Epistemology #6

The Body – it ain’t what you think

                It’s increasingly clear that the Western concept of mind is seriously flawed.  Even the research into brain function and cognition continually points to the importance of the body.  The insular consciousness that Descartes and Kant place at the center of knowing is a myth.  The mind/body split is a well- known problem in Western Philosophy, but it’s hard to get any further beyond it than Husserl and Phenomenology.  I’m not interested in Phenomenology.  No matter how much it expands the idea of consciousness, it still leaves the mind in the center of what it means to know.  I want to argue that a 21^st Century epistemology has to place the body at the center of cognition.

                It is hard for those of us (probably everyone reading this) who grew up with the ingrained idea of a self that had consciousness to feel very comfortable with this idea.  It is second nature for us to start any discussion of intelligence and knowing with the mind.  Descartes taught us to start our exploration of the world on the inside and move outward.  The problem is that we have never been able to define or locate the ‘mind.’  We assume that our consciousness is our own, and that it exists separate and independent from the ‘objective’ reality of the world.  I think we have to question that assumption.  There at least two levels of this challenge.  The first is to see the body as the source of not just all of our experiences in the world but as the only source of intelligence we possess.  The second is to see the body connected to the intelligence in the world which is not human.

                We exist as a body.  All of the input we use in cognition and consciousness is generated through it.  We experience the world as part of it, not as some alien and unconscious creature outside of it.   Whatever correlation exists between consciousness, intelligence and life, we participate in it through our body.  We not only think in this matrix, we feel in it.  We are an extension of it, and the habit we’ve developed of devaluing our experience and mistrusting the immediate experience of our existence has led us to a concept of intelligence that is both flawed and dangerous.  It is flawed because it assumes we can step outside ourselves and find a purer way of ‘knowing’ the world.  We all know the physical and emotional side of us is inferior.  The image from Plato of white and black horses fighting over control of the chariot comes from the Greek skepticism of the physical world and two millennia of Christian doctrine fearing and mistrusting the body and the physical world (and anything feminine) has made this a naturalized view of what it means to be human.  The best example of an alternative view I’ve read recently is Daniel Hinton’s book, Existence.   

                The danger of thinking of intelligence as disembodied is that it tempts us to lose our biological connection to the world.  We lose the capacity to see the limits of what we can think and maintain our structural coupling, in Maturana’a terms, with the world.  In fact, I think that one of the dangers some people see in AI come from the way it mirrors a disembodied view of the mind and intelligence.  There is no doubt that it has been powerful.  As Sloterdijk demonstrates in, In the World Interior of Capital, it is precisely this move that allows a Eurocentric view of the world to diminish a cosmic consciousness and turn everything and everyplace into a way to make money.  The consequences of that are all too obvious in the impending environmental disaster we face.  We will never ‘solve’ the problems of the environment or rampant capitalism as long as we hold on to a disembodied concept of mind.

                The second challenge to shifting our focus to the body and away from a mythical notion of the ‘mind,’ is to see the possibility of intelligence and consciousness as more than just human.  We live surrounded by other forms – plant and animal – that are essentially made of the same things we are.  We share the same dynamic and shifting membrane of reality with them.  How is it then, that we are the only form of intelligence or consciousness.  What if the world is animate and not inanimate.  My point here is not mystical; it is empirical.  There is mounting evidence that our insular ideas about what is and what is not ‘intelligent’ are badly out of step with the research.  My goal here is not to sell or promote one version or another of what that greater reality might be called or how it might function.  I just want to argue that we can no longer speak of intelligence or consciousness and ignore the implications of its existence.  An epistemology that accounts for an expanded sense of intelligence will have to grapple with that question.