Embodied Neurophenomenology

Overview

Amanda Nelson speaking at the International Conference on Embodied Intelligence 2023.

Abstract

First-personal investigation of the structure of experience reveals that we are fundamentally embodied agents, at once a lived/experienced/subjective body and an objective/physical body. Here, we examine one possible area of dialogue between first-personal and third-personal methodologies that follows from this strong embodiment thesis: that between (1) the dynamics of subjectivity revealed by interoception and (2) physiological dynamics captured by third-personal measures. The agent’s dual status, or dual aspectivity, suggests structural similarities between certain body-wide physiological (or otherwise physical) dynamics and the interoceptable dynamics of embodied subjectivity. We propose that these similarities are discoverable via rigorous first-personal investigation in dialogue with the right third-personal methods. If the interocepted bodily state is the backdrop to all other subjective experience of the agent’s self and environment, then the agent’s awareness, interpretation, and control of this state have a profound impact on the rest of its cognition. Further, the realizations of certain structural properties in the “hardware” of an artificial agent may allow the manifestation of particular cognitive/“software” functions in that agent.

Quotes of Relevance

Each development in the organism, whether it leads to maturation or to degeneration, consists of responses to and interactions with specific environments. Curiosity, esthetics, creativity, and stimulation are necessarily and deeply linked to metabolic efficiency and structural-anatomical development. For example, the known effects of stimulation and success (or isolation and depression) on brain anatomy and function should be linked meaningfully with metabolic, hormonal and dietary processes. There is a large amount of information available that could be put to practical use, but there are still important ideological barriers to be overcome. Marshalling the information needed to optimize our own development runs counter to the program of our technical-scientific culture, which prefers to believe that degeneration is programmed, while emergent evolution is unforeseeable. But, if an optimization project is presented as a way to forestall the “programmed degeneration,” it might succeed in becoming part of the culture.

— Ray Peat, newsletter on Genes, CO2, and Adaptation

The dualism of concern to Francisco here was not the abstract, metaphysical dualism of mental and physical properties, but rather the dualism of mind as a scientific object versus mind as an experiencing subject. One of the most significant and exceptional aspects of Francisco’s life and work, from this early paper to his last writings on his own illness and liver-transplant experience, is that he never lost sight of this point that the mind–body problem is not only a philosophical problem, or a scientific problem, but also a problem of direct experience. The problem could be put this way. It’s one thing to have a scientific representation of the mind as “enactive”—as embodied, emergent, dynamic, and relational; as not homuncular and skull-bound; and thus in a certain sense as insubstantial. But it’s another thing to have a corresponding direct experience of this nature of the mind in one’s own first-person case. In more phenomenological terms, it’s one thing to have a scientific representation of the mind as participating in the “constitution” of its intentional objects; it’s another thing to see such constitution at work in one’s own lived experience. Francisco believed, like phenomenologists and also Buddhists, that this kind of direct experience is possible. He also thought that unless science and philosophy make room for this kind of experience, we will never be able to deal effectively with the mind–body problem but will instead fall prey to one or another extreme view—either denying experience in favor of theoretical constructions or denying scientific insight in favor of naive and uncritical experience.

— Evan Thompson, Life and Mind: From Autopoiesis to Neurophenomenology