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Radical Embodied Cognition, Affordances, and the (Hard) Problem of Consciousness

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Radical Embodied Cognition, Affordances, and the (Hard) Problem of Consciousness Radical Embodied Cognition, Affordances, and the (Hard) Problem of Consciousness Valerie Gray Hardcastle ([email protected]) Departments of Philosophy, Psychology, and Psychiatry & Behavioral Neuroscience Cincinnati, OH 45221 USA Abstract Tony Chemero advances the radical thesis that Radical Embodied Cognitive Science cognition and consciousness is actually the same Most date the recent embodied movement in cognitive thing. He draws this conclusion from his understanding science to the work of Rodney Brooks (1991a, 1991b) of cognition as an extended process. I question this and Francisco Valera, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor conclusion because this view expands cognition beyond Rosch’s book The Embodied Mind (1991), though of being the sort of natural kind to which one can tie course J.J. Gibson’s ecological theory is its earliest phenomenal experience. Moreover, because cognition has been radically inflated, despite Chemero’s claim to the contemporary incarnation (Gibson 1962,1966,1979). contrary, embodied cognition does not solve any of the This work was intended to be an antidote for hard problems associated with consciousness. computational views of mind, in which perception, memory, and thought all become manipulations of Keywords: radical embodied cognition; consciousness; brain-based mental representations. perception-in-action; the hard problem. Proponents of embodied cognition hold agents’ Novel stimuli capture our attention. This well-known bodies, and often their local environments, are not fact forms the basis for several contemporary theories only physically relevant to cognition, but are also of theories of mind and brain, including Tony causally constitutive. Moreover, cognition is not the Chemero’s notion of embodied cognition (Chemero rational and abstract process that computationalists 2009). Chemero holds that noticing unexpected assume, but instead is dedicated to helping our events is key to understanding the larger cognitive bodies move and act upon our environment. system of which our brains are one part. He also We evolved as a species to take advantage of our believes that expecting some event to occur in the environment, and we do so as we solve so-called world is somehow tied to our conscious experiences. cognitive problems. In many cases, what at first In his book Radical Embodied Cognition (2009; see appears to be a difficult problem to solve using abstract also Silberstein and Chemero 2012, 2015) Chemero representations and computations divorced from the (along with Michael Silberstein) advance the radical physical world turns out to be much easier to resolve if thesis that cognition and consciousness is actually the we are allowed to consider our bodies and our same thing. He draws this conclusion from his environment as cognitive resources. It is easy for a understanding of cognition as a dynamical, non-linear, human to learn to move about on land because relational, and extended process. I question this Mother Nature designed our legs for walking on conclusion. Even if, we are the brain-body- Earthly terrain (Thelen and Smith 1994). In other environment synergies that Chemero and others claim words, instead of using our brain to solve problems, we are (e.g., Anderson et al. 2012, Silberstein and we manipulate our bodies and our environments to Chemero 2012, Kello and van Orden 2009, Kelso dissolve them. Moreover, in doing this, we can also 2009), we will not be able to conclude that alter our bodies and our environments such that the consciousness and cognition are two sides of the problems we need to solve also change. Gathering same coin because this view expands cognition food presents a different sort of challenge in a beyond being the sort of natural kind to which one cultivated field, compared to an unspoiled savannah can tie phenomenal experience. Moreover, contra rich with bison. Chemero’s claim that “the problem of qualia does not Hence, instead of thinking of the agent and its arise in radical embodied cognitive science” (2009, environment as two separate entities that occasionally Loc 2530/3178), embodied cognition does not solve touch each other, it is better to see them a single, any of the hard problems associated with interacting, system. It follows from this perspective consciousness. Nonetheless, some of Chemero’s that cognition is extended into the environment. It also views do help us understand some aspects of follows that any mathematical model of this larger conscious experience. system should describe how it unfolds dynamically over time, which would require non-linear differential equations. 476 What makes Chemero’s views of embodied cognition identical to a human’s (or a brain’s) physical radical is that he claims that dynamical systems interactions without also imagining that thing’s theory, which we need to be able to model consciousness, it appears that nothing about any cognition, does not presuppose mental physical interaction should give rise to phenomenal representations, or indeed any representations at all. experience. And yet, we are conscious, nonetheless. If brains, bodies, and environment form one unified How can this be? (Leiniz’s answer, like David system, then there is no need for one part of the Chalmer’s (1995, 1996) more contemporary one, is to system to represent another part of the system for posit that consciousness is a fundamental part of the everything is always and already connected. Perception, ontology of the universe.) action, and thought itself are all non-representational But if computational theories of mind are false, then and non-computational. Let us accept this view as true this particular problem of consciousness does not and see how he might explain consciousness using arise. Cognition is a feature of our extended and this understanding of human cognition and action. embodied system, as is consciousness. By “[refusing] to separate meaningful cognition and Conscious Cognitive Systems phenomenology” (2012, p. 41), Silberstein and Silberstein and Chemero (2012) hold that conscious Chemero believe that they have eliminated the so-called experience is “an essential feature of extended brain– hard problem of consciousness essentially by body– environment systems” (p. 36) and that definitional fiat. They assert that, “neutral monism phenomenology and cognition are “inseparable and properly conceived really does deflate the hard problem complementary aspects of coupled brain-body- once and for all” (2015, p. 182). environment systems….Experience is cognition and Can they do this? To answer this question, we cognition is experiential” (pp.40-41). They each “co- need a more complete picture of what they are determine” the other (p. 41). They get there by envisioning an extended phenomenological-cognitive positing that some version of neutral monism must be system to be. true, if the thesis of radical embodied cognition is true Our nervous system has its own spontaneous and (Silberstein and Chemero 2015). They trace this internally generated dynamics, which in turn create metaphysics back to William James, who held that transient neural assemblies comprising our there was no actual difference between the so-called sensorimotor capabilities. We are coupled to our objective world out there and the subjective environment via these sensorimotor structures, which experience of the world in each of us. “What result in changes to both our internal transient neural represents and what is represented is here numerically assemblies via sensory feedback and in the external the same” (James 1904, p. 484). Both the subjective environment via behavioral responses. Over time, we and the objective are defined in opposition to one become attuned to nuances in the extended brain-body- another, and both are ways of understanding the environment system that complements our world, which is the “more basic neutral ‘stuff’ of sensorimotor sensitivities and external features; this is experience” (Silberstein and Chemero, 2015, p. 186). our niche. Hence, one cannot have cognition, an objective What we perceive in our environment via our process, without also having at the same time, sensorimotor structures (and probably other related consciousness, the subjective experience. neural assemblies) are nothing less than Gibsonian Computational theories of mind artificially create a affordances, relational features of the brain-body- problem for consciousness, for they give the impression environment system used to guide our actions and that one can have mental computation without behavior. They are what the environment contains and concomitant conscious thought. We get the problem what we can do. Silberstein and Chemero claim that the of consciousness because we can imagine non- “set of affordances” we perceive in our world, “just is human, apparently unconscious, machines instantiating the environment as [we] experience it” (2012, p. 43, a computational theory of mind. That is, we can italics theirs). Hence, “cognition and conscious imagine cognition without consciousness, or so we experience can be understood as a single phenomenon” think. This is the hard problem of consciousness, a increased in size, while keeping the same proportions, so challenge that dates back to at least Gottfried Leibniz in 1 that one might go into it as into a mill. That being so, (we 1714: because we can imagine a something that is should, on examining its interior, find only parts which work one upon another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. Thus it is in a simple substance, and not 1 “Moreover, it must be confessed that perception and that in a compound or in a machine, that perception must be which depends upon it are inexplicable on mechanical sought for. Further, nothing but this (namely, perceptions grounds, that is to say, by means of figures and motions. And and their changes) can be found in a simple substance. It supposing there were a machine, so constructed as to think, is also in this alone that all the internal activities of simple feel, and have perception, it might be conceived as substances can consist” (Leibniz 1714, section 17). 477 (p. 35).
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