Embodiment
may be considered as the role of the organisms specific physiological make up
and its interaction with the world around it that decides its cognitive and experiential
state. It is from this that the organisms sensorimotor system both influences
and constrains the experiential life of the particular organism and which
itself is situated within a larger environmental, biological and evolutionary
context as such that “the organism both initiates and is shaped by the
environment” (Varela, 1995). It is this embodied and participatory, enactive
engagement with the world that allows for a "realm filled with purposeful
striving, temporal flows, ambiguous moods, sense-making, bodily feeling...in a
word our "erlebete", or lived existence" (Froese & De Paolo, 2011)
Agencies and entities are
described as abstract entities by Varela (1995), from this it is unclear as to
what may be considered here as constituting the agent self as also discussed is
of what defines a particular experience within the enactive process as being
physical or mental or cognitive is the “degree of significance” for the
individual. The enactive, participatory role of the organism here is without
doubt, but where, or how, the experiential aspects of such an organism
become differentiated into what may be, for want of a better term, particular
personal experiences is not addressed. The use of terms such as distinct or
differentiated is acknowledged as being problematic in such a context but it
remains that organisms have particular experiential incidents throughout their
existence and which are experienced, recollected and relived explicitly outside
of any current or immediate, participatory environmental context.
The argument here is, arguably,
related to the discussion of the existence of representative structures or
processes within the cognitive system. It has been previously addressed as to
whether a non-representationalist view of embodiment can account for all
cognitive processes. Clark (1995), while fully acknowledging the vital role
embodiment plays in cognitive practice, also argued that there remain some
“representational hungry” aspects of thought which still requires some form of
representation to remain.
It may still be argued that some
form of representation such as that in line with Clark may be required for the
negotiation of the environment. The organism in its embodied, situated
interaction within the world around it is immersed in continuous enormities of
information with which it must traverse successfully. As the organism moves
through its environment there is a continual raft of environmental influx and
it may be argued that the organism must hold some type of reference, or
representational, system to know when and how to react to specific stimuli
within such an environment. It may perhaps not be the standard view of strict
representation as being direct environmental information caricatured within the
cognitive system but perhaps a qualitative apportioning of embodied and
environmentally based representation to allow for the organism to recollect
what within the environment is to be considered pertinent and relative to
survival.
Perhaps not, the positing of
representations within the cognitive system remain theoretical constructs and
perhaps ultimately non-verifiable, again if they indeed play any part within
the embodied, or grounded perspectives. Barret (2015) discusses the negative
implication of holding onto the traditional computational model of cognition to
the exclusion of the consideration of the embodied and enactive agent within
the environment. This approach had led to the bias of what was thought to be
human cognitive functioning being imposed upon a plethora of non-human
organisms aside from the lack of awareness of the explanatory power of the
embodiment perspective and the sufficiency with which it allowed for the
organism to negotiate its world. As such embodiment led to a much broader
appreciation of the variety of ways in which individual species may interact
and experience their own situatedness and offered a framework for doing so.
References
Barrett, L. (2015). Why Brains Are Not
Computers, Why Behaviorism Is Not Satanism, and Why Dolphins Are Not Aquatic
Apes. The Behavior Analyst, 1-15.
Clark, A. and Toribio, J. (1995) Doing without
representing? Synthese101, 401–431
Froese, T. & Di Paolo, E. A. (2011). The Enactive Approach:
Theoretical Sketches From Cell to Society. Pragmatics & Cognition,
19(1): 1-36
Varela F. J. (1995) The re-enchantment of the
concrete. Some biological ingredients for a nouvelle cognitive science. In:
Steels L. & Brooks R. (eds.) The Artificial Life route to Artificial
Intelligence: Building Embodied, Situated Agents. Lawrence Erlbaum, New Haven: 11–20.
Available at http://cepa.info/1996
