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The concept of Embodied Cognition. This was his point.

• didericis 7y ago
  Interesting. Maybe my worry about new age stuff was unfounded. I don’t really like the philosophical direction of the concept, though. It mostly seems about acknowledging that we are fundamentally coupled to our environment, and that our minds are not really designed to function in isolation as a brain in a vat. That’s all true, but I think it dilutes both the definition of “self” and of “mind”. While we are not designed to function in isolation, the boundaries placed by the more traditional conception of both the self and the mind make them more useful, imo. If we consider the “self” to extend into our environment whenever there’s a dependency, at what point does “self” just become synonymous with everything? It’s going in a direction that makes the concept meaningless. And I don’t think it gives us any insight. For example, it is incorrect to think of object instances as living in isolation during the runtime of a computer. They are a part of a more holistic state, and interact with are influenced by other parts of that state constantly. But if you try to think of a program in terms of one giant state blob, reasoning becomes basically impossible. We need to break things down into differentiated modules in order to understand them. Keeping the concepts of “self” and “mind” as tools with which we can differentiate between something like “experiences per meatbag” and “thing doing the experiencing“, respectively, seems important, and the “embodied cognition” idea seems to be trying to get rid of those tools without replacing them.