Evan Thompson Empathy and Consciousness

ion from, and hence presupposes, our empathic cognition of each other. The second side of the Dyad comes from cognitive science and is comparatively straightforward. My aim in putting the two together, side-by-side, is to create a kind of hub or axis for all of the many different issues that can be raised about intersubjectivity and consciousness as seen from the viewpoints of phenomenology and cognitive science. Underlying all these issues is the fundamental question of how to conceptualize or understand the relationship between these two poles. I will come back to this question later in the article. III: Enactive Cognitive Science and the Embodied Mind The development of cognitive science over the past two decades or so has seen a movement from the classical, cognitivist view that an inner mind represents an outer world using symbols in a computational language of thought, to the view that mental processes are embodied in the sensorimotor activity of the organism and embedded in the environment (see Clark, 1999, and Beer, 2000, for recent discussions). This viewpoint has come to be known as enactive or embodied cognitive science (Varela et al., 2 E. THOMPSON