Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience by Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch (review)

EMBODIED MIND: COGNITIVE SCIENCEAND H W ” EXPERIENCE by FranciscoJ.Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. MIT Press, Cambridge , MA, U.S.A., 1993. Rewiaved by Simon Penny, Art and Robotics, Department o f Art, College@Fine Arts, CarnegieMellon University,Pittsburgh, PA 15213, U.S.A.E-mail: . Let us emphasize that the overriding aim of our book is pragmatic. W e 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 treatiseof comparative scholarship.Our concern is to open a space of possibilitiesin which the circulationbetween cognitive science and human experience can be fully appreciated and to foster the transformative possibilitiesof human experiencein a scientific culture. (p.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 the clinging to a notion of the self-inviolable, embraced 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 foundationsof the scientific method are 01995ISAST brought into question here. In order to effect such a reconciliation, nothing less than a thorough rebuilding of the philosophical foundations of the disciplinea purge-is required. In order to support their position, the authors offer a synopsis of the discipline . Conventional cognitive science is assessed as fitting largely within the tradition of “cognitivism” and is thus closely linked with the discipline of artificial intelligence (AI): The central tool and guidingmetaphor of cognitivism is the digital computer . ..a computation is an operation performed or carried out on symbols,that is, on elementsthat rep resent what they stand for. ... [Clognitivismconsists in the hypothesis that cognition-human cognition included-is the manipulationof symbols after the fashion of the digital computer.In other words, cognitionis mental representation: the mind is thought to operate by manipulating symbols that represent features of the world or represent the world as being a certainway. (pp. 7-8) The authors question 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 propertiesby 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/ subjectivismabout. ..how we come to know the world” (p. 9).In response, the authors maintain that the organism and its environment co-evolve,that any organism , particularly the human organism , activelyshapes 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 AI and cognitive science as they have been practiced over the last 20 years. Their position has much in common with Hubert Dreyfus’slongstanding refutations of the premises of AI (see What ComputersStill Can’tDo, MIT Press, 1992)and with the work of Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores in Computers and Cognition.All three works (particularly Embodied Mind and What ComputersStill Can’tDo) are informed by phenomenologyand 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 process ing as the appropriatevehicle for representations (but does not critique representation itself): “Forconnectionism , a representation consistsin the correspondence between.. .an emergent global state and properties of the world; it is not a function of symbols”(p. 8). The authors then assert a more radical alternative, critiquing the notion of representation : ‘Weexplicitlycall...