44 CHAPTER TWO
and the safety they feel. They bring to encounters different skills and histo-
ries. They are variously modified and transformed by experience: They are
enabled and debilitated, trained and inhibited. They are made and make
themselves, in relational terms, larger or smaller, more and less attentive,
more and less mobile, more and less emotionally attuned, engaged, visible.
They are settled and unsettled, and their relation to objects, people, and other
creatures changes and can be changed. They differ in their attachments to oth-
ers and in the affordances the world offers them. They are more and less vul-
nerable, and suffer more and less. Their trajectories are long, or cut tragically
short. They variously fit and “misfit” (Garland- Thomson 2011) in the world.
In considering the embodied mind, the question I want to ask (one that many
before me have asked in other contexts) is: Do these differences make any
difference?
Materialism and the Rise of Embodiment
Patricia Churchland’s (1986) declaration that the mind is what the brain
does, which proclaims the necessity of the brain sciences for understand-
ing the mind and consciousness, is both materialist and reductionist. A
materialist view of mind holds that “mental properties for perception, for
knowledge, for learning, for memory all had to come out of the complexity
of the organization of matter” (Churchland in Campbell 1996).^1 Reduc-
tionism as it applies to neuroscience holds that the only matter that counts
is brain matter; the mind and all that it entails can be entirely explained
through neural processes. In its most extreme form this could mean, as
Francis Crick claims, that “You, your joys and sorrows, your memories
and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no
more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associ-
ated molecules” (1994, 3). This view, that the mind is exclusively neuronal,
is contested within naturalized philosophy and neurocognitive science by
the idea that the mind is fundamentally embodied.
The embodied mind paradigm insists that the mind is irreducible to
the workings of any single organ or system. Rather, the mind is dependent
on “the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various
sensorimotor capacities” (Varela et al. 1991, 172), which “are themselves
embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural