Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (review)

Rarely do we find a work that reaches deep enough to restructure the very foundations on which the sciences of the mind stand. Evan Thompson’s outstanding new book, Mind in Life, does just that.

With the development over the past four decades of the cognitive sciences in general and cognitive psychology in particular, researchers broke with the behaviourists’ strictures on what counts as legitimate fields of study and turned their attention to accounts of mental processing such as perception, spatial representations, judging, and, more broadly, the nature of mental representations. Areas long banned as much too ghostly and, thus, unscientific during the heyday of behaviourism, came back into focus. But the reclamation of ‘mind’ did little to challenge either the Cartesian framework silently undergirding the new cognitive sciences or their ‘mathematization’ of cognition and, more broadly, of human existence itself.

The thorough quantifying of psychological phenomena was already at play in behaviourism once earlier neuro-physical accounts of stimulus and response gave way to functional accounts recasting them as independent and dependent variables. The new cognitive disciplines, strengthened by the development of computer input-program-output models of explanations in the hands of ai researchers and then expanded by connectionist programs employing virtual neural net modelling, also preserved quantifiability as the essential form of its rediscovered field of mental phenomena. However different, these various approaches rested on a certain paradigm, the computational information-processing model, which used or silently imported at least five crucial assumptions about the nature of cognitive processes:

1. 1. Cognition consists exclusively of rule-governed transformations of symbols, be they marks standing for something or units with numerical weight.

2. 2. Cognition is heteronomous in that it is determined by input from outside the system and, in spite of its reliance on recursive functions, lacks internal or self-determination.

3. 3. The content of cognition is reducible in that its output is sufficiently determined by (or is a direct causal result of) the processing of input.

4. 4. Mind is related to the external world only by internal representations.

5. 5. Cognition is a non-conscious form of processing, capable of various embodiments, and thus cannot be accessed through phenomenological approaches.

Phenomenological critiques of this model, of course, occurred time and again, but in retrospect these skirmishes, with a few exceptions, seemed somewhat unorganized. Their reluctance to deal with and develop a larger model of the relationship between life and mind meant that they lack a comprehensive alterative paradigm. What is called for is a theory of embodied dynamic systems, not just of consciousness but also of life itself. The great service of Thompson’s new book is to provide this. But its genius is to integrate fully into his analysis the vast resources of phenomenology, even giving legitimacy to its transcendental version. In so doing it redefines the very topography of the field of consciousness studies.

Restricting our scope to cognition, embodied dynamic systems differ from information-processing models in these crucial ways:

1. 1. Because cognition at its basic level consists of a certain know-how internal to bodily actions, ‘cognitive structures and processes emerge from recurrent sensorimotor patterns of perception and action.’

2. 2. Accordingly, meaning is not the output of symbol computation but vitally emerges from neuronal activity ‘making sense’ of stimulation and compensating for sensory disturbances.

3. 3. Cognition is ‘enacted’ by agents that are dynamically engaged in a world that is ‘constituted’ by that involvement and, thus, cognition and world are co-generated and co-emergent.

4. 4. The co-generation of cognition and meaningful environments entails the fact that causality is circular, and, thus, the system is autonomous – self-determining– and in this sense organizationally and operationally ‘closed.’

The third part of the book brings together Thompson’s account of dynamic systems, enactment theory, and the structure of action (first part) with his larger account of nature of organic life (second part) as it bears on the nature of consciousness (final part). The concept of emergence...