A central problem in philosophy of mind concerns the relationship between subjective experiences and the physical processes that subserve them. There seems to be an unbridgeable “explanatory gap” between the two. Whereas other scientific explanations (e.g. the explanation of temperature in terms of kinetic energy) involve determinate relationships between two kinds of phenomena, correlations be...

Emotional communication can be viewed as a fundamental factor in children's emotional, social, and cognitive development. Most developmental psychologists agree that the recognition and expression of emotions through early social interaction between the mother and the child play a particularly important role in children's development (Bandura, 1992; Bowlby, 1969; Sroufe, 1996; Trevarthen, 1979)...

Based on behavioral, neuroimaging and neuropsychological data, I argue that a key to understanding mathematical cognition is the sharing of neural resources between sensorimotor and mathematical processes. Mathematical cognition is embodied in the sense that it is grounded in simulations of sensorimotor processes through the use of neural resources that are also active in bodily perception and ...

Human interaction has a distinct collaborative quality based on the attribution of communicative intentionality. Two networks in the human brain are often described as part of the “social brain”: the mirror system for recognizing intentional behavior and the mentalizing (theory of mind) system for processing it. We equip virtual agents with both systems and model their interaction during embodi...

Embodied Cognition by Lawrence Shapiro is a fine text that focuses on the issues of body, embodiment, and the environment in cognitive science, philosophy, and psychology. As the title suggests, Shapiro's book offers us a glimpse into the broadly defined, and still growing, research paradigm known as "embodied" cognition. Within this particular paradigm the body and environment are placed in th...

The embodied perspective The emerging view of embodied cognition holds that the body shapes the mind, and that cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body’s interactions with the world. Thus sensorimotor and cognitive processes cannot be conceived of as separate. This perspective deeply contrasts with the view of traditional cognitive science according to which the mind is an information ...

I consider here some contemporary approaches to the live performance of computer music. Drawing upon ideas of the embodied mind and the extended mind, I will outline a theory of embodied listening which problematises some of our assumptions about music, gesture and performance. Against the background of this theory, I will argue against approaches which put too great a focus upon gestural legib...

The centrality of the embodiment of mind, self, and values for the later Nietzsche is widely acknowledged. Here, I reconstrue Nietzsche’s HL to show that he uses his drive model of the mind already in this early text. The “historical sickness” central to HL is diagnosed in the form of failures of embodiment and drive control. First, I argue that a precursor to Nietzsche’s figure of “the last hu...

Embodied Cognition by Lawrence Shapiro is a fine text that focuses on the issues of body, embodiment, and the environment in cognitive science, philosophy, and psychology. As the title suggests, Shapiro's book offers us a glimpse into the broadly defined, and still growing, research paradigm known as "embodied" cognition. Within this particular paradigm the body and environment are placed in th...