Talk:Embodiment

Free will

A fully bio-chimical view of cognitive process is often disturbing for the human ego, because it supresses Absolute Free Will (AFW), because anybody action could be calculated in advance by a powerfull enough computer holding the right program and the right informations (all molecular (smaller if it's still too big) positions and composition of a large enough space arround the environment to predict)! In addition AFW is a mith in comparison to the law of physics where anythings that happens depend on the past conditions and physicalo laws (no effects without causes)! However on a human level, free will is a reallity (I/we can choose among some possibilities and in certain contexts), so it's usefull to speak about observable free will (OFW) to describe what common sense tell us, this is absolutelly not in contradiction with AFW (I choose among a set of possibilities, and I try to make the best choice, even if it's purelly mechanical on the neuronal level). So the whole idea of this little paragraph is to make AFW (the probable physical reality (no real observable proofs of anything else, like effects without causes, we could call it miracles, and even so we often call miracles what we can't explain, but it does not mean that's it's not Absolutly explainable)) easier to accept!

So here is a solution that works fine for me (by the way, I am free) :

(1) AFW : who cares! In other words the best approach is to act like if it did not exists, because otherwise it may lead to fatalistic behavior and interact with healthy positive reactions, like responsability for your own actions, meaningful choices etc.

(2) AFW imply determinism, but a deterministical world does not imply that predictability is possible, above a certain level of complexity, let's say from the molecular level of a human being (I did not say an isolated human brain) determination is highly inpossible, so it's one more reason to not care about AFW on a comportemental level, because nobody will be able to do a full molecular prediction.

(3) luckily OFW is still there, and it's the main point! AFW is just an abstraction that does not interfers with OFW except in the case of an obsession with absolute freedom.

General remarks : (a) It's interesting to constat that the more you thinks about AFW the more generally (except in some rare cases, like this one where I am trying to reassure some possibly anguished minds :-) ) it messes up your own life, even without anguished, because it removes some brain power usefull to increase the OFW !! (b) allong this track there is also the vision of a universe being a massive memory of all events that happend and will ever happend (the trick is that nobody can do a full reading), but still imagine all particules (atoms and much smaller) interactions for ever stack into their own history is daunting, but still the most rational explication coming to my mind! (c) so let's say that we are God and we can push the cursor of time in any direction we want at any speed, have a close look at black holes see the process of material disintegration into some ultra dense soupe of particules, so predicting what happens during a black hole festin is quite easy, but what about reversing the process! All the particule positions inside the black hole should have a memory of all the disintegration process (except for the information that escaped during the feeding, such as gamma flashes etc.), but still if physical laws apply with a full preservation of cause to effect (even inside a black hole), all the information is there (90% in the black hole and 10% escaping outside on whatever physical form) even if it's not readable, for example with an invertion in the flow of time! (d) what about one physical Reality! It goes in the same direction, you propose 100 different realities, oups sorry, but my one counts all yours and all possible by definition! Oups it rings a paradox bell "the set of all sets" from Russell's paradox ... so it must also countain itself and it's not possible! Well my Reality does not countain itself, it Is just itself! .. so ... and all other possible reality by definition! logic is saved! (e) what about infinity in space, time and scales (as well as very small things, such as atomic civilisation in my nails), personally, I think it does not matters much and I don't see why some sort of systematic physical laws should not be respected anywhere, and even if they where not systematically respected, the disturbing (pseudo random) agents would also depending on some sort of physical laws. ....

Personally I think that cracks for the access to an eventual absolute freedom imply that :

The laws from cause to effects would be prooved wong at some scale, or in some situations (sorry I think quantum indetermination is just an observation bias or an mathematical artifact, and I agree with Einstein that "God does not play with dices").

or :

the posession of an omniscient computer

or :

that logic is just a bag of illusions, but having only logic to proove or disproove that we are probably stack

or :

that God exists as immortal and all powerfull as a separate entity from the univers, and having full control of it! Remark that all powerfull and immortal by itself for a God does not disturb anything it that God is the full universe by itself

or :

what about a world as a full computer simulation!! Even worse with the predictability of computers, and it could even play back again the whole things !

In conclusion the conclusion "it removes some brain power usefull to increase the OFW" apply quite well to the last part of this text!

Relationship between page and Embodied philosophy

I think that the relationship between page and Embodied philosophy should be worked out better. Should these be merged? Perhaps the embodiment page could describe a more general, loosely associated, 'cultural-movement'-like thing encompassing Green movement, ecofeminism, gaia theory, strands of postmodernism, 'collective consciousness', etc. Embodied philosophy (aka embodied cognition aka embodied mind thesis) could cover the more specific corresponding idea in the Philosophy of mind and cognitive science. This article as it is right now is kind of all over the place (check out the links to see what I mean) and is really an inadequate explanation of embodied cognition, if that is the intent. --mporch 05:32, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

I agree that the embodied cognition page is utterly lacking, as it covers only philosophical and cognitive linguistic contributions. There are also substantial contributions to the field from cognitive psychology and neuropsychology. There is an excellent literature review on embodied cognition in: Wilson, M. (2002). Six views of embodied cognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9(4), 625-636. That would be a good starting point. Mark.Howison 07:02, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

...also, have a look at The Enlightenment under "Fall of the Enlightenment". This contribution supports my impulse to make a distinction from "The Embodiment" as a larger movement and embodied cognition as a specific idea in cognitive science and Philosophy of mind. While I would love to see more discussion here, I am going to go ahead and further develop the embodied cognition entry along these lines (eventually)... or anyone else is welcome to do so - I just wanted to register my input on this distinction. I have set up the redirects: embodied cognition & embodied mind thesis --mporch 23:09, 4 May 2004 (UTC)

Good ideas, I agree with you. — mark ✎ 10:03, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

I'm with Mark Howison on this: time to work on the embodied cognition page. (See also the discussion on the embodied philosophy talk page.) Over three years since this was suggested and still nothing? Maybe this explains something about the speed with which the embodied cognition literature is (not) growing ;) — eitch 17:57, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Something needs to be done here. Since this thread is insanely old, let's talk about this at embodied philosophy. ---- CharlesGillingham 00:45, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

Reverted

Somebody has totally screwed up this article! What happened to the links & formatting???

--Jaibe 20:42, 9 February 2006 (UTC)

someone asked me to revert this page & I finally figured out how to do it. apologies to the person who tried to clean it up recently -- search "revert" on wikipedia & you'll find out how to do it sensibly, it's really quite easy.

--Jaibe 10:07, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Fixed use of term "scruffy"

Although Rodney Brooks is a "scruffy", the article suggested that all scruffies are concerned with implementing embodied, unconscious reasoning. In fact, many scruffies (including the original scruffies, such as Roger Schank and Marvin Minsky) were concerned with abstract knowledge representation: an opposite of embodied reason (along a dimension of symbolic vs. non-symbolic). ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 19:06, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Merge/Reorganization

I have started reorganizing the "embodied" family of articles. I Used several sections of this article in embodied mind thesis. I saved the old version at Talk:Embodiment/Deleted text. Perhaps there is more of this article that can be used somewhere—there is clearly another use of the word "embodied" that it is not currently covered by wikipedia ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 10:33, 18 May 2008 (UTC)—