Out of Our Heads is a terrific book that thoroughly undermines the notion that our brain in some way forms a representation of the world. It does that by a kind of "enactive holism." First of all by regarding cognition as part of a whole--that whole being our interaction with our environment. From this vantage, one can see brain activity as part of the individual's interactivity with her or his environment. One no longer regards the brain in a homuncular manner, as a crane driver that directs and uses our body. The body no longer seems like an living vat that holds the brain while serving as a medium for transmitting messages to and fro. By avoiding a brain/rest-of the-body dualism, one also undercuts the need to posit representations within the brain. Rather, the brain is the point at which our interactions become focused and interrelated.
Noe's holistic understanding of the human organism can account for the plasticity of the brain and may perhaps dissolve the bundling problem (more on this later).
Here's my way of approaching the same point. If you were to consider the brain in isolation from the rest of the body and it interactions with its surrounding environment, yet also understood all of the bio-chemical goings on in the brain, you would not be able to figure out what it is doing. That is, you would not recognize that anything like cognition, emotion, or intention (trying-to-do-x) is going on inside the brain.
Another thought based on Noe: perhaps infancy is the period during which this extreme plasticity of the brain gets habituated and interconnected through environmental interactions. In other words, perhaps our awareness of our environment as open to us is inseparable from our awareness of our own bodily wholeness. Perhaps both come together through habituation rather than through "hard -wiring."
(cut?) To approach the brain in isolation from its interactions, as part of the body, with the environment, is like trying to consider how an atom acts without considering that with which it interacts. We must instead start with the concrete whole, the interaction, and then seek to understand how each part of that whole interacts with the other. This is true in chemistry as well as in human action. In the latter case, the initial whole is human/environment. The operation of the brain is intelligible only inasmuch as it, as part of the human body, fits into this double foci.
Noe's holistic understanding of the human organism can account for the plasticity of the brain and may perhaps dissolve the bundling problem (more on this later).
Here's my way of approaching the same point. If you were to consider the brain in isolation from the rest of the body and it interactions with its surrounding environment, yet also understood all of the bio-chemical goings on in the brain, you would not be able to figure out what it is doing. That is, you would not recognize that anything like cognition, emotion, or intention (trying-to-do-x) is going on inside the brain.
This ignorance may perhaps be analogous to that of one who knew everything that happens within an oxygen atom when it forms a molecule with a different type of atom but without being told anything about that with which it is bonding. Or like studying the movement of walking without in any way noting the feet surface against which the feet are pushing. If you did physics at this level you would get nowhere: you would never grasp the action/reaction principle of Newton. Nor (returning to the previous example) would you recognize walking as such (unless you surmised on the basis of analogy with other examples in your memory of holistically understood interactions).
If, on the other hand, you considered how the same set of brain operations are part of the individual's interactions with an environment, you would be able to see how the brain is involved in our cognitive, affective, and interactive relation to our environment.
This analogy doesn't quite hit its target, for the problem that Noe is addressing isn't the fact that cognitive scientists and philosophers utterly ignore the environment, but that they omit it from their definition (and hence from their analysis) of cognition. Instead of looking at cognition as part of an interaction, they look at it as event happening inside the skull. Environmental interaction is one event, cognition another. These two events are certainly causally interrelated, says orthodox cognitive science, but they are, nevertheless, two different things: one of them happens outside the brain and the other inside.
Another thought based on Noe: perhaps infancy is the period during which this extreme plasticity of the brain gets habituated and interconnected through environmental interactions. In other words, perhaps our awareness of our environment as open to us is inseparable from our awareness of our own bodily wholeness. Perhaps both come together through habituation rather than through "hard -wiring."
(cut?) To approach the brain in isolation from its interactions, as part of the body, with the environment, is like trying to consider how an atom acts without considering that with which it interacts. We must instead start with the concrete whole, the interaction, and then seek to understand how each part of that whole interacts with the other. This is true in chemistry as well as in human action. In the latter case, the initial whole is human/environment. The operation of the brain is intelligible only inasmuch as it, as part of the human body, fits into this double foci.
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