Tutorial # 19. Philosophy of Mind: The Embodied Mind. Discussion Questions

After having read Anderson, M. How to Study the Mind: An introduction to Embodied Cognition, try to think about these questions:

• What is the relationship between evolutionary thinking and embodied cognition?
• Does the fact that a cognitive trait is advantageous necessarily entail that it has been biologically selected during evolution? Think about fear of handguns. Is this advantageous? Has it been selected?
• Does the fact that a cognitive trait has been selected during evolution necessarily entail that it is advantageous? Think about sickle cell anemia. It has genetic facilitators, but it’s not adaptive. How could we argue for the existence of cognitive adaptations?
• Is cognition a graded notion that comes in degree? Where does it start?
• What is the relation between perception and action? What role do intentions play in action? Try to make examples.
• EC theorists argue that minds are shaped by particular bodies inhabiting particular environments. To what extent is this true? How would they account for highly abstract thinking e.g. chess playing, decision-making?
• What problems are faced by explanations of the mind that neglect to take the
  body into account?
• Think about Tetris. To what extent we use the environment to simplify our cognitive processes? Does the environment changes the nature of the processing or does it simply enable the organisms to use other inexpensive cognitive abilities?
• In which sense the environment is part of the cognitive system? Is this a trivial claim?
• Do blind people see with their canes? In which sense?
• Consider bees learning to forage on certain kind of highly-rewarding flowers. Is it necessary to consider the cognitive activities of the bees to include their environment? Or the environment simply a source of visual input?
• Consider the role of gesture during speech in different cultures. What is the effect of gesture on communication? Does it change the cognitive processes underlying communication (either in the listener or in the speaker) in any interesting way?
• Think about The passage from the Metamorphosis by Kafka. Would it make a crucial difference to your cognitive processes if your body were very different?
• Is it (at least sometimes) explanatorily more useful to see mind/brain as a computer? If so, why?