Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience

by Francisco J Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch
MIT press 1993

Reviewed by Simon Penny

"Let us emphasize that the overriding aim of our book is pragmatic. We do not intend to build some grand unified theory either scientific or philosophical of the mind body relation. Nor do we intend to write a treatise of comparative scholarship. Our concern is to open a space of possibilities in which the circulation between cognitive science and human experience can be fully appreciated and to foster the transformative possibilities of human experience in a scientific culture." (xviii)

So saying, the authors of Embodied Mind state their basic premise that Cognitive Science has come to an impasse due to the inability of cognitive scientists to reconcile the results of cognitive science research with their own lived experience. Specifically, the authors recount various examples of cognitive science research which make untenable the notion of a unified self. They pair the discussion of this research with quotations revealing the inability or unwillingness of these same researchers to accept the implications of their research. The authors argue that this reconciliation is critical to the future development of Cognitive Science, that clinging to a notion of the self- inviolable by the entire discipline is an impediment to further development. Further, they argue that a notion of the inviolable self and of an objective external reality are flip sides of the same argument. Thus nothing less than the foundations of the scientific method are here brought into question. In order to effect such a reconciliation, nothing less than a thorough-going rebuilding of the philosophical foundations of the discipline, a purge, is required.

In order to support their position, a synopsis of the discipline is offered. Conventional cognitive science is assessed as fitting largely within the tradition of "cognitivism" and is thus closely linked with the discipline of Artificial Intelligence: "the central tool and guiding metaphor of cognitivism is the digital computer ...a computation is an operation performed or carried out on symbols, that is, on elements that represent what they stand for. ...cognitivism consists in the hypothesis that cognition-human cognition included-is the manipulation of symbols after the fashion of the digital computer. In other words, cognition is mental representation: the mind is thought to operate by manipulating symbols that represent features of the world or represent the world as being a certain way."(7-8) The authors questions the assumption that cognition is fundamentally representation. Such an assumption entails further assumptions: that the qualities of the outside world are fixed and "objective"; that we recover these properties by internally representing them; and that there is a separate subjective "I" that does these things. "These three assumptions amount to a strong, often tacit and unquestioned, commitment to realism or objectivism/ subjectivism about ...how we come to know the world" (9) In response, the authors maintain that the organism and its environment co-evolve, that any organism, particularly the human organism, actively shapes its environment. They refer to this as "structural coupling". So here too, the clear distinction between self and objective world becomes untenable.

Thus the authors of Embodied Mind directly challenge the basic premises of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science as it has been practised over the last twenty years. There is much in common in their position with the long standing refutations of the premises of AI of Hubert Dreyfus (see What Computers Still Can't Do, MIT Press 1992) and with that of Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores in their work Computers and Cognition. All three works (particularly Embodied Mind and What Computers Still can't Do) are informed by phenomenology, and refute the relevance of the AI paradigm to human cognition.

Varela, Thompson and Rosch discuss alternatives to cognitivism. They summarize the emergence/connectionism approach, which critiques symbol processing as the appropriate vehicle for representations, (but doesn't critique representation itself): "For connectionism, a representation consists in the correspondence between... an emergent global state and properties of the world; it is not a function of symbols." (8) The authors then assert a more radical alternative, critiqueing the notion of representation: "...we explicitly call into question the assumption-prevalent throughout cognitive science-that cognition consists of the the representation of a world that is independant of our cognitive and perceptual capacities by a cognitive system that exists independent of the world." (xx)

As an alternative, the authors propose an approach to the study of cognition which they call Enaction, is to re-orient cognitive science from cognitivism and representation to cognition as embodied action: an ongoing self-organising and groundless lived process, based on the idea that "cognition has no ultimate foundation or ground beyond its history of embodiment." (xx) The authors refer to this history of embodiment as an "emergent" phenomenon, and thus link their enterprise with the contemporary study of complexity theory, emergent order and self-organising systems. This is an appropriate connection, as these studies are also fueled by a disenchantment with similar aspects of the Artificial Intelligence paradigm and the engineering world-view.

The use of the terminology of emergence would seem to place this work in a close relationship with the study of Artificial Life. But there is an interesting and clear difference between the two positions on the subject of evolution. The AL community seems to embrace an unproblematized emulation of Darwinian selection, and thus opens the possibility for the reification of all sorts of C19th Social Darwinist notions. In addition, certain aspects of the community seem all too willing to adopt the DNA-as-algorithm dictum, which is open to similar critiques as the authors of Embodied Mind level at cognitivism: that the analogy with the digital computer may be inappropriate. In contrast, the authors of Embodied Mind offer a rather liberating notion of "evolution as natural drift" as a component of their theory. The core of this notion is the movement from a position that "evolution forbids anything that is not survivable" to "evolution admits anything that can survive" opening the evolutionary field to mutations which do not impair survivability, and thus allows the possibility of seeing evolution as "bricolage", that species exist not because they fulfill some ideal design but simply because they are possible. "There are therefore reasons to ask whether the very program of studying evolution as trait fitness optimization is not fundamentally flawed"(189). And later: "Baldly stated, representatrionism in cognitive science is the precise homologue of adaptationism in evolutionary theory, for optimality plays the same central role on each domain"(194).

The stance of rejection of the possibility of objectivity and simultaneous rejection of the stability of the cognizing subject is timely, and resonates with post-structural critical theory of the last twenty years in the humanities (a tradition that the authors make only scant reference to). Their position also resonates with critiques of the scientific method, from Paul Feyerabend to the Endo-physics of Otto R'ssler et al. By associating themselves with these various schools of thought, and with the phenomenologically informed critiques of AI, the authors make it plain that they are interested in placing their discussion not only within the confines of the discipline of cognitive science, but within the broader debate on the scientific method and the tradition of the enlightenment.

Noting that in the US and in cognitive science in the US, phenomenology has remained a relatively uninfluential philosophical school, the authors cite the fundamental intuition of "double embodiment" of Merleau-Ponty. "For Merleau-Ponty as for us, embodiment has this double sense: it encompasses both the body as a lived, experiential structure and the body as the context or milieu of cognitive mechanisms."(xvi) They call for a "radically new approach to the implementation of Merleau-Ponty's vision." (xvii) It is here that the authors pull a rather surprising trump card which becomes a central theme of the book. They assert; the work of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Husserl and Nietzche notwithstanding; that although the western philosophical is largely bereft of tools to deal with the issue of the insubstantial nature of the self, there exists a long tradition of experientially based philosophy of cognition in certain aspects of Buddhist thought (the Madhyamika tradition), which has been developed and refined for many centuries.

It is in the Madhyamika tradition that the authors find both an experiential dimension of study which complements and redeems cognitive science from being lost in abstraction, and a system of thought that finds no need of objective ground, indeed counsels against the clinging to or grasping of such ground as falacious. There ensues an introduction to the notions of groundlessness and of the nonunified or decentered self in the Buddhist tradition, and the explication of a system for enlightened living based on this notion of groundlessness and egolessness in the same tradition. They find in this system support for their program of Enactive cognitive science.

The expansive reach of this work is breathtaking. The book swings between a focused and specialized examination of the discipline of cognitive science and a philosophical discussion which steps beyond the limits of the western tradition by placing the entire tradition in relation to the idea of groundlessness as discussed in Buddhist teachings. There is a certain thrill in the audaciousness of this position. Their approach implicitly takes cognitive science researchers to task in a double way, it critiques the philosophical basis of their methodology within cognitive science, and it critiques their inability to incorporate the results of their research in their lived lives.

Over the years there have been numerous attempts at a holistic reconciliation of science with spiritual traditions, both Eastern and Western, typified by the works of such authors as Fritjof Capra and Paul Davies. These works clearly address a felt need of an entire generation. Although tempting, it would be a mistake to see Embodied Mind as fitting neatly into this category. Embodied mind is not working on the level of poetic associations. Like the Buddhist tradition it sources, it is ruggedly, steadfastly pragmatic.