Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

Not surprisingly, such differences in fundamental ideas lead to embodied cognitive
science adopting methodologies that are atypical of classical cognitive science.
Reverse engineering is replaced with forward engineering, as typified by behaviourbased
robotics. These methodologies use an agent’s environment to increase or leverage
its abilities, and in turn they have led to novel accounts of complex human
activities. For instance, embodied cognitive science can construe social interactions
either as sense-act cycles in a social environment or as mediated by simulations that
use our own brains or bodies as physical stand-ins for other agents.
In spite of such differences, it is still the case that there are structural similarities
between embodied cognitive science and the other two approaches that have
been introduced in the preceding chapters. The current chapter ends with a consideration
of embodied cognitive science in light of Chapter 2’s multiple levels of
investigation, which were earlier used as a context in which to consider the research
of both classical and of connectionist cognitive science.
5.1 Abandoning Methodological Solipsism
The goal of Cartesian philosophy was to provide a core of incontestable truths to
serve as an anchor for knowledge (Descartes, 1960, 1996). Descartes believed that he
had achieved this goal. However, the cost of this accomplishment was a fundamental
separation between mind and body. Cartesian dualism disembodied the mind,
because Descartes held that the mind’s existence was independent of the existence
of the body.
I am not that structure of limbs which is called a human body, I am not even some
thin vapor which permeates the limbs—a wind, fire, air, breath, or whatever I
depict in my imagination, for these are things which I have supposed to be nothing.
(Descartes, 1996, p. 18)
Cartesian dualism permeates a great deal of theorizing about the nature of mind
and self, particularly in our current age of information technology. One such theory
is posthumanism (Dewdney, 1998; Hayles, 1999). Posthumanism results when the
content of information is more important than the physical medium in which it
is represented, when consciousness is considered to be epiphenomenal, and when
the human body is simply a prosthetic. Posthumanism is rooted in the pioneering
work of cybernetics (Ashby, 1956, 1960; MacKay, 1969; Wiener, 1948), and is
sympathetic to such futuristic views as uploading our minds into silicon bodies
(Kurzweil, 1999, 2005; Moravec, 1988, 1999), because, in this view, the nature of the
body is irrelevant to the nature of the mind. Hayles uncomfortably notes that a
major implication of posthumanism is its “systematic devaluation of materiality
and embodiment” (Hayles, 1999, p. 48); “because we are essentially information, we
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