Tutorial #7. Embodied Cognition. Discussion Questions

After having read Clark's Where Brain, Body and World Collide, think about the following questions:

• Does the state of your brain determine the phenomenal experiences you have?
• What is the sensorimotor theory of perception?
• What is the relationship between evolutionary thinking and embodied cognition?
• 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 (think also about Clark’s 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?
• Is it (at least sometimes) explanatorily more useful to see mind/brain as a computer? If so, why?