Embodied cognition

Embodied cognition is the theory that many features of cognition, whether human or otherwise, are shaped by aspects of the entire body of the organism. The features of cognition include high level mental constructs (such as concepts and categories) and performance on various cognitive tasks (such as reasoning or judgment). The aspects of the body include the motor system, the perceptual system, bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness) and the assumptions about the world that are built into the structure of the organism.Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge. We are all prodigious olympians in perceptual and motor areas, so good that we make the difficult look easy. Abstract thought, though, is a new trick, perhaps less than 100 thousand years old. We have not yet mastered it. It is not all that intrinsically difficult; it just seems so when we do it.It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can Embodied cognition is the theory that many features of cognition, whether human or otherwise, are shaped by aspects of the entire body of the organism. The features of cognition include high level mental constructs (such as concepts and categories) and performance on various cognitive tasks (such as reasoning or judgment). The aspects of the body include the motor system, the perceptual system, bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness) and the assumptions about the world that are built into the structure of the organism. The embodied mind thesis challenges other theories, such as cognitivism, computationalism, and Cartesian dualism.It is closely related to the extended mind thesis, situated cognition and enactivism. The modern version depends on insights drawn from recent research in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, dynamical systems, artificial intelligence, robotics, animal cognition, plant cognition and neurobiology. In philosophy, embodied cognition holds that an agent's cognition is strongly influenced by aspects of an agent's body beyond the brain itself. In their proposal for an enactive approach to cognition Varela et al. defined 'embodied': The Varela enactive definition is broad enough to overlap the views of extended cognition and situated cognition, and indeed, these ideas are not always carefully separated. Some authors explain the dependence of cognition upon the body and its environmental interactions by saying cognition in real biological systems is not an end in itself but is constrained by the system's goals and capacities. However, they argue, such constraints do not mean cognition is set by adaptive behavior (or autopoiesis) alone, but cognition requires “some kind of information processing...the transformation or communication of incoming information”, the acquiring of which involves 'exploration and modification of the environment'. The separation of embodied cognition from extended cognition and situated cognition can be based upon the embodiment thesis, a narrower view of embodiment than that of Varela et al. or that of Dawson: This thesis omits direct mention of some aspects of the 'more encompassing biological, psychological and cultural context' included by Varela et al. The Extended mind thesis, in contrast with the Embodiment thesis, limits cognitive processing neither to the brain nor even to the body, but extends it outward into the agent's world. Situated cognition emphasizes that this extension is not just a matter of including resources outside the head, but stresses the role of probing and modifying interaction with the agent's world. In his Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven (1755). philosopher Immanuel Kant advocated a view of the mind–body problem with parallels to the embodied view. Some difficulties with this interpretation of Kant include (i) the view that Kant holds the empirical, and specifically knowledge of the body, cannot support a priori transcendental claims, and (ii) the view that Kant holds that transcendental philosophy, although charged with the responsibility of explaining how we can have empirical knowledge, is not itself empirical. José Ortega y Gasset, George Santayana, Miguel de Unamuno, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger and others in the broadly existential tradition have proposed philosophies of mind influencing the development of the modern 'embodiment' thesis.