Some thoughts on Shaun Gallagher’s How the Body Shapes the Mind, Oxford University Press
What’s the ugliest
Part of your body?
What’s the ugliest
Part of your body?
Some say your nose
Some say your toes
But I think it’s your MIND…
I think it’s your mind
(Frank Zappa, 1968)
Shaun Gallagher marshals a formidable range of empirical research in support of his philosophical case for the claim that there is an essential relation between human physicality and cognition, thereby challenging the notion of the brain as a closed causal system. Gallagher is not making the trivial claim that the mere fact of our having olfactory, visual, somatosensitive and auditory experience implies that one’s body has a nose, eyes, touch, and ears. The more interesting claim that he is making is that the body is part and parcel of the cognitive system. Gallagher, a leading embodiment theorist, takes up the gauntlet thrown down by neurobiologist Gerald Edelman: “[I]t is not enough to say the mind is embodied; one must say how” (p. 1). Gallagher’s answer to Edelman is already implicit in the question he poses for himself: how “does one’s body appear as part of one’s perceptual field?” (p. 17).
Gallagher’s book is divided up into two sections. The first section is entitled “Scientific and Phenomenological Investigations of Embodiment”; the second “Excursions in Philosophy and Pathology”. Cutting across these two sections is discussion of Gallagher’s primary distinction – body image and body schema (BI-BS) – a distinction that critically informs other related distinctions such as conscious/non-conscious, personal/subpersonal, explicit/tacit, and willed/determined.
Gallagher’s first order of business is to retrieve the BI and BS distinction from a conceptual confusion which has plagued the distinction typically associated with the questions “of whether and to what extent an image or schema involves consciousness” (pp. 21, 22). The critical question that Gallagher raises is whether conscious awareness of one’s own body is always intentionally present, or as part of an intentional state of affairs (p. 27). When the body appears in the attentional field of consciousness, the issue of ownership is usually already settled (p. 28). In other words, one does not require a “presence of mind” or higher-level of reflection to recognize one’s self as one’s self: this knowledge is already built into the structure of experience (p. 29). Body image, on Gallagher’s conception “consists of a system of perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs pertaining to one’s own body” (p. 24). By contrast, “a body schema is a system of sensory-motor capacities that function without awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring” (p. 24). Put another way, the distinction roughly corresponds to having a belief, whereas in the latter case we are talking about a capacity.
Gallagher examines the BI-BS distinction in light of the results of clinical case studies. One such case concerns that of patient “IW” who suffered from an acute sensory neuropathy below the neck with the consequence that he had no proprioceptive sense of posture or limb location. To compensate, consciousness or “presence of mind” encroaches upon or micro-manages one’s motor abilities, which under normal circumstances is less energetically self-monitored in the background. The moral that Gallagher takes from such cases is “that conscious experience is itself constrained and shaped by my prenoetic motility, but conscious control does not directly shape movement” (p. 64). Gallagher discuses the role played by the body image in neonate imitation, and the development of the Self opening up the long standing debate as to whether the body schema is an acquired or innate phenomenon. For Gallagher certain aspects are certainly innate, re-invoking the moral he takes from the case of IW.
Gallagher also considers the long standing puzzle of aplasic phantom limbs. The controversy divides as follows. If a BS is acquired then aplasic phantoms are unlikely. If, however, one subscribes to the innate theory, then aplasic phantoms are a distinct possibility. Some argue that the same empirical data may also be interpreted as supporting an alternative hypothesis in which body image is learnt from sensory input. This doesn’t affect Gallagher’s point. The idea is that if patients without limbs have the sensations of having limbs, the inference to be drawn is that our sensations are embodied by the brain activity that receives messages from the limb, and not by the neural activity in the limb itself. If the embodiment of our sensation is distributed throughout the nervous system would we not expect such a phenomenon? All that should matter is that the conscious self has a broad sense of what the entire situated and embodied agent can and can not do and that surely structures and informs our sense of who we are. So, a patient fitted with a new prosthetic leg now has an ability which must rapidly alter and catch up with his or her bundle of ‘‘taken-for-granted’’ skills, knowledge, and abilities. One’s sense of location is not simply a function of our beliefs about the location of our body: it is the two-way cybernetic looping between brain, body, and world that matters. Knowledge includes knowledge of the constraints and possibilities of the human body’s interaction with the world, a notion that chimes very nicely with Arthur Glenberg’s research (not cited by Gallagher) at the Laboratory for Embodied Cognition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In a nutshell, Glenberg suggests that an ability to understand sentences seems to incorporate an agent’s knowledge about how its body might interact with objects in its environment. Gallagher does pose some profoundly intriguing questions concerning the relationship between embodiment and language. Returning to the case of “IW” Gallagher observes that “the self-organizing intentionality of language, including gesture, remains intact” because gesticulatory language is not dependent upon body schemas (p. 126).
Towards the end of the book Gallagher supplements what he concedes is a somewhat static conception of the BS/BI distinction with a more dynamic temporal version based upon research on movement disorders associated with chronic schizophrenia. Despite patients invoking a third-party as “causing” certain actions, they misidentify a sense of ownership with a sense of agency (p. 175). In consideration of this condition Gallagher takes both neuroscientists and philosophers to task for unnecessarily positing an additional layer of monitoring or “hyperreflection” (p. 183, 203). They appear to fall foul of an infinite regress, a humuncular-type explanation generated by Cartesian idea that there is some central or ultimate place in the brain where something like an “I” or the Self attends to and witnesses consciousness. Gallagher is of the view that schizophrenia is a much more global condition since often patients feel alienated not just from thought and action, but also from their own body, skin, saliva and even their name (p. 204). Gallagher makes the critical point that “’the intention to think’ is not something separate from thinking itself; it is included in the very structure of thought . . . [t]he schizophrenic does not discover alien thoughts by means of a metarepresentational introspection.”
Fundamental to Gallagher’s discussion is his phenomenological approach. Gallagher’s understanding of phenomenology is best characterized as a naturalized phenomenology, what he terms “front-loaded,” the idea being that phenomenological insights should inform experimental design (pp.30-32). Methodologically speaking, phenomenology acknowledges the idea of the irreducibility of the structure of lived experience. This conception goes some way to countering the view historical view that phenomenology is merely equivalent to subjective introspectionism and as such has been dismissed by many naturalists as non-scientific and disreputable. Much has changed since neurobiologist Francisco Varela’s combative defense of phenomenology some 10 years ago: a recent search in PubMed returning almost 2,000 references to “phenomenology.” Indeed, a case can be made that cognitive science’s embracing of phenomenological concerns emanates not so much from an engagement with ideas associated with one or another variant of phenomenology but more as general response to empirical questions faced within science itself. Furthermore, to deny that a first-person phenomenology has no place in a science of consciousness is absurd: as Bernard Baars, the theoretical neurobiologist puts it, “There is already a field of systematic phenomenology, and it’s called ‘psychology.’”
Embodiment, a well entrenched paradigm within computer science and artificial intelligence circles, challenges the notion of the body as merely an antenna-like device, a receptacle for somatosensory and sensorimotor input. Gallagher presents a case for the idea that spatio-temporally located pragmatic agents are defined by the very construction and shape of the body. This said, the notion of embodiment it is not immune from conceptual ambiguity. What precisely does it mean to be embodied? Can any criteria be specified? Embodiment raises interesting corollary philosophical questions such as “would entities that display human-like mental properties have similarly human bodies?” But such esoteric discussion would have limited appeal outside of philosophy. It would have been useful had Gallagher offered a brief survey of the various senses of embodiment: to many the positing of embodiment may seem an unnecessarily stated tautology. Gallagher’s target must surely be traditional artificial intelligence circles and philosophers of mind who are of the view that the mind is only contingently dependent on the brain, the implication being that a mind can be studied independently of the body and instantiated in any material.
The positive message of this book is that the notion of embodiment should be factored into research design, mediating overly reductionist and overly inflationist approaches (p. 2, 152). Gallagher argues that a multi-dimensional picture of human consciousness rests upon a multi-pronged approach – developmental, neurological, pathological and phenomenological – none to the exclusion of any other, thereby ensuring a philosophical and a scientific modesty. Gerald Edelman’s “neural Darwinism” takes seriously the idea that minds develop through interactions with their environment as does psychiatrist Bruce Wexler. Embodiment theory might a useful conceptual guide to neuroscience to show that the neural networks spread throughout the body are not modally different from the ones encased within the cranium. Though these neural networks aren’t just “in the head,” they perform many functions that could be described as cognitive. Neurologist William Seeley, interviewed in Scientific American (November 2005, p. 100-101), appears to give some credence to this notion when he says: “[But] I can never get away from living in my body or representing the fact that I’m the same person I was 10 seconds or 10 years ago. I can never escape that, so that network must be busy.” Indeed, there is a whole range of peripheral nerves consisting of axons from primary sensory neurons, lower motor neurons and preganglionic and postganglionic autonomic neurons.
Gallagher’s work might well fall on deaf ears. On the one hand, clinicians are not typically driven by philosophical considerations. On the other hand, why would scientists want empirical data refracted through a non-scientist? It will be noticed that Gallagher has only in passing (p. 30) referred to anorexia nervosa, surely a paradigmatic condition that would invoke his BS/BI distinction.
By way of conclusion, the publisher should be commended on refraining from posting the usual dust-jacket hyperbole – Gallagher’s book does exactly what the title advertises – and this is perfectly in accord with Gallagher’s low-key manner. The breadth and depth of Gallagher’s learning is astonishing, assimilating a voluminous literature across the empirical sciences and philosophy, tempered with lovely flourishes of historical sensitivity. Whether Gallagher has made a convincing case for clinical practitioners, remains an open question – as a research program, embodied cognition is only now reaching early maturity. If, however, one is motivated to explore the notion of embodiment further, then the courtesy should be extended to Gallagher (in advance of the similarly titled How the Body Shapes the Way We Think by computer scientists Rolf Pfeifer and Josh Bongard). Few have a deeper or broader understanding of the concept of embodiment than Gallagher.
manwithoutqualities 