The Ideas that are Changing Politics
Speaker: David Willetts MP
Chair: Professor Kenneth Minogue
Optical Illusions
Cognition unbound
It seems that the notion of embodied cognition is seeing a spike in the release of new books – not to mention that the mainstream media has now picked up the idea. I’ve already mentioned the Boston Globe piece. I’ve since discovered that there is an NPR piece plugging the Blakeslees’ The Body Has a Mind of Its Own. Other recent similar titles include:
Rolf Pfeifer & Josh Bongard’s How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence (MIT, 2006)
*Mark Rowlands’ Body Language: Representation in Action (MIT, 2006)
*Shaun Gallagher’s How the Body Shapes the Mind (OUP, 2005)
I’ve read those marked *
Werner Herzog
I’ve agreed to review Brad Prager’s The Cinema of Werner Herzog: Aesthetic Ecstasy and Truth for the Journal of Mind & Behavior. As an “art-form” film attracts, at best the juvenile mind, or at worst, the pseudo intellect: Herzog is an island of artistic authenticity and integrity in a sea of vulgarity and schlock. I’m pleased that there now exists a serious study of his work. (Please take the journalistic hyperbole of the publisher’s website with a pinch of salt – Herzog is no enfant terrible and they have got the date of Aguirre wrong!)
Update: I’m still working on this and have decided to incorporate Colin McGinn’s The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact.
The above photograph is of my Siamese cat “Oddsock” sitting next to an 8×10 poster of Aguirre: Der Zorn Gottes – the poster sits right in front of me on my desk – a reminder of the authenticity, discipline and passion one requires to do anything worthwhile.
Embodied Cognition
On my daily train commute into Boston I was asked by another regular commuter what book I was reading – I showed him Adams’ & Aizawa’s The Bounds of Cognition. After reading the dust jacket blurb he then gave a surprisingly detailed “man on the Clapham omnibus” account of what he took to be “the body thinking”. Well it transpired that the notion of embodied cognition made it into The Globe this week. As one would expect the piece does not survey the critical landscape. So for anyone whose interest has been pricked by the notion of embodied cognition and a raft of related theses, I would urge you to read Adam’s & Aizawa on the grounds that they offer the most sustained critique of the “extended mind” literature currently on offer. Furthermore, they write with such clarity as to afford the novice every chance of coming to grips with the central arguments (for and against) in a burgeoning field.
I’m not out of sympathy with the DEEDS literature, a literature denoting a loose and internally fluid philosophical and empirical coalition comprising the Dynamical-, Embodied-, Extended-, Distributed-, and Situated- approaches to knowledge and cognition – and that takes inspiration from the anti-Cartesian titans such as Heidegger, Vygotsky, and Merleau-Ponty. As an acronym, DEEDS appropriately emphasizes the “doing,” the lived and contextualized experience of the particular, human experience’s most present condition. This said, I see no methodological profit whatsoever to throwing out the Cartesian baby along with the bath water – I, for one, am seeking to negotiate the polarities that suggest:
(a) mental states are somewhere other than in the head; or that,
(b) what is outside the head has nothing to do with what ends up in the head.
The Adams & Aizawa book is a long overdue and welcome corrective to the discussion in this field.
Papineau review of Searle
Papineau’s TLS review of Searle’s Freedom and Neurobiology
The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World
Withdrawn from project
I’m very pleased to have been asked by the editor of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science to be a participant in a forthcoming symposium on Owen Flanagan’s recently published The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World. The other participants are Greg Peterson (So. Dak. State); Ann Taves (UC Santa Barbara); Don Wiebe (Toronto) and, of course, Owen Flanagan, someone whose work on mind and consciousness I’ve followed over the years.
The anticipated publication date is March 2009.
Chomsky vs. Boden
Those following the recent McGinn-Honderich review kerfuffle might be interested to read Chomsky’s reticient but nonetheless combative contribution to a symposium on Margaret Boden’s Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science – see an earlier review by Harman.
It begins . . .
When I was asked to join a symposium on Margaret Boden’s history of cognitive science, I demurred, explaining that I felt it was inappropriate, given the role assigned to me in her saga. After several requests, I agreed, but with the same reservations. I’ll therefore keep to my assigned role as the demon who almost destroyed the field, though fortunately it was saved, just in time, by a few courageous souls who escaped my iron grip and were able to “trounce” my own failed efforts, and even to “eclipse” all of linguistics, rescuing cognitive science from disaster.
Bohemian Rhapsody
It is tiresome (and just downright false) for the Fundamentalist Right to claim that certain “alternative” lifestyles are incompatible with conservatism. In the first instance their grip on what conservatism is, is very weak and often at often at odds with the spirit of conservatism; and secondly, they do not appreciate that ideological categories are fluid and cannot be fixed by necessary and sufficient conditions.
It equally tiresome to assume that bohemianism denotes a left-of-centre sensibility: much of what is currently taken to be bohemian is just faux, shallow, and studied off-the-peg consumerist lifestyle choices. Elsewhere I wrote about Mill’s “experiments in living” – this is an idea that might shed light on the notion of the bohemianism:
Mill says that freedom is necessary to encourage “experiments of living”, which will bring new possibilities of experience, new roads to happiness, to light. Society needs a diverse field of ways of life; we have to continually experiment. In no other way can we serve “the permanent interests of man as a progressive being” (Introduction).
The engine of these experiments in living is “individuality”, a certain structure of mind and character which we need if we are to withstand the pressure to social conformity.
The Wiki Bohemianism entry says:
Many prominent European and American figures of the last 150 years belonged to the bohemian counterculture, and any comprehensive ‘list of bohemians’ would be tediously long. Bohemianism has been approved of by some bourgeois writers such as Honoré de Balzac, but most conservative cultural critics do not condone bohemian lifestyles. Ironically enough, bohemianism by definition can only exist within a framework of conservative values.
While I agree that being a conservative doesn’t preclude being a bohemian, the writer doesn’t explain what is meant by “conservative” and provides no definition of “bohemianism”. It’s therefore hard to say what if anything, in general or in relation to conservatism, is true of bohemianism “by definition”.
The concept of bohemianism does seem contrastive. The bohemian life style is NOT conventional and is UNconventional in certain reasonably specific ways – freedom of sexual relations, emphasis on the aesthetic approach to experience, a sense of superiority to the common run of vulgar humanity. It can be reconciled with conservatism in two ways.
(1) that this life style takes for granted that the vulgar herd will continue to be vulgar and support this life style as servants and retainers and there will be a background presence of conventional folk readily shocked by bohemian antics.
In this sense it depends on a status quo (a) to attend to its needs and (b) to show contempt for.
(2) A political or social conservative may place value on activities and institutions that aren’t damaged by bohemian, or bohemian, goings-on. Oakeshott’s innumerable affairs were not inconsistent with his conservatism and practically implied no commitment to rationalism in politics or to large-scale social engineering. Oakeshott’s own philanderings were hardly likely to undermine the institution of Western marriage.
Another interesting example of a right-leaning bohemian was that of Frank Zappa. Zappa was the scourge of the Fundamentalist Right and the “politically correct” Left, most publicly manifest in his testimony before the US Senate Commerce, Technology, and Transportation committee, attacking the Parents Music Resource Center, a music censorship organization founded by then-Senator Al Gore’s wife Tipper Gore. But that’s another story.
Zappa as Conservative (3.71MB) Zappa wrote a chapter in his autobiography entitled “Practical Conservatism“. “Practical Conservatism” would, to many a high Tory, be a contradiction in terms. Nonetheless what’s on offer is a conservative disposition tempered by a Hayekian libertarianism wrapped up in bohemian garb – a combination bound to bewilder the Right-wing Fundamentalist and the Right-on PC mob. And to add insult to injury, I’m pleased to have come across this Marxist appreciation of Zappa – see here.
Review of Dennett’s Sweet Dreams
I can now make available a full version of my review of Dennett. This version is still in MS form: if you want to cite the article, I will send you an off-print. You can drop me a line.
manwithoutqualities 