Here is chapter three of Taking Heart and Making Sense.
This chapter completes Part One of the book. My intention for this first part of the book is to provide overviews of relevant aspects of contemporary theories that contribute to a new theory of feeling. It is meant to introduce you to a series of concepts that are finding their way into contemporary conversations around consciousness, emotion, feeling and the body, often by way of popular science books and online interviews with their authors.
For those who might be familiar with the theories presented, the first three chapters also intend to outline an overall problem space, to show why a different philosophy is required. This is a technique of speculative philosophy; to identify issues in a set of ideas (particularly if those ideas are influencing the broader culture) that point to the need for a deeper, philosophical explanation. (Don’t worry, I explain speculative philosophy more later, in chapter five!)
Enactivism, a stream of embodied cognition discussed in this current chapter, goes even further than including the body in cognitive processes. It explores how these processes depend not only on whole body movements, but on relationships with the world beyond the body. Straightforward examples are the use of artificial devices that then become incorporated into the actions and perceptions of the body (for instance a blind person using a cane) and the multitude of ways we offload cognition into the world beyond the body (for instance making a list so that we don’t need to remember everything). Obviously, these days we offload more and more of our cognitive requirements onto our devices!
As a side note, you might have come across the term 4E Cognition. This branch of cognitive science understands cognition as enactive, extended and embedded, as well as embodied. As far as I can tell, 4E cognitive science is a further development of embodied cognition and enactivism. But my focus here is really on the relationship between action and experience, so I’ve stayed with the more limited term, enactivism. This chapter also explores some of the work of a well-known neuroscientist of emotion, Antonio Damasio. His work augments the perspectives from embodied cognition.
So to recap, what is the overall problem space that leads into the rest of the book? The arc of the first three chapters goes like this: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s theory of emotion upends the traditional view of emotion in psychology by saying that emotion isn’t just the responses of the body brought to awareness. That’s very interesting, but it seems to me to go too far, in saying that emotions are concepts and a phenomenon of the brain. It also seems contrary to some other fields (ie. embodied cognition) that have specialised in understanding how concepts arise, and that have shifted to including the body in the generation and use of concepts (ie. cognition). To state this plainly, Barrett moves away from the body and they move towards it.
So then what do those embodied theories say? Well, one stream of embodied cognition (metaphor theory) seems to demonstrate pretty clearly that embodied experience gives rise to conceptual understanding, and another stream (enactivism) shows how our actions and interactions in the world are literally part of our cognition. These two streams reflect on the embodiment of cognition in different but complimentary ways. But neither of them say much about feeling and emotion, although they do draw upon some neuroscientific views of emotion, which I also discuss in the present chapter.
I’m not satisfied with any of these theories as full explanations of feeling, and in particular, its relationship to consciousness and the whole body, but they all offer something important. Even so, their respective shortcomings seem to me to point to the need for a closer look at their underlying assumptions about the world, which includes a much deeper consideration of questions about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world, or the mind-body problem, the subject of the following chapter.
Quick overview:
The previous chapter on the theory of metaphor pointed out that our experience is structured. This chapter discusses a different stream of embodied cognition, enactivism, and its emphasis on experience as dynamic and continuous. Enactivism emphasises that cognition should be understood in terms of action and dynamic engagement; the whole body interacting in an environment is integral to processes of cognition, including perception.
I argue that the enactivist perspective brings forward important aspects of cognition but downplays the border of the body. As a counterpoint, I discuss neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s view of levels of consciousness (including the difference between feeling and emotion), and his emphasis on whole body functioning (including blended systems, and chemical as well as neural signalling within the body). Damasio emphasises the personal, inward nature of experience and links feeling to the biology of homeostasis.
I observe that a reliance on concepts of hierarchical organisation to understand complex systems permeates all the works discussed in chapters 1-3. I suggest that the hierarchical approach brings deeper implications that should be considered within a new philosophy of nature. Such a philosophy could bridge many discrepant theories.
