The philosophical tradition mistakenly asks how the inside (i.e. thoughts, ideas, concepts) can represent the outside (i.e., the world). This trap is a consequence of the view that mind and body must be two ontologically different entities. On this view the problem of meaning is to explain how disembodied “internal” ideas can represent “external” physical objects and events. Several centuries h...

Os estudos contemporâneos sobre o corpo, advindos das ciências cognitivas, têm possibilitado novos olhares a corporalidade na dança, performance, no teatro e nas artes cênicas em geral. Principalmente partir do filósofo francês Maurice Merleau-Ponty, com seu livro Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945), atravessamos marcos importantes,como Teoria Enativista, proposta por Francisco Varela, Evan ...

The problem of explaining the mind persists essentially unchanged today since the time of Plato and Aristotle. For the ancients, of course, it was not a question of the relation of mind to brain, though the question was fundamentally the same nonetheless. For Plato, the mind was conceived as distinct from the body and was posited in order to explain knowledge which transcends that available to ...

Enactive approaches in cognitive science propose that perception, and more generally cognitive experience, are strongly mediated by embodied (sensory-motor) processes, and that our primary experience of the world is action-oriented or pragmatic (Noë 2004; Thompson 2007; Varela et al. 1991). Extended mind theorists propose that cognition supervenes on embodied and environmental processes such as...

The major theories of presence in virtual worlds (social presence, co-presence, self-presence, hyper presence, and external presence) all define presence as an illusion about the virtual-ness of a virtual experience (Schultze, 2010). Their approach implies that we are always present when there is no virtuality. In this essay I will argue that 1) regardless of virtuality, we are almost never pre...

This article considers W. Ross Ashby’s ideas on the nature of embodied minds, as articulated in the last five years of his career. In particular, it attempts to connect his ideas to later work by others in robotics, perception and consciousness. While it is difficult to measure his direct influence on this work, the conceptual links are deep. Moreover, Ashby provides a comprehensive view of the...