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Philosophy of Cognitive Science > Embodiment > Flashcards

Embodiment Flashcards

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1
Q

What is the historical context of embodiment?

A
  • 17th century mind-body problem
  • Rene Descartes dualist approach
  • Behaviourism (1920s): Behaviour, the mind irrelevant, unknowable, a black box.
  • Computationalism (1960s): Cognition is a computational process, symbol manipulation, implementation-independent.
  • Connectionism (1980s): Architecture of the brain. The body is peripheral.
  • Embodiment: Cognition not just bounded to the skull. Embodied and deeply dependent upon the physical body. Empirical research within the past 10 years.
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2
Q

What is embodiment?

A
  • The Embodiment Thesis: Embodiment is an approach to cognition that states that our cognition is deeply dependent upon the physical body. The body both has a causal role for cognitive processes and it also plays a physically constitutive role in cognition, i.e. part of the cognitive system.
  • Limits/constraints: The body limits or constrains our cognitive abilities, and the nature of our body determines how we perceive our environment.
  • Vision/action: Especially, embodied cognition aims at understanding how our perceptual and motor capacities affect cognition.
  • Empty thoughts: Without the involvement of the body in both sensing and acting, thoughts would be empty and mental tasks would not have the same characteristics as they do.
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3
Q

What are the 4 parts of 4E cognition?

A

Embodied, embedded, enacted, extended.

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4
Q

What is the embodied part of the 4E cognition?

A
  • Cognition is embodied in our senses and motor behaviour.
  • Cognition involves perceiving and acting with a physical body.
  • The brain co-evolved with the body and is coupled to a body.
  • Example: The role of hands in cognition.
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5
Q

What is the embedded part of 4E cognition?

A
  • Environment
  • Cognition is embedded in an environment that is both physical, cultural and social.
  • Our behaviour and action is formed by the environment.
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6
Q

What is the enactive part of 4E cognition?

A
  • Body-environment-action relationship.
  • We are perceiving the environment in terms of what we can do with the objects around us.
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7
Q

What is the extended part of 4E cognition?

A
  • Cognition is extended beyond the organism itself.
  • Functionalist conception: Cognition is extended across other people, objects, tools, devices, in the environment.
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8
Q

What is the reasoning for the 4E cognition?

A
  • Cognition is not just neural activity occurring solely in the brain.
  • It involves the body, the brain and the environment and dynamical relations between them.
  • Cognition is also embodied, embedded, enactive and extended.
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9
Q

What are the 3 roles / functions that the body has for cognition?

A
  1. Body as constraint
  2. Body as distributor
  3. Body as regulator
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10
Q

Body as constraint

A

Cognition is constrained by brain and body anatomy.

Bodily movements can either enhance cognition (e.g. gestures, walking) or inhibit cognitive functions (e.g. multitasking)

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11
Q

Body as distributor

A

The body distributes cognitive tasks between the brain and body. The body takes part in the cognitive processing.

Example 1: Children using their hands and fingers to count and solve maths problems.

Example 2: Gestures to convey meaning, to comprehend and for working memory.

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12
Q

Body as regulator

A

The body regulates cognitive activity over space and time.

Ensures that cognition and action are coordinated.

The body provides feedback that can regulate cognition.

Example: Technique in sports

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13
Q

Mention 6 well-known examples of embodied cognitive science.

A
  1. Gesturing: Facilitates communication and language processing.
  2. Vision: Action-guiding, the body provides feedback, ecological perception.
  3. Mirror neurons: Fire when we do an action but also when we observe others do the same actions.
  4. Cognitive processing: Cognitive tasks, e.g. remembering, are performed more effectively by using our bodies.
  5. Future: Thinking about the future caused participants to lean slightly forward. Thinking about the past caused participants to lean slightly backwards.
  6. Gut feelings: Microbiome-Brain-Gut Axis, ENS, the second brain, 30 neurotransmitters.
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14
Q

What are the six historical anchors for embodied cognitive science?

A
  1. Metaphor and cognition
  2. Enactive cognition
  3. The embodied approach to robotics
  4. Ecological perception
  5. Dynamicism and development
  6. Phenomenology
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15
Q

Who is George Lakoff?

A
  • 1941- (81 years old)
  • American cognitive linguist and philosopher from University of California, Berkeley.
  • One of the key figures to empirically study embodiment.
  • Discovered that we think metaphorically. Semantics arise from the nature of the body.
  • Wrote the book Metaphors We Live By (1980) together with Mark Johnson.
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16
Q

What are examples of thinking metaphorically?

A

Happiness is up, e.g. “I’m walking on air”, “I’m feeling up”.

Sadness is down, “Feeling drained”, “Being under a dark cloud”.

Control is up, being controlled is down.

Love is a physical force: electricity, sparks, affection is warmth.

Conclusion: The metaphors are based on the physiology of emotions.

17
Q

What is the embodied approach to robotics?

A

Late 1980s and early 1990s.

A view of computational intelligence with focus on bottom-up behaviour and interaction with the world rather than algorithms and representations.
Minds are not for thinking, but for doing.

18
Q

What is ecological perception?

A

The embodied approach to vision.

Traditional view on vision: The visual system has to solve the problem of reconstructing a 3D world from a static 2D image on the retina.

Embodied view on vision: The traditional problem of vision does not exist. Vision does not begin with a static retinal image because the organism is actively moving and engaging with the environment.

19
Q

What is phenomenology and what is its goal within embodiment?

A

Phenomenology: A philosophy of experience. The investigation and description of how phenomena are consciously experienced.

Goal: To specify the mechanisms that explain how cognition is grounded in and deeply constrained by the body.

20
Q

Tradition vs. embodiment on modularity and vision/action.

A

Traditional: The brain consists of modules that are independent, domain specific, hardwired. Cognition occurs only in the brain. Bodily processes simply provide inputs and executes instructions.

Vision and action two distinct modules. The visual system has to solve the problem of reconstructing a 3D world from a static 2D image on the retina.

Embodied: Sensory and motor processes interact. Ecological perception, i.e. the embodied approach to vision. The traditional problem with vision does not exist as the organism is actively moving and engaging with the environment.

21
Q

Tradition vs. embodiment on mental representation.

A

Tradition: Representations are used in language, concepts and memory. They are separated from sensory or motor systems and their meaning has nothing to do with bodily experience. Representations are symbolic, abstract (“table” denotes multiple tables) and amodal (“table” in written or spoken language produces the same representation).

Embodiment: Dynamical systems theory - minimizes / denies the need of representations. When you can sense the world, and you interact and are influenced by the world, you don’t need abstract symbolic descriptions.

22
Q

Tradition vs. embodiment on nativism.

A

Tradition: Certain concepts and abilities are “native” and innate. The body and environment are “triggers” of hard-wired traits. E.g. linguistic nativism, grammar is largely hard-wired into the brain.

Embodiment: The dynamic interplay between the body and the world creates cognition (e.g. language acquisition, gesturing).

23
Q

What are the two types of situated cognition?

A

Embedded cognition and extended cognition.

24
Q

Mention some empirical domains for embodied cognition.

A
  • Visual consciousness
  • Concepts: Thinking about concepts activate previous experiences. Emotion concepts are embedded in bodily feelings, facial expressions, gestures.
  • Memory: e.g. remembering where ingredients and tools are in the kitchen.
  • The understanding of other minds: Theory of Mind in traditional cognitive science. Mirror neurons.
  • Moral cognition: Gut feelings, disgust (physical, bodily changes, nausea, stomach-turning, wrinkling of the nose). The body-specificity thesis, i.e. the claim that people with different kinds of bodies tend to think differently.
25
Q

What is the difference between dynamicism and embodiment?

A

Dynamicism is a broader concept, interaction between the agent and the environment. Embodiment is dynamicism inside the human body.

Philosophy of Cognitive Science (12 decks)

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