Friday, May 06, 2011

Eric Schwitzgebel - Embodied Introspection

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Cool stuff from Eric Schwitzgebel at The Splintered Mind on Embodied Introspection. Andy Clark and Alva Noe are two of my favorite authors. Rob Wilson is new to me.

Here is some of Wilson's bio from the page linked to in the post below.
My research falls chiefly in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the philosophy of biology, and general philosophy of science, but I also have ongoing interests in ethics, metaphysics and epistemology, and 17th and 18th century philosophy. Over the last three years I have been reading and thinking about eugenics, the contemporary uses of biotechnology, and the philosophy of psychiatry, amongst other things. I am also involved in several large-scale research projects that fall under the question What Sorts of People Should There Be?, which now has a mighty fine blog that's worth checking out.
You can find some of his recent papers here.

Embodied Introspection

Embodiment is hot these days in philosophy of psychology. Andy Clark, Alva Noe, Rob Wilson, and others have argued that cognition and perception are not processes confined within the brain, but rather transpire in extended brain-body-environment systems. Tactile perception, the argument goes, is not a brain process in response to stimulation of the skin; rather, it is a looping process that includes as a part one's active bodily movement and environmental exploration. Thinking about Scrabble moves can happen perhaps entirely in the brain if one visually imagines shuffling the tiles; but if shuffling the wooden tiles with one's fingers serves a similar functional role, that fingered shuffling is as much a part of Scrabble cognition as is imaginary shuffling.

Introspection, it might seem, is not embodied in the same way. After all, you can just close your eyes and introspect, no body involved, right? Introspection seems to be entirely interior -- a kind of attunement to one's internal stream of experiences, or the activity of the brain's self-monitoring systems.

Yet I think proper appreciation of the tangle of processes that drive introspective judgments points toward treating introspection as embodied. Consider two examples . . . .
Read the whole post.


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