The Embodied Mind Audiobook By Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch cover art

The Embodied Mind

Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press)

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The Embodied Mind

By: Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch
Narrated by: Toby Sheets
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A new edition of a classic work that originated the "embodied cognition" movement and was one of the first to link science and Buddhist practices.

This classic work, first published in 1991, was one of the first to propose the "embodied cognition" approach in cognitive science. It pioneered the connections between phenomenology and science and between Buddhist practices and science - claims that have since become highly influential. Through this cross-fertilization of disparate fields of study, The Embodied Mind introduced a new form of cognitive science called "enaction", in which both the environment and first-person experience are aspects of embodiment.

However, enactive embodiment is not the grasping of an independent, outside world by a brain, a mind, or a self; rather, it is the bringing forth of an interdependent world in and through embodied action.

Although enacted cognition lacks an absolute foundation, the audiobook shows how that does not lead to either experiential or philosophical nihilism. Above all, the audiobook's arguments were powered by the conviction that the sciences of mind must encompass lived human experience and the possibilities for transformation inherent in human experience.

©1991, 2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (P)2018 Redwood Audiobooks Consciousness & Thought Philosophy Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Science Cognitive Science

Critic reviews

“A thoroughly original integration of cognitive science, continental philosophy, and Buddhist thought, and in its transpersonal dimension, rather beautiful.” (Gordon G. Globus, professor of psychiatry and human behavior, University of California, Irvine)

“An important book with wide ranging implications...engagingly written, presenting difficult ideas and complex research programs with grace, lucidity, and style." (American Book Review)

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I very much enjoyed this journey into the theory of mind, articulated by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Roche. Thompson‘s introduction to the latest edition was also helpful. This book makes a serious contribution to the philosophy of mind, and offers a way forward through the quagmires that Western models have let us into. For me, the first few chapters were the most slow going, and the last chapters were the most rewarding.

Challenging and rewarding

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Should have chosen a narrator that understood what he was reading, not just a fast reading excercise. Extremely poor narration for a deep reflective text.

Read the book. Unfortunate narration.

Unfortunate narration.

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The Embodied Mind is an undisputed classic of cognitive science and one of the founding documents of embodiment and the enactive approach to consciousness. See many excellent reviews of the book elsewhere - I will focus on the audiobook. The performance is very good and I am puzzled by the earlier negative reviews. The narrator reads at a comfortable pace and clearly grasps what he is reading. I have listened to a number of dense technical and philosophical works on audiobook and it is perfectly reasonable to expect to listen to certain sections more than once to fully grasp them. This is not a deficiency in the narrator but a necessity of the work and a limitation of the listener. This is a strong performance of a complex work and I am very pleased that this essential work has finally been produced in audiobook format.

An Essential Work in Cognitive Science

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Before finishing the second introduction, I already have insurmountable objections to this book.

In the 2nd intro, just before "Science & Enaction", Rosch wrote: "Typically when the lama’s mind... is judged to have merged with the dharmakaya..., and his body is cremated, rainbows appear. I have witnessed all of this twice."

I give Rosch credit for writing this, when it would have been more-strategic not to mention it. But earlier she wrote, "One positive result is that Buddhism and the large family of concepts being called “mindfulness” are no longer treated as visits from an extraterrestrial as they were twenty-five years ago." Here she presents evidence that is on a par with the evidence for alien abductions, unintentionally raising the question, Why is Buddhism no longer treated the same way as claims of alien abduction?

In the opening to Chapter 1, "A Fundamental Circularity", Merleau-Ponty sees a circularity which would be dispelled by materialism 101, because MP is injecting into the dialogue precisely the distinction between self and world that the Buddhist claims to go beyond. If one really doesn't accept that distinction, there is no problem here. And even if one accepts the distinction, it's trivial to point out that the scientist observes not his own body, but someone else's. There is no circularity in one human observing the processes in another human. And even if there were, circularity isn't a problem when it's done in an empirical manner, with numeric measurements, probabilities, and iterative updating of beliefs, because the infinitessimal step size usually prevents falling into infinite loops, and any infinite loops one does fall into can always be escaped by adding random noise. Philosophers really need to catch up with this; it's been 40 years since engineers started using hillclimbing and posterior-priority methods successfully to solve problems without priors. No one but continental philosophers are stuck in a hermeneutic circle.

Then the book invokes Kuhn's post-modernist claim that science has no tendency towards progress: "From Alexandre Koyré to Thomas Kuhn, modern historians and philosophers have argued that scientific imagination mutates radically from one epoch to another and that the history of science is more like a novelistic saga than a linear progression."

(It's true that Kuhn denied saying this in his revised edition; but that was a lie, as he did say it, and it's the main thing Kuhn is cited for.)

Kuhn's own book proves that science reliably and objectively progresses. He used 6 case studies in his argument that science moves randomly, rather than from less-accurate to more-accurate:

Copernican astronomy replacing Ptolemaic
Oxygen replacing phlogiston
Quantum mechanics replacing Newtonian mechanics
Evolution replacing creationism
Relativity replacing Newtonian mechanics
Germ theory replacing miasma theory

That's 6 cases. If scientific were unbiased wrt progress or regress, the odds of getting any one of them right would be 1/2. Yet in every one of these 6 cases, the change was indisputably an improvement. The odds of that happening by chance are 1 in 64. So Kuhn proved, with 98.4% confidence, that science progresses forward.

So what we have here is three different baseless attacks on science, from 3 different disciplines which are fighting for their lives against being replaced by science: Buddhism, phenomenology, and post-modernism. The authors chose them uncritically, because they're all politically aligned in wanting to malign science.

It would have been in one way excusable to write this book in the 1980s, when classical AI was obviously failing, but it wasn't yet clear to everyone why. The reason was that classical AI is completely disconnected from bodily experience, and completely unable to incorporate situational context into its reasoning.

But this book was first published in 1991, when the computational solutions to these problems had already become clear to this; and, astonishingly, revised in 2017, when it had already been demonstrated that neural-network based AI could do all the things this book says AI can't do.

The point that our minds are adapted to operate through structural coupling with a living body and an environment had already been made much better by David Chapman & Phil Agre in their 1987 article "Pengi: An Implementation of a Theory of Activity", in just a few pages. Hubert Dreyfus had tried to do the same thing earlier, applying Heidegger's discussion of "always already" being in a situation to artificial intelligence, in his book "What Computers Can't Do", but I thought it was a poor book, written from a position of ignorance about AI.

Pattie Maes' article "Do the Right Thing" was also relevant, as is the entire publication run of the journal /Adaptive Behavior/, the conference series /From Animals to Animats/, the journal /Artificial Life/ and the /Artificial Life/ conference proceedings. Perhaps the single most-enlightening work on the subject in that era was Christine Skarda & Walter Freeman's 1987 "How brains make chaos in order to make sense of the world", Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10: 161-195. But all that work de-mystifies the subject, reducing it to rule-based simulations or differential equations; whereas The Embodied Mind mystifies it.

Inexcusably ignorant

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Wordy introductions, indeed, lots of flowery words without ever suggesting ways one might use the cognitive mind or the human experience to practical benefit. If you're after lengthy, academic, philosophical discussion, you've come to the right place; otherwise, look elsewhere.

Academic, theoretical and non-applicable

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