142 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
Chapter 2. What Difference Does the Body Make?
1 The materialist view of mind was made possible in part by the convergence of
scientific fields that had previously separated questions of the brain and mind,
and by a new model of cognition that was not limited to computers but could be
applied to the organic brain. Cognitive science worked on cognition by develop-
ing formal computational models rather than the brain itself, and neuroscience
explored the brain without dealing with questions of mind. The connectionist
view of cognition empowered both to take a stand on mind and consciousness.
Rather than the abstract processing of symbols, connectionism explains cog-
nition as the operation of neural networks distributed across the brain. In the
last decade of the twentieth century, cognitive science became neurocognitive
science; philosophy, Churchland hoped, would become neurophilosophy. While
they once eschewed tackling the mind, “[f ]ew neuroscientists now take a non-
naturalist position, and still fewer hold to a principled agnosticism on the mind-
brain question. The vast majority believe in physical realism and in the general
idea that no nonphysical agent in the universe controls or is controlled by brains.
Things mental, indeed minds, are emergent properties of brains” (Mountcastle
2000, 1). Philosophers could explore the mind not as the product of disembod-
ied, abstract reason, but rather of physical, biological processes that are (in the-
ory) measurable and locatable.
2 Ruth Leys explains: “since somatic markers signal the mixing of innate and
learned components of our affective responses, the somatic marker hypothesis
suggests a mechanism for conceptualizing how culture and the body interact.
Somatic markers are thus said to be culturally influenced ‘gut reactions’ that pro-
vide guidelines for decision making” (2011, 464).
3 In their early work, Metaphors We Live By (1980), Lakoff and Johnson advanced
the argument that metaphors, which they see as the primary conceptual building
blocks for human reason, are informed by embodied experience. Twenty years
later, in Philosophy in the Flesh (1999), they gave this argument a neurobiological
foundation.
4 For example, Haraway noted that the world appears different when viewing it
through a dog’s eyes, a camera, a spy satellite, a magnetic resonance imaging
machine, or any of the countless technological mediations used to visualize the
world. Vision, she contends, is not a matter of neutrally observing an objective
world that has a fixed and indisputable meaning. Nor is it a matter of passively
perceiving it from a stable vantage point. Rather, vision is an active, productive
process involving an assemblage of capacities, from the neural and other bodily
systems of organisms to the “prosthetic technologies interfaced with our biologi-
cal eyes and brains,” that make perception possible (Haraway 1988, 589).
5 Clark’s theory has led to consideration of how cognitive economies are assem-
bled. For example, they may be “softly- assembled,” that is, temporary and task-
specific. Their organization may be interaction- dependent, in that their parts do