Embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended mind

It was long thought in philosophy that there was a distinct division between the mental and corporeal aspects of the mind. A typical example of this kind of thinking is the Cartesian ontology by Descarters (1641/1996), where the mind and the body are composed of their own kinds of substances and properties, where the body is the same for all, but the mind is different and unique for each person (Descarters, 1641/1996; Harré, 2002). Descartes’ dualistic view of the mind and the body as separate entities, and where only thinking is what defines the individual as “me,” has since been often criticized. However, Descartes (1641/1996) does write about how, in order to form any conclusions about the present external world, an individual needs to not only examine their direct sensory perceptions, but also apply the knowledge of the past from their memory in the process of understanding. Thus, Descartes (1641/1996) provides interesting and important views about thinking and perception as cognitive processes which can be understood as explanations of how people make sense of not only their thinking, but also of their perceptions and bodies in an intersubjective manner.

According to Descartes (1641/1996), an individual can sense, feel, think about, and move their own bodies, as well as make separations and find similarities between their own bodies and those of others. The mind becomes aware of the body not because the individual can directly sense or imagine something in the body, but because these immediately perceived bodily sensations, pains and pleasures, appetites and passions are recognized, judged, and understood in “a certain passive faculty of perception” (Descartes, 1641/1996, p. 101) and some other active faculty which is located in a different substance and separate from the “me” as the thinking thing, a res cogitans, itself.

According to Descartes (1641/1996), the individual’s sense of existence is based on the individual’s ability to think, where thinking includes feeling, and an ability to think about one’s own existence. In this sense, a human being is “a thing which thinks” (Descartes, 1641/1996, p. 65), a thing “that doubts, affirms, denies,

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that knows a few things, that is ignorant of many [that loves, that hates], that wills, that desires, that also imagines and perceives” (Descartes, 1641/1996, p. 70).

Another approach called “the embodied mind” proposes that humans are interwoven mind-body entities, in which their bodies and their distinctive biological characters and organs shape their cognition and vice-versa in their thinking, emotions, perceptions, experiences, and (inter)actions; how humans are situated and behave in the real, lived world, is embedded in their internal and external environments, physically and socially (Clark, 1999; Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012; Varela et al., 2016). Action, perception, attention, cognition, and learning work together and affect each other within a joint biological framework (Clark, 1999, 2012).

The idea of an embodied mind is not a new one. The outlines of this concept can be traced back to the psychophysical interactionist view of Plato (Saariluoma, 1985; Plato, 360 BC/2001) and Aristotle’s’ idea of the soul (psyche) and body as an interactive ensouled entity (Aristotle, 1986; Saariluoma, 1985). According to Aristotle (1986), the mental soul gives life, movement, and ideal form and shape for its own, observable, and appropriate kind of body, to which the appropriate kind of soul belongs, actualizing the potentials of the body. “For it is by their partnership that the body acts and the soul is affected, that the body comes to be moved and the soul produces motion” (Aristotle, 1986, p. 142), “through some kind of choice and thought process” (Aristotle, 1986, p. 140). The soul itself and its mental states are moved by not only desires, wishes, perceptions, imagination, and judgements but also the states of the body (Aristotle, 1986; Saariluoma, 1985).

The soul is composed of four faculties or layers, forming an entirety that also holds the body parts together (Aristotle, 1986; Harré, 2002; Saariluoma, 1985).

The first faculty that is shared by all living creatures is a vegetative layer related to nourishment, reproduction, change and growth, and decay. Perception and sense of touch, or perceptive and desiderative faculties, distinguish animals from plants and make the faculty of spatial moving and locomotion possible. Because animals have at least the sense of touch, they can also feel pleasure and pain and have “the desire for the pleasant” (Aristotle, 1986, p. 162). The fourth faculty is that of an intellective or thinking that is composed of contemplating, problem-solving minds (Aristotle, 1986; Harré, 2002; Saariluoma, 1985). According to Aristotle, “whereas the sense faculty is embodied,” the faculty of intellect

“whereby the soul thinks and supposes” (Aristotle, 1986, p. 202) is not.

Similar ideas to those of Plato and Aristotle are displayed in Spinoza’s thinking. Spinoza proposes in his work, “Ethics,” originally published in 1677, that “mind and body are one and the same thing which is conceived sometimes under the attribute of thought and sometimes under the attribute of extension”

(Spinoza, 1677/2018, pp. 96–97). Mode of attribute of thought as idea has a corresponding mode of attribute of extension as body in causal and conceptual relationship, making the modes of the mind and the body the same (Spinoza, 1677/2018). This philosophy challenged Descartes’ (1641/1996) Cartesian dualism in which the mind and the body were seen as composed of two separate substances.

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As Gallagher and Zahavi put it, “It is just an empirical fact that we are indeed embodied, that our perceptions and actions depend on the fact that we have bodies, and that cognition is shaped by our bodily existence” (2012, p. 149).

The evidence is strong and can be highlighted throughout findings from the fields of neuroscience to developmental psychology to biology. As an example, Lakoff and Johnson (1999) explain how humans’ rational thinking can be seen as resulting from their bodily capacities and their particular neural configurations that operate according to certain computational principles. Humans’ bodily sensorimotor systems effect the ways how they understand what is real, how they categorize, how they conceptualize things, and eventually, how they experience the world (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, pp. 17–20).

The term “embodiment” can refer to multiple concepts. According to Reinhardt and Locke (2013), embodiment can be defined as body being central to cognition, as it is the mediating instrument for being in the world, for self- and social reconstruction and engagement. Embodiment can refer to “both the embedding of mental processes in the living organism and to the origin of these processes in an organism’s sensorimotor experience” (Fuchs, 2011, p. 199). It can be seen as being-in-the-world, following the Heideggerian vision that “the being of humans is simply practices […] that take place in the instrumental networks that partly realize them” (Rowlands, 2010, p. 59). According to MacLachlan (2004), the way of being-in-the-world means the embodiment in the sense of self, where consciousness constructs meaningful wholes of internal and external events and of both biological and social representations of the self, patterned by and included emotions (MacLachlan, 2004). Embodiment is apparent in agency, the sense of being-a-body that is created by the coordination of intention and motor action (MacLachlan, 2004). The sense of agency emerges when the results of person’s intentional actions correspond with the intended outcomes, creating feeling of being in control of one’s own body and movements, as well as controlling the external environment by own bodily actions (Kannape & Blanke, 2012; Tsakiris et al., 2006).

Embodied reflection refers to a mindful reflection of experience and as an experience itself, “where body and mind have been brought together” (Varela et al., p. 27) and when the reflection is performed with mindfulness or awareness.

This kind of embodiment can be seen in the activity of experts, for example in the performance of athletes or artists, where the mind and body are fully coordinated, and physical actions are executed in full awareness – the connection between intention and act has become closer, almost invisible mind-body unity (Varela et al., 2016). Embodiment can be exemplified in gestures, where those are used together with speech to create an integrated communication system. Thus, gestures can be viewed as a form of embedded thoughts (MacLachlan, 2004).

Embodiment also concerns cultural artifacts, which can be seen as transcending objects that embody their creators’ individual and cultural ideals (MacLachlan, 2004). For instance, graffiti can be understood as symbolically embodied artefacts that, through graffiti spectators, create re-embodied images of writers’ subcultural identities and physical bodies (Hannerz, 2017). These

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graffiti artifacts can convey social or symbolic meanings, for example, by expressing membership in one’s peer group (Schacter, 2008). As noted by Danto (2017), like the mind is in an intertwined and inseparable relationship with the body, so is the meaning embodied in the artwork. Even the human body itself can be viewed as a cultural object, where a person’s symbolic identity is distinguished, evaluated, and communicated in their own body through psychosocial processes and practices that are expressed through their body’s appearance and activity (MacLachlan, 2004). This cultural objectification can be seen clearly in masculine versus feminine cultures, where men are often characterized as tough and aggressive and focused on material success in masculine cultures, and women are characterized as tender, humble, and focused on quality of life (Hofstede et al., 2010).

According to Noë (2004), the environment is perceived as different affordances and possibilities that enable action, movement, and sensorimotor contingency. As proposed by Gibson (1986, p. 127): “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes”.

Affordance gives an individual an explanation of how something is used and what it does, and what it can do for them. The experienced affordance is relative to both the environment and the subject’s own posture, behavior, and activity in that situation; it can concern objects and interactions and can also have a social significance (Gibson, 1986; Saariluoma, 2004). “The enacted mind” refers to the enactive approach to perception where an object of perception is phenomenologically present to the perceiver, as the object is a continuous store of information that can be explored by directing the subject’s attention to that object at will. One's ability to perceive their world is made up of their sensorimotor knowledge, their expectations about how the object relates to them and their moving bodies, and of their ability to act in the world (Rowlands, 2010).

Actions upon an external environment make the information that is present in the information-bearing external structures available for the cognizing organism (Rowlands, 2010). The external components that are provided by the organism’s physical and social environments can affect their thinking, direct their behavior, and enhance their functional capacities by assisting the externalization and cognizing of their memories and thinking with the support of language or physical artifacts (Clark & Chalmers, 1998). An organism can deploy, utilize, and manipulate the information that is partly embedded in environmental structures and objects in such ways that the load and complexity of cognitive processes in the brain can be reduced and the content of the mind can be extended (Rowlands, 2010). For example, people can use their fingers to help their minds to make mathematical calculations outside their brains (Clark, 2012). Humans can harvest and mold metals and other raw materials and turn them into technologically sophisticated devices to create calculators, which they can then use to make even more complex mathematical calculations outside their brains, and which can extend their otherwise limited cognitive capacities to the objects in external world (Clark & Chalmers, 1998). Thus, individuals can extend and share information with other human creatures by not only speech or gestures, but also via

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manmade artifacts that embody and convey symbolic meanings, from, for instance, finger-made markings in sand, to traffic signposts, to social media platforms and works of art or graffiti.

Finally, among cognitive scientists, there are several approaches and interpretations on embodiment and the embodied mind, or an approach that can be called 4E cognition (Newen et al., 2018). Proponents of the 4E approach are partaking in an ongoing debate on whether, and in what ways and degrees, cognition is embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted in intracranial, bodily, and environmental processes (Newen et al., 2018). For example, the cognitive process can be understood as being embodied in “strong” or “weak” ways, being partially constituted or only partially dependent by an agent’s bodily or extrabodily processes or the individual’s ability to act (Newen et al., 2018). Some of the embodied approaches are in line with more traditional cognitive scientific representational/computational models, accepting that the mind is both representational and embodied, whereas others are more radical, explicitly anti-representational and/or anti-computational (Newen et al., 2018), because the world itself is a direct, external representation of agents’ actions (Dawson, 2013).

For example, the view of the embodied mind discussed in Dawson (2013) describes how embodied cognitive science asserts cognition’s purpose as directing an agent’s “actions upon the world” (Dawson, 2013, p. 205) and where that individual’s bodily senses, structure, and abilities to act in specific situations in its world become essential components in understanding the mind. The approach of embodied and extended cognition can be understood as a reaction against the methodological solipsism in traditional cognitive science that holds a

“classical sandwich” view, where the cognitive agent’s separate and unequal perceptions and actions are mediated by thinking in iterative sense–think–act cycles and the mind is disembodied (Clark, 2012; Dawson, 2013). According to Dawson (2013, p. 208): “The embodied approach replaces the notion that cognition is representation with the notion that cognition is the control of actions upon the environment.”

Clark acknowledged that human minds “are at the very least in deep and critically important contact with human bodies and with the wider world” (Clark, 2012, p. 275), and that their bodily characteristics and interactions with the world in some sense inform how humans sense, perceive, think, feel, learn and act, and move. However, Clark (2012) promoted a view called “external functionalism,”

where the brain, non-neural body, as well as the world “are apt to provide the physical machinery that implements (some of) the abstract organizations that turn matter into mind” (Clark, 2012, p. 284). According to this view, artefacts in the external world are integral to intellectual activities and cognizing, such as organizing information into a logical order that represents contents of some appraised schema or mental model, or into whole new assemblies, representing operations of restructuring. A body part, such as a finger, an external artefact, and interface; a medium, such as paper and pen; or a calculator can become, at least sometimes, an augmented part of intelligent mental actions in problem-solving, as a form of complementary cognitive extension or ”external symbolic

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storage” (Clark, 2012, p. 282; Clark & Chalmers, 1998). The external functionalistic view supports the weaker claim of 4E cognition where cognitive processing is based on the “core biological bundle” (Clark, 2012, p. 286), the mind is a representative thing, and the activities that happen across the brain, body, and world can cause representations and thinking, even though there can also exist solely internal information-processing entities (Clark, 2012).