the embodied mind, cognitive science and human experience
This is my first attempt at a review of The Embodied Mind..I'm writing this not so much because there are a number of points I want to capture and more because I have found it incredibly dense and hard to get my head around but I'm hoping that by tracking my increasing understanding I will be able to motivate myself to make it to the end! I wonder whether books like these are hard for me to read because the language used really is difficult or whether it is so outside my common experience that common words start to lose their meaning.
Anyway here is my first get the first chapter: a fundamental circularity: in the mind of the reflective scientist.
it seems that the important point to grasp here that is that Cognitive Science is essentally circular.....are they saying it is very hard to look at one's own behaviour and understand it without it being blurred, or perhaps dependent on the activity of looking at oneself? That is simplifying it ridiculously and I think probably also incorreclty but I have to start somewhere. actually I think it's more about the fact that the structure of the brain produces behaviour and experiences but at the same time our behaviour and experiences affect the structure of our brain. and then the issue is that any scientific description of our brain structure and behaviour and experiences are products of the structure of our brain (or what they call a cognitive system), and then after that we can say that the reflection on the diagram is also part of this system and then the diagram can go on and on ad infinitum in every increasing circles, like a mirror facing another mirror. (they don't use this description or draw this but I think this is a much better image, perhaps that's why I find it so hard to read...because the writers don't use much visual info...diagrams OK yes but very dry ones with arrows and for me these just don't get the message across).
now I'm not saying that what I've written above is any good but what I do feel is that I'm less self-conscious about talking to my blog now and it means that the ideas are coming out a bit more easily, I'm losing the self-consciousness that varela would say is that circularity. whilst I feel I've been very little so far from the embodied mind, I feel I've gained quite a bit more just by talking about it.goodnight