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[T]he last 15 years have witnessed the ascent of an alternative view, that of embodied or enactive cognition. This new wave arose because the computationalist doctrine failed to account even for the most elementary coping with the world: walking, perceiving object in a natural setting, imagination. Slowly the cards turned into considering that the basis of mind is the body in coupled action, that is, the sensory-motor circuits establish the organism as viable in situated contexts. From this perspective the brain appears as a dynamical process (and not a syntactic one) of real time variables with a rich self-organizing capacity (and not a representational machinery). So in this sense the mind is not in the head since it is roots in the body as a whole and also in the extended environment where the organism finds itself.
--
Varela (1998) "The Cosmos Letter", Expo'90 Foundation, Japan

 

Francisco Varela

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The 'Other Half' is the word. The 'Other Half' is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the 'Other Half' is a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common 'hallucinations' of subject during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject's body at an angle...yes quite an angle it is the 'Other Half' worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.

 

William S. Burroughs

 

It ought to arouse our suspicions that people who spend enormous efforts on interpreting [Heidegger's] work disagree on the fundamental question whether he was an idealist. For the purposes of this discussion, his lack of a resolute commitment to the basic facts is enough. Suppose you took the notion of Dasein seriously, in the sense that you thought it referred to a real phenomenon in the real world. Your first question would be: How does the brain cause Dasein and how does Dasein exist in the brain? Or if you thought the brain was not the right explanatory level you would have to say exactly how and where Dasein is located in the space time trajectory of the organism and you would have to locate the right causes, both the micro causes that are causing Dasein and its causal effects on the organic processes of the organism. There is no escaping the fact that we all live in one space-time continuum, and if Dasein exists it has to be located and causally situated in that continuum. Furthermore, if you took Dasein seriously you would then have to ask how does Dasein fit into the biological evolutionary scheme? Do other primates have it? Other mammals? What is its evolutionary function? I can’t find an answer to these questions in Heidegger or even a sense that he is aware of them or takes them seriously. But taking these questions seriously is the price of taking Dasein seriously, unless of course you are denying the primordiality of the basic facts.

 

Martin Heidegger

 

The relation between psyche and soma, mind and brain, are peculiarly intimate; but, as in marriage, the partners are not inseparable: indeed their divorce was one of the conditions for the mind's independent history and its cumulative achievements.
But the human mind possesses a special advantage over the brain: for once it has created impressive symbols and has stored significant memories, it can transfer its characteristic activities to materials like to stone and paper that outlast the original brain's brief life-span. When the organism dies, the brain dies, too, with all its lifetime accumulations. But the mind reproduces itself by transmitting its symbols to other intermediaries, human and mechanical, than the particular brain that first assembled them.

 

Lewis Mumford

 

Evolution embodies information in every part of every organism. ... This information doesn't have to be copied into the brain at all. It doesn't have to be "represented" in "data structures" in the nervous system. It can be exploited by the nervous system, however, which is designed to rely on, or exploit, the information in the hormonal systems just as it is designed to rely on, or exploit, the information embodied in your limbs and eyes. So there is wisdom, particularly about preferences, embodied in the rest of the body. By using the old bodily systems as a sort of sounding board, or reactive audience, or critic, the central nervous system can be guided - sometimes nudged, sometimes slammed - into wise policies. Put it to the vote of the body, in effect. ...

 

Daniel C. Dennett

 

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

 

Arthur Schopenhauer