The Embodiment

Recent experimental research in the field of neurophysiology has led to the discovery of two classes of visuomotor neurons: canonical neurons and mirror neurons. In light of these studies, we propose here an overview of two classical themes in the cognitive science panorama: James Gibson's theory of affordances and Eleanor Rosch's principles of categorization. We discuss how theoretical perspectives and neuroscientific evidence are converging towards the current paradigm of embodied cognition. From this perspective, we discuss the role of action and simulation in cognitive processes, which lead to the perceptual recognition of objects, and actions and to their conceptual categorization.

Cosa significa protestare per le strade, perché occupare uno spazio nella città? Veniamo da un recente risveglio, da anni che hanno riportato la politica nelle piazze e nelle strade. In tutto il mondo uomini e donne sono scesi in piazza manifestando un'urgenza condivisa di resistenza, di riappropriazione degli spazi e della capacità di agire e fare politica a partire dalle vite. Come comprendere la specificità di queste esperienze? Perché chiamarle rivolte urbane e non rivoluzioni? Quali sono gli strumenti per leggere una rivolta senza astrarre, generalizzare, neutralizzare? Stare per le strade è la pratica di 'stasis' che crea lo spazio per la rivolta e contemporaneamente dispone un modo affettivo di vivere lo spazio urbano. Durante una protesta, la corporeità è esposta in tutta la sua intensità appassionata e vulnerabile. Il corpo al centro permette di cogliere la relazione che questi eventi intessono con gli spazi urbani, il nuovo senso della politica che propongono e i rapporti tra uomini e donne nel momento della protesta.

Theory of mind explanations of how we know other minds are limited in several ways. First, they construe intersubjective relations too narrowly in terms of the specialized cognitive abilities of explaining and predicting another person’s mental states and behaviours. Second, they sometimes draw conclusions about second-person interaction from experiments designed to test third-person observation of another’s behaviour. As a result, the larger claims that are sometimes made for theory of mind, namely that theory of mind is our primary and pervasive means for understanding other persons, go beyond both the phenomenological and the scientific evidence. I argue that the interpretation of ‘primary intersubjectivity’ as merely precursory to theory of mind is inadequate. Rather, primary intersubjectivity, understood as a set of embodied practices and capabilities, is not only primary in a developmental sense, but is the primary way we continue to understand others in second-person interactions.

We do not know how to think with or about these notions and others such as reality, perception, space, time, etc…
ABSTRACT

In the following I will deal with the umbrella notions of mind, consciousness and body. The contents is relevant, but of greater importance is the manner or method in which I deal with these notions.
I first present as an illustration of my approach or method, how I have dealt with the notions of intuition and intuiting.
One of the points I am trying to make is that: we do not know how to think about many things, for example mind, consciousness, awareness, body, intuition, etc.
Therefore, I attempt to explore a number of things that we must investigate and deal with before we use these and other notions, as if they are clearly defined terms, before we try to use them to think and to think about anything, especially many levelled and multi- dimensional issues and problems such as the workings of ‘the mind, the body, intuition, consciousness and the relationship, if there are any, between these and other things. Then I suggest the initial steps for a few very basic requirements before the exploration of  a theory of embodied, living, conscious tissues and a model for embodied (self-) consciousness research.
CONTENTS


Intuition                                                          4

Mind                                                              9

Consciousness                                              19

Embodied Consciousness                          44

Human Body                                              52

Theory                                                        61

Proposal for a Model of
Embodied Consciousness
Research                                            86

Self or Reflective Consciousness    90

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

We propose to read Francis Bacon's doctrine of the idols of the mind as an investigation firmly entrenched in his mental-medicinal concerns and we argue that an important role therein is played by the imagination. Looking at the ways in which the imagination serves to pinpoint several crucial aspects of the idolic mind permits us to signal the explicit or implicit cross-references between what in Bacon's tree of knowledge appear as distinct branches: the various faculties and their arts; the mind, the body, and their league; natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of man. The consequence of this rich picture of the diagnosis of the mind is an equally rich conception of the cure, which comprises both epistemic and physiological aspects. We extract the features of this integrated view out of Bacon's epistemological and medical natural historical writings, which we propose to read in tandem. We also propose a number of sources for Bacon's views on the imagination, whose variety accounts for the multivalent, sometimes elusive, but surely pervasive role of the imagination in the Baconian diagnosis and cure of the mind.

This article examines tattooing as an ancient and contemporary form of body inscription and modification. It frames the
popularity of tattooing in the Western World in relation to other modern body modifications and within the landscape of
consumer culture. Showing parallels between the motivations and meanings of contemporary tattoo practices, a historical
overview of tattoos in premodern and non-Western cultures is presented. The divergent ways in which scholars have
approached tattooing is examined, juxtaposing research in the behavioral sciences that links tattoos to deviant and antisocial
behaviors with ethnographic and social–scientific studies that place tattoos within cultural, symbolic, esthetic, and prosocial
frameworks.

so clearly shows in his dissertation, between the 8 th and 14 th centuries there were illuminating phenomenological distinctions that were considered essential to understand the great perfection practice of awareness, becoming aware of awareness. These distinctions were primarily made by the Nyingma masters of meditation. The most basic distinction is between the mind of dualistic experience (sems) and the primordial awareness of naturalistic non-dualistic experience or primordial knowingness (ye shes) or (semde). This ye shes is non dualistic knowingness. Unfortunately, many Buddhist texts describe dualism as deluded and non-dualism as non-deluded. This language of delusion is highly prejudiced and is nihilistic in tone and devalues the oneness of the two truths (conventional and absolute reality). They devalue the indivisibility of appearance and awareness and moreover, challenge the validity of the foundational human experience of oneness and difference or duality within non duality. This negative use of language unhappily challenges the divinity of appearance and invalidates the human experience of the Nirmanakaya dimension which is ordinary life. The differentiation and distinction of mind from awareness prevents the bewildering confusion of mind and awareness resulting in the negation of either the experience of non-duality or the experience of duality. Much of the understanding about the difference between mind and awareness was presented in the unfolding of the seventeen Atiyoga tantras that brought forth the heart essence tradition (sying thig). These teachings and instructions are part of the instructional teachings of Dzogchen. These teachings are instructional in the forms of skillful means or praxis for bringing the experience of awareness of awareness into completion. This completion is experiencing the fullness of experience of personal awareness within the vast infinite and multidimensional field of awareness. The essential method is to experience directly and completely primordial knowingness as well as the manifestations of this primordial knowingness such as mind, innermost subjectivity and external phenomenal appearance. Mind, subjectivity and all appearance are the manifestation of primordial knowingness itself. Primordial awareness is the primordial and abiding pervasive condition. Our experience of non-conceptual knowingness or non-conceptual perception opens us to the direct understanding and direct non-conceptual experience that everything and anything is the manifestation of primordial or ground awareness. Primordial awareness is radiance openness or radiant emptiness. Primordial awareness is not simply emptiness alone but the oneness of openness and radiance spaciousness as light. The incompleteness of emptiness alone is recognized by the 14 th century Nyingma master Longchenpa. Awareness is the union of spaciousness and radiance.

Storytelling has successfully been used in language teaching at all levels of proficiency. This paper commences with suggestions of the kinds of tales that can be employed in the classroom, story selection criteria, practical tips, techniques as well as other recommendations illustrated with concrete tried and tested examples, and the numerous advantages of such activities.
Subsequently we consider the dualistic Cartesian approach that has characterised much of even twentieth-century thought: in this ‘traditional’ view, going back to Descartes, cognition has been seen as manipulation of symbolic, mental representations, with the brain conceived of as an input-output processor running abstract, generalised computational programs which enable us to process incoming data into a perception and interpretation of the outside world. Language, too, has for a long time been viewed as a system operating largely independently from the body (articulatory-perceptual organs notwithstanding).
A rich and diverse inventory of heterogeneous evidence against such a view is finally presented, addressing the issue of the link between cognition, language, body, and environment. The paper ends with implications for language instruction that enhances acquisition and retention thanks to storytelling which invites learner to actively use their body in the process, or at least observe the teacher doing so, thus activating their mirror neurons.

Research has shown that the brain is constantly making predictions about future events. Theories of prediction in perception, action and learning suggest that the brain serves to reduce the discrepancies between expectation and actual experience, i.e., by reducing the prediction error. Forward models of action and perception propose the generation of a predictive internal representation of the expected sensory outcome, which is matched to the actual sensory feedback. Shared neural representations have been found when experiencing one's own and observing other's actions, rewards, errors, and emotions such as fear and pain. These general principles of the "predictive brain" are well established and have already begun to be applied to social aspects of cognition. The application and relevance of these predictive principles to social cognition are discussed in this article. Evidence is presented to argue that simple non-social cognitive processes can be extended to explain complex cognitive processes required for social interaction, with common neural activity seen for both social and non-social cognitions. A number of studies are included which demonstrate that bottom-up sensory input and top-down expectancies can be modulated by social information. The concept of competing social forward models and a partially distinct category of social prediction errors are introduced. The evolutionary implications of a "social predictive brain" are also mentioned, along with the implications on psychopathology. The review presents a number of testable hypotheses and novel comparisons that aim to stimulate further discussion and integration between currently disparate fields of research, with regard to computational models, behavioral and neurophysiological data. This promotes a relatively new platform for inquiry in social neuroscience with implications in social learning, theory of mind, empathy, the evolution of the social brain, and potential strategies for treating social cognitive deficits.

Embodied social cognition (ESC) aims to explicate how our embodiment shapes our knowledge of others, and in what this knowledge of others consists. Although there is much diversity amongst ESC accounts, common to all these accounts is the idea that our normal everyday interactions consist in non-mentalistic embodied engagements. In recent years, several theorists have developed and defended innovative and controversial accounts of ESC. These accounts challenge, and offer deflationary alternatives to, the standard cognitivist accounts of social cognition. As ESC accounts grow in number and prominence, the time has come for a dedicated, sustained debate on ESC and its most controversial and innovative elements. The goal of this special issue is to host such a debate with the aim of bringing clarity to the discussion of social cognition.

To understand the development of infant comprehension of visual obstructions and perspective-taking, this study tested the ability of N= 28 infants at 14, 16, and 18 months to adapt attention-sharing to visual constraints. An experimental task investigated how infants modify gaze following behaviors when an adult's line of sight is obstructed by a barrier. From 14 to 18 months, infants gradually learned to modify their search behavior when an adult looked toward a referent hidden behind a barrier from the infant's perspective. This ...

The question of freedom is recurrent in the theory of habitus. In this paper I propose that the notion of freedom is an essential and necessary component for the coherence of the analyses which mobilize habitus both in terms of their theoretical articulation and in terms of their grounding in empirical reality. This argument can seem surprising considering that the theory of habitus has often been accused of being deterministic. Yet I show that, from an epistemological point of view, habitus theory is not deterministic. Bourdieu’s treatment of this concept implies at least three principles that exclude determinism: (1) the production of an infinite number of behaviors from a limited number of principles, (2) permanent mutation, and (3) the intensive and extensive limits of sociological understanding. After identifying and describing these principles, I show the reason for their incompatibility with a deterministic perspective and consider their implications for the corresponding model of action. I illustrate this analysis by a discussion of Loïc Wacquant’s carnal sociology of the pugilistic universe which reveals why it is essential to understand and explain the relation between habitus and freedom.

Mirror neurons are widely regarded as an important key to social cognition. Despite such wide agreement, there is very little consensus on how or why they are important. The goal of this paper is to clearly explicate the exact role mirror neurons play in social cognition. I aim to answer two questions about the relationship between mirroring and social cognition: What kind of social understanding is involved with mirroring? How is mirroring related to that understanding? I argue that philosophical and empirical considerations lead us to accord a fairly minimal role for mirror neurons in social cognition.

In spite of the merits of Gallotti and Frith’s we-mode proposal of social cognition, they attempt to separate social knowing from the dynamics of social interaction in order to focus on the individual mechanisms of social cognition. We argue that this approach leads to important shortcomings: 1) it imposes an implausible dichotomy between social and non-social interaction; 2) it is circular in that it simultaneously presupposes and tries to be explanatory of social skills and does not provide a developmental story for the representational capacities underlying the we-mode; 3) it does not really go beyond a notion of ‘mirror mechanism for mental states’ as it remains vague about its embodied versus representational nature.

In this practice of becoming aware of our own awareness, the qualities of this awareness, of this field become more and more manifest...more known and more felt as a felt sense. The felt sense of the presence of awareness becomes embodied, becomes flesh, becoming luminous flesh. Awakened awareness! As the experience of awareness unfolds, and the qualities of awareness become experienced and become embodied, the quality of spaciousness or primordial openness unfolds. The quality of light, the quality of being light, the felt sense of light, the experience of radiance, the radiance of the field flows beyond one's body boundary. This quality of light and radiance can also be experienced as energy, as Shakti, as chi or as sublime vibrations. The undulation of the primordial pulsation, as bliss, as Maha Suka overcomes suffering in its fullness, completeness and enough-ness. This light as radiance manifests the bringing forth of the quality of compassionate resonance and knowingness as light. The quality of non-duality, of oneness, of indivisibility, arises, inside to inside, directly, as unmediated primordial boundedness, primordial at home-ness. The Self arises as well as Self-liberation. This unfolding process of embodiment of the foundational state manifests over time and through time as timeless awareness in time. In the beginning we may feel that we are holding the experience and holding this awareness. Then one day we begin to experience it as if we are entering into this awareness as the field above us and below us, in front us, behind us and through us. We enter the field and are surrounded by a sphere of awareness. We are in the qualities of space, light, energy and resonance. Then one moment in time, one day, we become this field of energy. We become the field of light. We become spaciousness. We become openness. We become resonance. We become non-duality within duality. Aham Ah. I am becoming what I am and who I am. Aham Ah. As this experience unfolds, we begin to feel these qualities not only as the qualities of our own innermost awareness as lucidity, as light, but we begin to experience the quality of the lucidity in phenomena, in the light of appearances. We experience lucidity in otherness, for example, lucidity in

Being within awareness as awareness and being with another who is within awareness is a most powerful skillful means to bring forth awareness within one's self and within each other. Two awarenesses are better than one, just as self regulation can be enhanced by co self regulation on the bodily dimension. Self-illumination is a co-emergent process between and within companions, compassionate companions. The lucidity within one's own awareness, as one's own awareness can experience the lucidity within the other's awareness as lucidity. It is true, awareness awakens awareness both in one's self and in the other. This is the secret of the tantra. The luminous energy within one's own body can resonate to the luminous energy in the other's body, deepening the mutual embodiment of light. Light is awareness and awareness is light. The attunement to awareness within one's own body can bring forth the attunement of awareness within the body of the other. The self arising of the awareness field in one's self resonates to the self arising of awareness within the other's body. The self arising of the energy or the chi or the shakti can bring forth the self arising within each other and can bring forth the sustaining of the energy field within each other. In essence, humanness is the manifestation of light, and the manifestation of primordial luminous energy, and the openness of the great space of compassion.

Intention recognition is ubiquitous in most social interactions among humans and other primates. Despite this, the role of intention recognition in the emergence of cooperative actions remains elusive. Resorting to the tools of evolutionary game theory, herein we describe a computational model showing how intention recognition co-evolves with cooperation in populations of self-regarding individuals. By equipping some individuals with the capacity of assessing the intentions of others in the course of a prototypical dilemma of cooperation – the repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma –, we show how intention recognition is favored by natural selection, opening a window of opportunity for cooperation to thrive. We introduce a new strategy (IR) that is able to assign an intention to the actions of opponents, on the basis of an acquired corpus consisting of possible plans achieving that intention, as well as to then make decisions on the basis of such recognized intentions. The success of IR is grounded on the unshameful exploitation of unconditional cooperators whilst remaining robust against unconditional defectors. In addition, we show how intention recognizers do indeed prevail against the most famous successful strategies of iterated dilemmas of cooperation, even in the presence of errors and reduction of fitness associated with a small cognitive cost for performing intention recognition.

Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in theories of mindreading. New discoveries in neuroscience have revitalized the languishing debate between the Theory Theory (TT) and the Simulation Theory (ST). The discovery of so-called mirror neurons has revived interest particularly in ST. Both ST proponents and theorists studying mirror neurons have argued that mirror neurons are strong evidence in favor of ST over TT. In this paper I argue against the prevailing view that mirror neurons are evidence for ST. My view is that on an appropriate construal of their function, mirror neurons do not operate like simulation theorists claim. In fact, mirror neurons are more appropriately understood as one element in an information-rich mindreading process. As such, mirror neurons fit in better with some sort of TT account of mindreading. I defend a positive account, the Model TT, which better explains the role of mirror neurons in social cognition.

""Classical ways of viewing the relation of consciousness to the brain and physical world make it difficult to see how consciousness can be a subject of scientific study. In contrast to physical events, it seems to be private, subjective, and viewable only from a subject's first-person perspective. But much of psychology does investigate human experience, which suggests that classical ways of viewing these relations must be wrong. An alternative, Reflexive model is outlined along with it's consequences for methodology. Within this model the external phenomenal world is viewed as part-of consciousness, rather than apart-from it. Observed events are only "public" in the sense of "private experience shared." Scientific observations are only "objective" in the sense of "intersubjective." Observed phenomena are only "repeatable" in the sense that they are sufficiently similar to be taken for "tokens" of the same event "type." This closes the gap between physical and psychological phenomena. Indeed, events out-there in the world can often be regarded as either physical or psychological depending on the network of relationships under consideration.

However, studying the experience of other human beings raises further complications. A subject (S) and an experimenter (E) may have symmetrical access to events out-there in the world, but their access to events within the subject's body or brain is asymmetrical (E's third-person perspective vs. S's first-person perspective). Insofar as E and S each have partial access to such events their perspectives are complementary. Access to S's experience is also asymmetrical, but in this case S has exclusive access whereas E can only infer its existence. This has not prevented the systematic investigation of experience, including quantification within psychophysics, psychometrics, and so on. Systematic investigation merely requires that experiences be potentially shared, intersubjective and repeatable. In this the conditions for a science of consciousness are no different to a science of physics."

Note added for 2012 Academia.edu upload: This paper, presented at a Ciba Foundation Symposiumin 2002 was the first time the epistemological implications of reflexive monism for a science of consciousness were presented to a group of internationally recognised scholars on consciousness, including John Searle, Dan Dennett, Thomas Nagel, Sydney Shoemaker, Colin McGinn, Michael Lockwood, Margaret Boden, Bernie Baars, Peter Fenwick, Michael Gazzaniga, Jeffrey Gray, Stevan Harnad, Marcel Kinsbourne, Nick Humphrey, John Kihlstrom, Ben Libet, Tony Marcel, Jerome Singer, Robert Van Gulick, Howard Shevrin, and Pat Wall. The discussion that follows the paper is of particular historical interest, much of it focusing on the how to interpret the projected nature (or out-thereness) of much of the phenomenal world. Over the following decade, various participants accepted the importance of the out-thereness of the phenomenal world (e.g. Libet, Gray, and Humphrey) along with other theorists such as Lehar, Revonsuo, Hoche, and Tye. However, whether phenomena that seem to be out in the world are really in the brain continued to be a source of contention.

The mechanisms of emergence and evolution of cooperation in populations of abstract individuals with diverse behavioural strategies in co-presence have been undergoing mathematical study via Evolutionary Game Theory, inspired in part on Evolutionary Psychology. Their systematic study resorts as well to implementation and simulation techniques, thus enabling the study of aforesaid mechanisms under a variety of conditions, parameters, and alternative virtual games. The theoretical and experimental results have continually been surprising, rewarding, and promising. Recently, in our own work we have initiated the introduction, in such groups of individuals, of cognitive abilities inspired on techniques and theories of Artificial Intelligence, namely those pertaining to both Intention Recognition and to Commitment (separately and jointly), encompassing errors in decision-making and communication noise. As a result, both the emergence and stability of coop- eration become reinforced comparatively to the absence of such cognitive abilities. This holds separately for Intention Recognition and for Commitment, and even more when they are engaged jointly. The present paper aims to sensitize the reader to these Evolutionary Game Theory based studies and issues, which are accruing in importance for the modelling of minds with machines, with impact on our understanding of the evolution of mutual tolerance and cooperation. In doing so, it also provides a coherent bird’s-eye view of our own varied recent work, whose more technical details and results are spread throughout a number of well recognized publishing venues, and to which we refer the reader for a fuller support of our claims where felt necessary.

This original and timely monograph describes a unique self-contained excursion that reveals to the readers the roles of two basic cognitive abilities, i.e. intention recognition and arranging commitments, in the evolution of cooperative behavior. This book analyses intention recognition, an important ability that helps agents predict others’ behavior, in its artificial intelligence and evolutionary computational modeling aspects, and proposes a novel intention recognition method. Furthermore, the book presents a new framework for intention-based decision making and illustrates several ways in which an ability to recognize intentions of others can enhance a decision making process. By employing the new intention recognition method and the tools of evolutionary game theory, this book introduces computational models demonstrating that intention recognition promotes the emergence of cooperation within populations of self-regarding agents. Finally, the book describes how commitment provides a pathway to the evolution of cooperative behavior, and how it further empowers intention recognition, thereby leading to a combined improved strategy.