Some arguments in favor of embodied cognition

Abstract

The article criticizes a number of assumptions of the disembodied approach to mind, ac­cording to which human mind and higher cognitive capacities can be represented without a human body or without a body part outside the brain; the bodily correlate of mind is the human brain; mind and cognition can be conceptualized as computation. In contrast, arguments for the conception of embodied cognition are presented: 1) the prototypical form of mind is impossible without natural language, and language is impossible without the body; 2) the brain-in-a-vat mental experiment is inadequate because the individual brain mirrors idiosyncratic experiences associated with the body that cannot be translated into extramodal “information”; the brain cannot be isolated from the rest of the nervous system and the body as a whole, and the fullest understanding of nervous system func­tioning is possible only from comparative-evolutionary, ontogenetic, and cultural per­spectives; 3) biological processes and those involving conscious states cannot be reduced to “computation” because of the incommensurability of ontologies.