Essential Embodiment Theory

Characteristics

Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese:

"The two core ideas of the Essential Embodiment Theory —

(1) that conscious, intentional minds are the irreducible and truly global or inherently dominating intrinsic structures of motile, neurobiologically complex, situated, forward-flowing living organisms, and

(2) that because organismic life is basically included in nature and is basically causally efficacious, then our minds are basically causally efficacious too—when adequately elaborated, enable us to offer a radically revisionary explanation of mental causation and intentional action.

This is, as we have just said, a radically revisionary explanation in relation to contemporary mainstream philosophy of mind and cognitive science, but also one that is not wholly historically unprecedented. As we will see in a moment, it is significantly related to Aristotle’s metaphysics. But perhaps even more significantly, although the Essential Embodiment Theory is radically opposed to Cartesian Dualism and mechanism alike, it is also ironically true that Descartes’s own passing remarks about the ‘‘intermingling’’ of mind and body into a single ‘‘unit’’ strongly anticipate our core idea. There is, indeed, nothing that our own nature, and nature itself, teach us more directly and vividly than that we have living organismic bodies and that we are ‘‘very closely joined’’ to them. We believe that this is no mere metaphysical accident, and that the embodiment of our minds necessarily extends to all the vital systems, vital organs, and vital processes of our living bodies. This is not to say that we are always or even usually conscious of our living bodies and their vital systems, organs, or processes. Indeed, this is relatively rare, as, e.g., when I become single-mindedly and vividly attentive to the pounding of my heart and the heaving of my lungs after running up a flight of stairs .But it is indeed to say that minds are always and necessarily conscious and intentional with, or in-and-through, all the vital systems, organs, and processes of our living bodies. If we are correct that minds are always and necessarily conscious and intentional with or in-and-through our living bodies and their basic neurobiology, then it follows that minds are necessarily and completely incarnated, situated, forward-flowing, alive, and causally efficaciously engaged with the natural world."

(https://www.academia.edu/21620839/Embodied_Minds_in_Action_OUP_2009)