The idea that the brain is a predictive, creative organ, not a passive receiver and processor of information, returns us to frogs, the same creatures many students dissected in ninth-grade biology and the ones John Dowling mentioned, animals with less “hardwired” visual systems than human beings. In 1958, Humberto Maturana, a young Chilean neurobiologist, wrote his PhD dissertation on the neurophysiology of frog perception. In 1959, he was a coauthor of what would become a famous paper, “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain.” The three other authors were Jerome Lettvin, William McCulloch, and Walter Pitts, the same McCulloch and Pitts of the 1943 paper on binary neurons. What the paper demonstrated was that the frog’s visual system did not represent the world out there but constructed it. Perception is not about registering an objectively given world but about how an individual nervous system—frog or human—creates what is there through its interaction with the environment. Therefore, as Dowling argued, the human visual system with its greater plasticity adjusts itself to lenses that turn the world upside down better than a frog’s does. This does not mean human vision is accurate and a frog’s deceptive. They are different. Nor does it mean the world does not exist, but rather that neither frogs nor human beings can jump out of their bodies and peruse a world that is not reliant on their bodies for its configurations.
For Maturana, this finding would have a revolutionary effect, and he would take it to its logical end. In a later paper, he wrote, “Therefore we literally create the world in which we live by living it.”306 He came to oppose a Cartesian-Newtonian way of understanding the world, which is independent of the person doing the looking—the observer. Maturana went on to write a short but dense book with another Chilean scientist, Francisco Varela, titled Autopoiesis and Cognition, which was first published in English in 1980. I read the book twice very slowly and found it difficult both times. This much seems clear: An autopoietic system is dynamic and self-organizing and continually adjusts itself in order to maintain its physiological equilibrium or homeostasis. An organism’s interaction with and perception of its environment is determined by its own autonomous structure. Autopoiesis draws on cybernetics and its emphasis on dynamic interacting systems that are not reducible to its parts. The authors also maintain that any autopoietic system, whatever it is made of (it could theoretically be metal, wires, and plastic) is sufficient for life. Further the two argue, “No description of an absolute reality is possible.”307 Although this is hardly a shocking thought in the history of philosophy, it still makes many contemporary scientists uneasy. Despite the fact that autopoiesis remains outside mainstream science, the theory has generated a huge literature of commentary, inside and outside biology.
Maturana and Varela’s biology directly addressed epistemology—the study of how we know what we know—which shaped their views of scientific research and the nature of perception, but Varela developed and expanded these ideas. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch state plainly in their book, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, that their work is a continuation and elaboration of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. For them, “organism and environment enfold into each other and unfold from one another in the fundamental circularity that is life itself.”308 Varela called these interactions “couplings” with the environment. Commenting on Varela’s work after his death, a group of scientists note, “If . . . the environment doesn’t contain pre-defined information that is independent of the ‘domain of coupling’ that the autonomous system defines, it literally in-forms the system’s coping.”309 There is no objective independent information out there in the world, but what is out there affects the closed internal systems.
So what is the mind for Varela? It is not just in our heads. “The mind,” Varela argued, “cannot be separated from the entire organism. We tend to think that the mind is in the brain, in the head, but the fact is that the environment also includes the rest of the organism; the brain is intimately connected to all of the muscles, the skeletal system, the guts, and the immune system, the hormonal balances and so on and so on . . . In other words, the organism as a meshwork of entirely co-determining elements makes it so that our minds are, literally, inseparable—not only from the external environment, but also from what Claude Bernard already called the milieu intérieur, the fact that we have not only a brain but an entire body.”310 For Varela, the mind and consciousness are an embodied reality of interdependent systems that cannot simply be reduced to neural correlates.
I have to say my reading in autopoietic theory has often left me with a claustrophobic feeling. Despite an organism’s couplings with the environment, it seems to be largely trapped in its own inescapable circling reality. I think interactions are more open, that the internal and external are in a kind of continual, mutual, rhythmic engagement, which can also be disrupted and irregular. Although human embryology is rarely, if ever, mentioned in these writings, there is no question that a mother’s heartbeat, respiration, voice, bodily movements establish a rhythmic relation with the developing fetus, which lies inside the amniotic sac, attached by the umbilical cord to the placenta, which in turn is attached to the uterine wall. But when does a self appear in the story of development?
Varela, Thompson, and Rosch locate no essential self in the “aggregates” of human experience—feeling, perception, habitual thoughts, and consciousness. They do not contend there is no subjective experience, but rather that for them human beings are a collection of separate capacities without a guiding center, an echo of Diderot’s swarming bees as well as a more complicated, organic version of Brooks’s mobots. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch have all been deeply influenced by Buddhist thought. For them, the ego of the West is empty, an illusion.
Like “the mind,” “the body” becomes a theoretical abstraction in much of philosophy and science. Sometimes it means the human body, which is presumably both male and female, but other times it includes all kinds of bodies, animal and machine. Everywhere I turn, I read another paper or attend another conference that includes the words “body” or “embodied in its title.” This animal “body,” with its movements, sensations, and emotions, has risen in importance in many fields, at least in part because of long-standing neglect and prejudice, the prejudice Myrtle McGraw cited when she bemoaned the endless dependence on dichotomies in intellectual life and the Greek worship of the rational, the same stubborn prejudice in GOFAI that stripped human “intelligence” of its material reality and turned it into a series of logical symbols that could be processed in a quasi-Cartesian mind, a prejudice that often hides its fear of leaky, messy, mortal bodies as so much unfortunate cellular baggage to be transcended.
It is important to understand the paradigm shift toward embodied models of mind as a response to scientific failures, but I think there is more at work here. Turing’s acknowledgment that food, sex, and sport are necessarily left out of his future machine is significant. For all its marvelous coherence, accuracy, and power over the natural world (which includes discovering how to destroy the whole planet), theoretical physics doesn’t really help us penetrate human experience as it is lived. Although it is fascinating to read about a static space-time block, for example, it does not address our subjective experience of time passing or the stubborn fact of our mortality. And even within the sanctified realm of theoretical physics, there is disagreement, sometimes profound disagreement. Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, who is known for his contributions to quantum gravitational theory, argues in his book Time Reborn (2013) that the laws of physics are not timeless and eternal but evolve and change in real time. He advances an idea of cosmological natural selection, which includes reproduction on a grand scale, in which universes give birth to universes. Smolin broadly adopts a dynamic temporal model of natural selection from biology and applies it to physics. He admits that his approach is speculative, but then so is string theory, the dominant theory in contemporary physics. Interestingly, Smolin was influenced by Charles Sand
ers Peirce, the American Pragmatist philosopher who suggested that the laws of physics cannot be static. I am not in a position to judge these bold ideas, but I am in a position to say that while they remain controversial, there are certainly people in the field who take them seriously.
I would be the first to argue that logic is an indispensable tool in making an argument and in thinking well, but does logic explain internal mental images or dream pictures or felt inner experience? Without corporeal sensation and emotion and their influence on thought, could there be memory and imagination? How are we to understand why after seeing his house burn down a man without any damage to his visual cortex suddenly goes blind? Can we understand such an event through a computer mind? Exactly how does a human being create metaphor and meaning?
The neuroscientist Gerald Edelman repeatedly argued against the mind as a computer and asserted that metaphor and association are prior to logic in the brain. In Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge (2006), he refers to Vico, although he doesn’t elaborate on the historian’s thought. Edelman’s brain recognizes patterns, not logic. In Second Nature he addressed what has puzzled so many people in artificial intelligence. How is it that after years of trying we still cannot build a human being? If the laws of physics don’t change, what’s the problem? Edelman writes, “Although all of our brain functions and cognitive capacities are constrained by physics and can be understood as products of natural selection, not all of these capabilities can be treated successfully by reduction.”311 Like Merleau-Ponty, Edelman argues that the brain is in a body that is in the world, and that situation is crucial: “Although there are certainly regularities of intentionality and behavior, they are variable, culture- and language-dependent, and enormously rich. Subjectivity is irreducible.”312
In a 1999 essay, Francisco Varela and Jonathan Shear argue the same thing: “Lived experience is irreducible . . . phenomenal data cannot be reduced or derived from the third-person perspective.”313 The experience of mine-ness, of ipseity, is not reducible to a mathematical formula. Edelman, Varela, and Shear do not argue against third-person approaches. They are all for them, but their arguments resonate with Nagel’s. When you shift perspective from first to third, the phenomenal “what it is like to be” a particular being, human or bat, is lost. Edelman had and has many critics, most notably Francis Crick of the central dogma, but then, Crick emphatically believed that subjective experience, a person’s dreams and wishes, were reducible to an objective third-person perspective of neurons and neurochemicals. Interestingly, Edelman also experimented with robots that he had built according to his own theories and named after the father of evolution. He called them Darwins. Their talents, however, like their many artificial comrades, did not closely mimic those of human beings.
If metaphors are prior to logic in the mind-brain-body, how does that work? George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book Metaphors We Live By (1980) became an important work for many people inside and outside of science for thinking about the role of the body in thought. They took the corporeal turn but were not influenced, as far as I can tell, by phenomenology. Their first paragraph is worth quoting:
Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action.314
Lakoff and Johnson take a radically anti-Cartesian, anti-Hobbesian position. Metaphor is not the decorative frippery or intoxicating perfume of the poet or novelist that turns the hardheaded, step-by-step, rational man into a swooning, confused, effeminate fop. Without ever referring to Vico, they make the argument that metaphors rise from human bodily experience and in turn shape that experience. Our bodies and their locations in space are vital to our conscious thinking lives. As they point out, happy is up, sad is down. Our spirits rise and fall. Inside and outside metaphors are continually at work. My own examples: Crew cuts are in; mohawks are out. Our moods are light and dark but can also be blue. And a tactile metaphor: Men are hard; women are soft. Mathematics is hard; literature is soft. The authors do not argue that there is no cultural variation in the way metaphors work, although they do not stress this in Metaphors We Live By. Language climates are diverse and affect our lived realities, our perceptions and feelings. In China, for example, white signifies death, mourning, and funerals, a meaning alien to Westerners. But what is culture and what is biology?
The scientists in one study, “Tough and Tender: Embodied Categorization of Gender,” had their subjects squeeze hard or soft balls while looking at gender-neutral faces. The results showed that touching the hard balls biased the subjects toward identifying the faces as male and the soft balls as female. The authors write, “Social categories may also be grounded by sensorimotor metaphors.”315 What are we to make of these findings? The same researchers conducted a similar experiment, this time using faces of both sexes identified as either politicians or professors. Participants handling a hard ball were more likely to view the faces as those of Republicans. The sensation of soft balls swayed toward Democrats. Similarly, feelings of hardness were related to physicists and squishiness to historians. The authors write, “While a social category such as sex is based in a biological difference, the present two categories [politics and profession] are not rooted in biology to nearly the same degree, if at all. Thus, using these unequivocally socially constructed categories in the present work reveals the richness of just one sensory domain in grounding social-categorical thought quite broadly.”316 Notice the authors’ equivocation about “rooted in biology.” Obviously voting Democrat and deciding that physics is your path in life are culturally bound activities in ways that chromosomes and genitalia are not. Beyond the borders of the United States there are no doubt many people unfamiliar with our political stereotypes and their accompanying tactile metaphors. It is important to maintain distinctions, but the researchers’ hesitation about the “degree” to which a social category, such as politics, is biological and if it can be called biological at all reflects a conceptual confusion in general, which travels far beyond these two studies. The sensation of touch is surely biological, of bodily processes, crucially but not exclusively of the brain. In these cases, however, the acquired categorical understandings of a particular culture are literally embodied in motor-sensory processes.
How much empirical evidence is there that the body is crucial to thought and language? Scientists have begun to investigate language, metaphor, and the brain. Research has shown that sentences with action verbs, such as “Sarah kicked Phil,” activate motor areas of the brain. Another study showed that reading a metaphor, such as “She had a rough day,” activated somatosensory regions of the brain. The tactile quality of the metaphor was registered. Reading the sentence “She had a bad day” did not activate those areas.317 In most studies I have read, dead metaphors and idioms do not have the same effect, which makes sense. “Tamika was dying to go to the concert,” for example, is far removed from Tamika’s actual death in any form. There are many arguments about what these results mean for “the mind,” but for some the idea that thinking is purely about manipulating symbols in an isolated language module in the mind has come to seem just plain wrong. The claim is not that no one can think without a body, but rather that our bodies in space in relation to what is beyond them structure our thoughts. What is vital, I think, is to understand that ideas—about sex difference, for example—are related to a person’s individual experience but also to the codes of a given culture, and those codes also shape our bodily existence.
Other scientists have collaborated directly with philosophers to rethink the earlier paradigm that ignored the body’s role in thought and consciousness. The cognitive scientist Shaun Gallag
her coauthored a book with the philosopher Dan Zahavi called The Phenomenological Mind. A philosophical tradition that began with Husserl has been taken up by scientists to rethink assumptions about the mind-body relation and, in their case, redefine the self, which they believe exists in both prereflective and reflective self-consciousness. Gallagher and Zahavi argue, “In its most primitive and fundamental form, self consciousness is simply a question of the ongoing first-personal manifestation of experiential life.”318 This form of self-consciousness is not about thinking about thinking or analyzing my own thoughts; it is just about being me in a bodily situation, lying on the deck, say, with my face turned to the sun, empty of all thoughts about thoughts. As James, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty maintained, experience is never anonymous; it belongs to someone, to me. If I have a stomachache I don’t have to ask whether I have it or to whom it belongs. What this feeling of agency or selfness means, however, is the subject of raucous controversy.
The enfolding and unfolding between organism and environment, the insistence on “situatedness” in perception, on action and movement, on metaphor as embodied, and the importance of including subjective experience in philosophy and science is reminiscent of Goethe’s methodology, but it also resembles the American Pragmatists William James and John Dewey. In Pragmatism, thought is action, and it cannot be isolated from feeling, perceiving, or moving around in the world. “All action,” James wrote, “is also re-action upon the outer world; and the middle stage of consideration or contemplation or thinking is only a place of transit, the bottom of a loop, both whose ends have their point of application in the outer world.”319 James insisted that “mental facts” could not be studied apart from the “physical environment,” and he criticized past philosophy for “setting up the soul as an absolute spiritual being with certain faculties of its own” without “reference to the peculiarities of the world with which these activities deal.”320 John Dewey proposed an idea of organismic continuity and increasing complexity. It is not hard to understand why he was a supporter of McGraw’s research. In her work, he hoped to find scientific substantiation of his own insights, in which definitive mind-body and body-environment dualisms were banished. Dewey’s philosophy, in turn, influenced McGraw’s thought. McGraw’s idea that there was a reciprocal relationship between neural growth processes and early experience, that the two go hand in hand, was a new way of looking at the changing child. Her ideas were overlooked until recently, but her thought anticipated what is now widely acknowledged as a truth in contemporary theories of child development.
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