The embodied mind

What Hacker News says

1. chapulinNov 2024
   The Embodied Mind by Thomas Verny is another great read on this theme. It's about cellular memory/cognition.
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2. robwwilliamsAug 2024
   At some level the fundamental assumptions of a “color” space as a real representation of the human perceptual space is almost comical. The color yellow has been an issue for many decades and diverse combinations of wavelengths evoke identical conscious yellow percepts.

   The fundamental “not-geometry” of color space is the output of a very complex deep neural net.

   Thinking about color space as “real” world is almost nonsensical ;-). Trying to map “real” world into brain now has a deservedly bad wrap. Modern philosophy has largely given up on Descartes, sharp subject-object dichotomies, and the brain and mind as a warped mirror of nature.

   If puzzling at first then check out Humberto Maturana and F. Valera (both experts in color vision electrophysiologist and philosophers), Martin Heidegger, Richard Rorty, and Daniel Dennett have powerful arguments against representationalism of the type implicit in most neuroscience.

   Valera, Rorty, Dennett are all readable. Heidegger and Matura are more cryptic unless you are a philosopher.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Varela

   Valera’s “The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience”, co-authored with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, is a good intro on this and related concepts.

   But for Hacker News readers by far the best intro to this topic are chapters 4 and 5 of is the CS classic by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores that is often highlighted on HN. It is a key text in understanding both what goes on in our brains and what is and may go on in machine brains.

   1986. Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design (with Fernando Flores) Ablex Publ Corp

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3. axiologistApr 2024
   »Varela supported embodied philosophy, viewing human cognition and consciousness in terms of the enactive structures in which they arise. These comprise the body (as a biological system and as personally experienced) and the physical world which it enacts.«

   »Varela's 1991 book The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, co-authored with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, is considered a classic in the field of cognitive science, offering pioneering phenomenological connections and introducing the Buddhism-informed enactivist and embodied cognition approach. A revised edition of The Embodied Mind was published in 2017, featuring substantive introductions by the surviving authors, as well as a preface by Jon Kabat-Zinn.«

   'The Embodied Mind' can be borrowed at https://archive.org/details/embodiedmindcogn0000vare

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4. maroonblazerJan 2024
   Also an armchair philosopher and I enjoy thinking about these things a lot. The theory you've described is the one that seems to have the most explanatory power.

   Andy Clark's "Surfing Uncertainty-Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind" is a book-length exploration of this idea. Highly recommend.

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5. sinbadpalomarMar 2022
   I would add The Embodied Mind - Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson (1991) https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/embodied-mind-revised-edition

   A great accomponiment to the first two, and a great read for those in AI related fields to start thinking about cognition more holistically and less computationally.

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6. edtechdevMay 2016
   One argument of embodied cognition and enactivism is that all our concepts have an embodied basis - even abstract things like math, computation, language, philosophy, etc.

   The article mentioned radical enactivism from Anthony Chemero. Another person who's written a lot from this perspective is Dan Hutto: https://uow.academia.edu/DanielDHutto

   Here for example is an article describing "Remembering without Stored Contents" https://www.academia.edu/6799100/Remembering_without_Stored_...

   and he has a book: Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content. First chapter: https://www.academia.edu/1163887/Radicalizing_Enactivism_Bas...

   But for a more general, less radical background on this topic, see also work by Rafael Nunez and others: http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~nunez/web/publications.html

   The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience http://www.amazon.com/Embodied-Mind-Cognitive-Science-Experi...

   George Lakoff & Rafael Nunez: Where Mathematics Come From: How The Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being http://www.amazon.com/Where-Mathematics-Come-Embodied-Brings...

   George Lakoff & Mark Johnson: Philosophy in the Flesh http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Flesh-Embodied-Challenge-We...

   Mark Johnson: The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason http://www.amazon.com/Body-Mind-Bodily-Meaning-Imagination/d...

   And there are now around 30-40 books on this topic, at least.

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