Digital Mantras: The Languages of Abstract and Virtual Worlds by Steven R. Holtzman (review)

tion of Darwinian selection and thus opens the possibility for the reification of all sorts of nineteenth-century Darwinist notions. In addition, certain aspects of the community seem all too willing to adopt the “DNA-as-algorithm” dictum, which is open to a critique similar to one the authors of Embodied Mind level at cognitivism:that the analogy with the digital computer may be inappropriate . In contrast, the authors of Embodied Mind offer a rather liberating notion of “evolution as natural drift”as a component of their theory. The core of this notion is the movement from a position that “evolution forbids anything that is not survivable”to “evolution admits anything that can survive”opening the evolutionary field to mutations that do not impair survivability . This allows the possibility of seeing evolution as “bricolage,”meaning species exist not because they fulfill some ideal design but simply because they are possible. “Thereare therefore reasons to ask whether the very program of studying evolution as trait fitness optimization is not fundamentally flawed” (p. 189).And later: “Baldlystated, representationism in cognitive science is the precise homologue of adaptationism in evolutionary theory, for optimality plays the same central role on each domain” (p. 194). The stance of rejecting the possibility of objectivity and simultaneously rejecting the stability of the cognizing subject is timely and resonates with post-structural critical theory of the last 20 years in the humanities (a tradition that the authors make only scant reference to). Their position also resonates with critiques of the scientific method, from Paul Feyerabend to the Endo-physics of Otto Riissler,et al. By associating themselves with these various schools of thought, and with the phenomenologically informed critiques of Al,the authors make it plain that they are interested in placing their discussion not only within the confines of the discipline of cognitive science, but also within the broader debate on the scientific method and the tradition of the enlightenment. Noting that in the U.S. and in cognitive science in the U.S., phenomenology has remained a relatively uninfluential philosophical school, the authors cite the fundamental intuition of “double embodiment”of Merleau-Ponty.“For Merleau-Pontyas for us, embodiment has this double sense: it encompasses both the body as a lived, experiential structure and the body as the context or milieu of cognitive mechanisms” (p. xvi).They call for a “radicallynew approach to the implementation of Merleau-Ponty’svision” (p. xvii). It is here that the authors pull a rather surprising trump card, which becomes a central theme of the book. They assert (thework of Merleau-Ponty,Heidegger, Husserl and Nietzche notwithstanding) that although the Western philosophical tradition is largely bereft of tools to deal with the issue of the insubstantial nature of the self, there exists a long tradition of experientially based philosophy of cognition in certain aspects of Buddhist thought (the Madhyamika tradition ),which has been developed and refined for many centuries. It is in the Madhyamika tradition that the authors find both an experiential dimension of study that complements and redeems cognitive science from being lost in abstraction and a system of thought that finds no need for objective ground, indeed counsels against the clinging to or grasping of such ground as fallacious. There ensues an introduction of groundlessness and of the nonunified or decentered self in the Buddhist tradition, and the explication of a systemfor enlightened living based on this notion of groundlessness and egolessness in the same tradition. They find in this system support for their program of Enactive cognitive science. The expansive reach of this work is breathtaking. The book swings between a focused and specialized examination of the discipline of cognitive science and a philosophical discussion that steps beyond the limits of the Western tradition by placing the entire tradition in relation to the idea of groundlessness as discussed in Buddhist teachings. There is a certain thrill in the audaciousness of this position. Their approach implicitly takes cognitive science researchers to task in two ways: it critiques the philosophical basis of their methodology within cognitive science, and it critiques their inability to incorporate the results of their research in their lived lives. Over the years there have been numerous...