016).

1992 "A stroll through the worlds of animals and men, a picture book of invisible worlds [...] (1934)," in Semiotica (International Association for Semiotic Studies/Walter de Gruyter), vol. 89, no. 4, pp. 319-391 (http://www.codebiology.org/pdf/von%20Uexk%C3%83%C2%BCll%20J%20(1934)%20A%20stroll%20through%20the%20worlds%20of%20animals%20and%20men.pdf, accessed: 23 December 2016).

MATURANA, Humberto R.

1980 "Biology of cognition (1970)," in Humberto R. Mataruna and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and cognition: the realization of the living, Dordecht/Boston/London, D. Reidel Publishing Company, pp. 5-58 (http://topologicalmedialab.net/xinwei/classes/readings/Maturana/autopoesis_and_cognition.pdf, accessed: 4 December 2016).

MATURANA, Humberto R.; VARELA, Francisco J.

1980 "Autopoiesis, the organization of the living, 1973," in Humberto R. Mataruna and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and cognition: the realization of the living, Dordecht/Boston/London, D. Reidel Publishing Company, pp. 59-123 (http://topologicalmedialab.net/xinwei/classes/readings/Maturana/autopoesis_and_cognition.pdf, accessed: 4 December 2016).

1998 The tree of knowledge, the biological roots of understanding, Robert Paolucci, translator, Boston/London, Shambhala.

VARELA, Francisco J.; THOMPSON, Evan; ROSCH, Eleanor

1993a [1991] The embodied mind, cognitive science and human experience, Cambridge/London, The MIT Press.

1993b [1991] The embodied mind, cognitive science and human experience, digital copy, Cambridge/London, The MIT Press (http://monoskop.org/images/b/b2/Varela_Thompson_Rosch_-_The_Embodied_Mind_Cognitive_Science_and_Human_Experience.pdf, accessed: 3 April 2016).

2016 The embodied mind, cognitive science and human experience, revised edition, Cambridge/London, The MIT Press.

Gibson's theory of affordances, a key feature of his ecological psychology, may help understand the common denominators in cognition by human and nonhuman animals. This is explained in the following text:

GIBSON, James J.

1978 "The ecological approach to the visual perception of pictures," in Leonardo (Pergamon Press), vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 227-235 (http://classes.matthewjbrown.net/teaching-files/ccc/gibson.pdf, accessed: 8 February 2017).

1986a The ecological approach to visual perception, New York/Hove, Psychology Press.

1986b The ecological approach to visual perception, New York/Hove, Psychology Press (https://archive.org/details/pdfy-u5hmFOvOM2Civ4Gz, accessed: 8 February 2017).

You're welcome, Sabine. I met Tony Chemero last December, at the Body of Knowledge conference at the University of California, Irvine, and had the opportunity to talk to him briefly. That was good, because I had read his book a couple of months earlier. His keynote talk was recently uploaded to the conference website (it's the second video from the top down):

There is an article with the same title that is more accesible than the book:

Chemero, Anthony

2013 “Radical embodied cognitive science,” in Review of General Psychology (American Psychological Association), vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 145-150 (https://www.academia.edu/6684841, accessed: 5 January 2016).

The idea behind the word "radical" in the titles of the book and the article is that "radical embodied cognitive science" rejects the notion of "representation", while some other types of embodied cognitive science don't go that far. He sees potential in James Gibson's ecological approach, for testing the ideas of the radical version.

I'm still trying to sort all of this out.

Frances and John, thanks for the leads!

Hi Norman,

I wish there was an easy answer to the question in your title. Hanne de Jaegher and Shaun Gallager make some suggestions in their TICS paper. Apart from that you could look at things like facial mimicry, bodily mimicry, blinks synchrony, movement coordination, etc. But it's difficult territory.

I'm not sure how your explanation relates to the question you pose in your title.

Best regards,

Sebo

Dear Max:

First, here is an early study that heavily influenced the field of embodiment:

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice

1945 Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris, Éditions Gallimard (http://www.fichier-pdf.fr/2012/12/12/merleau-ponty-phenomenologie-de-la-perception/merleau-ponty-phenomenologie-de-la-perception.pdf, access: 30 January 2015).

1962 Phenomenology of perception, Colin Smith, translator, London/Henley/New Jersey, Routledge & Kegan Paul/The Humanities Press (https://archive.org/details/phenomenologyofp00merl, access: 30 January 2015).

1993 Fenomenología de la percepción, Jem Cabanes, translator, Barcelona, Planeta-De Agostini (http://filosinsentido.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/merleau-ponty-maurice-fenomenologia-de-la-percepcion.pdf, access: 30 January 2015).

2012 Phenomenology of perception, Donald A. Landes, translator, London/New York, Routledge.

Here are two fundamental works from the 1990s, with web links where available:

Varela, Francisco J.; Thompson, Evan; Rosch, Eleanor

1993a The embodied mind, cognitive science and human experience, Cambridge/London, The MIT Press.

1993b The embodied mind, cognitive science and human experience, digital copy, Cambridge/London, The MIT Press (http://monoskop.org/images/b/b2/Varela_Thompson_Rosch_-_The_Embodied_Mind_Cognitive_Science_and_Human_Experience.pdf, access: 3 April 2016).

Lakoff, George; Johnson, Mark

1999a Philosophy in the flesh, the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought, New York, Basic Books.

1999b "The embodied mind," chapter three of the book Philosophy in the flesh, the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought (http://www.ics.uci.edu/~redmiles/ics203b-SQ05/papers/Lakoff1999Chapter3.pdf, access: 21 January 2016).

undated "Chapter one, Philosophy in the flesh, the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought," in The New York Times on the Web (http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/l/lakoff-philosophy.html, access: 30 January 2015).

A more recent overview can be found here:

Shapiro, Lawrence

2011 Embodied cognition, London/New York, Routledge.

For further reading, please see the bibliography I have been assembling over the last two years, for a graduate seminar called "Art in the embodied mind":

Best regards,

David

Thi is an interesting question often seized upon by those wishing to paint solar energy in a poor light. I didn't know of the latest findings - thank you, Patrick - that Cd based panels can have an EROI ( I would call that EYR, energy yield ratio) over 30. That is excellent news. What really annoys me is that the skeptics of solar energy never seem to consider the EROI of all the other structures that we use in a modern 21st century economy. What is the EROI of a brick, for example? Or a car? It's negative!! So by their arguments one should not build houses, or really anything else at all. Anything we can construct that has an EROI much in excess of unity is to be applauded, not denigrated and I hope to see solar PV systems integrated into building (BIPV) becoming more and more common. Soon we can have an entire building with a positive EROI!

Hi Thrish,

it helps if one knows why you are asking this.  Are you preparing a project proposal?  Or teaching a class?   At any rate, here's one: "The research field of morphological computation [...] explores the concepts and theories of computation in physical systems, where we investigate how motion control processes can be distributed over informational and physical dynamics."  I nicked it from a IEEE RAS call for papers for some special issue.  That definition is also a bit convolved, with constructs such as "informational dynamics" and "motion control processes".  But I think that these are just bloated phrases for simple concepts: dynamics, control.  Doing a bit more simplification, and changing the confusing "physical" to "mechanical", the whole sentence may be shortened to, "Morphological computation explores the concepts and theories of computation in mechanical systems."    (My apologies to the original authors; I think your definition was great but I just didn't quite get it.)

Patrick

I BELIEVE DR. ELKONON GOLDBERG, A WELL RENOWNED PERSON IN THE AREA OF THE HISTORY OF FRONTAL LOBE FUNCTIONING AND RESEARCH, HAS A USEFUL OPINION ON THIS; HE CAN BE REACHED AT EGNEUROCOG@AOL.COM, AND IF POSSIBLE, I WOULD LIKE TO INVITE HIM TO RESEARCH GATE. LK - CAPS FOR ME - NOT YOU!

Dear Louis Brassard:

1) I think there is a great deal of truth to the view that embodied cognition isn’t a theory, namely because of the disparate origins for the disparate ways in which different scientists believe cognition to be embodied. That said, I wouldn’t really call it a sub-movement, because I don’t think there is any movement that it is subordinate to. Within cognitive linguistics, research on and development of the ways in which cognition is embodied date back to the 80s and in particular with the groundbreaking book by Lakoff Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (which, despite being published 7 years after his co-authored Metaphors We Live by, was far more influential, specific, and clearly situated within an embodied view of cognition). Around that time another linguist, Ronald Langacker, was also developing a theory of language that incorporated embodiment, as were other “founders” of the umbrella framework of cognitive linguistics.  Meanwhile, psychologists like Eleanor Rosch were looking at cognition more generally and in terms of dissatisfaction with the reigning paradigm within cognitive science. Perhaps THE groundbreaking publication from psychology on embodiment is Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind (1991).  A few years later two other important works from other fields emerged: Thelen & Smith’s 1994 The Development of Cognition in Action (which, in addition to being an early work on embodied cognition from developmental psychology was also one of the earliest uses of a dynamical systems approach within psychology) & Hutchins’ 1995 Cognition in the Wild (a cognitive anthropology perspective). Finally, just before the 21st century, yet another line of inquiry, this time from robotics and AI, contributed to the development of the now disparate but large body of evidence supporting embodied cognition: Brooks’ Cambrian Intelligence. This is not by any means intended to be an exhaustive list of the fields or researchers who independently contributed to EC, but rather to emphasize that there was no movement that this research can be seen as a sub-movement of.

2) Although there is no single, cohesive EC theory that would satisfy all those who consider EC to be true, there are a number of widely shared core components. While I think your first description (if I am interpreting it aright) is fair, I am not sure about the second. EC proponents can and do believe that the world is understood through representations in the brain, and the nervous system is largely irrelevant to EC theories excepting in the ways already covered in your first characterization.

3) “There is nothing new under the sun.” It’s true that EC was not some wholly new paradigm (or set of paradigms) nor that the general idea was new. However, there was a great deal of novelty to the work and findings of the early developers of EC. In fact, Lackoff’s book mentioned above spends a fair amount of time on how traditional philosophy led to an understanding of categorization mostly rooted in Platonic philosophy. He cites Rosch’s work on prototype theory among other evidence that categorization is both fundamental to cognition, is not at all some modern cognitive science version of Plato’s Forms, and is embodied. Additionally, much of early EC research could not have existed except as a response to more mainstream theories/approaches. Had early cognitive scientists not posited that the brain is just another symbol processing machine and the symbols arbitrary, meaningless, and amodal, and had Chomskyan linguistics not provided the best ways in which to show this to be true only to fail repeatedly, we would likely not have seen linguists seeking better theories that led to cognitive linguistics, the re-introduction of neural networks in the connectionist program  that allowed cognitive psychologists to abandon the algorithms along with the “mind as computer” metaphor and look for other ways in which the brain might work. Of extreme importance was the idea that cognition wasn’t amodal but grounded in sensory modalities. Whatever parallels between EC and older philosophy exist, the idea that cognition is modal-specific or multimodal isn’t one of them.

4) Kant utterly rejected key components of EC. The fact that he distinguished between knowledge that required sensory experience or justification vs. that which didn’t is nothing like EC. It was Husserl, not Kant, who first tied conceptualization, categorization, and cognition all to perception. As for Piaget, one of the most important developments in developmental cognition was when Baillargeon thought to question Piaget’s mostly anecdotal evidence for object permanence. She demonstrated that infants did understand object permanence by developing a way to test whether or not Piaget’s conclusion was based upon his failure to take into account the limited motor skills infants had. Just because earlier philosophers and scientists connected bodily experience to cognition doesn’t mean they were fore-runners to modern EC. Piaget’s theories were largely wrong because he had used motor and perceptual capabilities as metrics to test what were very abstract, non-embodied stages of cognitive development. EC proponents do the reverse: they start with the abstract and test whether and how it may be rooted in sensorimotor experience/perception.

Yes, but the practical knowledge and abilities is missing! I have done work in this area over a lot more than 60 years. toni@ivergard.com 

Dear Imre,

The most expressive infrastructure/tool suite that I have found for modelling  pre-embodiment and actual embodiment of SW and  HW architectures and their implementations is Ptolemy-II at http://ptolemy.eecs.Berkeley.edu/ptolemyII/ by the team  at Berkeley led by Prof. Edward A. Lee. The system uses a work-flow among functional "actors"  within performance contexts defined by "director" abstractions, and these workflows  can be laid out in a 2-D graphics environment and has a very powerful ability for taming heterogeneity and complexity. It's is a weakness that it does not contain extensive Ontology support.

On the Ontology/Cyberware side of your question, I found Protege by Stanford at http://protege.stanford.edu/ to be very powerfull, but also other tools in the semantic web list at http://answers.semanticweb.com/questions/3316/list-of-ontology-modeling-tools.

I hope this helps a little

Giselle,

Since you've completed  your research you can delete the question by clicking the icon on the upper right of the question block.

> I wonder if there are different approaches that at least come closer to our everyday perception

As Tonto said "who's 'we', white man?" (Its a joke about the Lone Ranger - may be culturally specific:) 

Its culturally determined.There are numerous popular examples. In Chinese there is no word for brown.'Brown' cows are red' The famous river is 'yellow'.  The ancient Greeks had no concept of 'blue'. Homer referred to a 'wine dark sea'. There is a story of Vygotsky doing research in Uzbekistan where his subjects adamantly argued that two browns were completely different because one was the color of pigshit and the other was the color of bread.

Good! :)

looking forward...

Renata

Dear James,

You are young and have clearly bought in to the contemporary academic philosophy debate. However, I am old enough to have had the opportunity to talk to scientific staff of all disciplines at Trinity College when Russell was still alive, although by then no longer present at dinner. The contemporary debate is I think just a reflection of the fact that academic philosophy has completely lost touch with what science is about – Russell bemoaned this 75 years ago but by 1970 it had become far worse. Perhaps the really hard problem is indicated by the end of your post – how to make progress in philosophy if the academic philosophy community does not (and seemingly prefers not to) understand what science is about.

The problem is, I think, encapsulated by Stephen’s comment: “This is where traditional science is woefully limited. Someone said "this physical stuff is what exists. Then built a system of discovery to uncover physical stuff. Therefore, all stuff is physical." It's only scratching the surface of what exists, not intrinsic properties.” The point is that nobody in science ever said that. Descartes, Newton and Leibniz tell us to be very careful not to think like that, and every major innovator in fundamental science that I am aware of has done much the same. Scientists have consistently said that there is experience (cogito) and there appear to be mathematical regularities in the dynamic connections between experiences (to paraphrase Descartes). We use the terminology of stuff for practical purposes but not as a metaphysical base. The irony is that, as you say, most philosophers think ‘physical’ is a metaphysical category based on physics but the one thing physics does not have is such a category – it just traces dynamic connections.

So when, at my first formal dinner at Trinity as a student, I was seated next to a senior physical chemist and expressed to him my puzzlement over how surface tension could actually be visualized in terms of ‘things’ he smiled and explained that science does not try to do that. People who go in to science and want to retain the naïve idea of stuff have a hard time and maybe often switch to philosophy having (somewhat tongue in cheek) been told that they were ‘too philosophical’, meaning, in truth, that they were not philosophical enough.

Russell’s own account seems to me to be reasonably good, but there is one unhappy word in it: intrinsic. This gets complicated but intrinsic is not supposed to be relational. Russell sees that all physics is relational, and so includes nothing intrinsic. That might seem to leave room for qualia to be intrinsic. But as Louis points out we communicate about qualia al the time so they must be involved in causal relation, so cannot be non-relationally intrinsic. In fact the whole idea of anything being intrinsic is probably vacuous. Russell never quite got his knowledge by acquaintance to work. Qualia must be relational. After all when I get green qualia it is likely because of my relation to grass (indirectly). It is not me that is intrinsically green. The solution to this difficulty is, I think, simply to say that qualia are always proximal, or immediate relations. They are metaphysically distinct simply in that they are here. Physics has built a language of relations that can work in chains going as distal as you like but a key feature inherent in the ‘inverse problem’ is that qualia are never passed on. That is why we cannot test for them ‘over there’ and why it does not really matter whether or not you are a panpsychist because there is nothing to be shown to be true about distal qualia. That does not mean, nevertheless, that we are not entitled to try to discover exactly what immediate physical dynamic relation has the proximal qualia we are familiar with – that is the very difficult easy problem to concentrate on.

Dear Nathan,

I think you've taken one of the essential aspects of the matter.

The cortical processing of experience flow is one of the predominant data in human cognitive activity.

On the other hand it is also true that all our experiences, any experience, even symbolic and semantic, such as metaphor, emerges from a bodily and sensory background, as well as relational and interactive.

In this sense, the Imagery techniques can retrieve analog memories, like sensory and gestural feelings, transforming them in qualities of movement and posture, in forms of interaction with environment and people.

In this perspective are similar to the early playful fantasies and simulation activities, just like the ones commonly used during childhood in the context of play experiences.