(Part I is here, and part III is here)
In certain respects, development of the view that embodied experience is crucial to understanding the mind and brain reached a nadir in the period after World War II, at least within psychology. Behaviorism had redefined psychology as an “objective” science with no need to refer to consciousness [...]
History of the development of neurophenomenology pt.II-cognitivism, neurology, and psychology
How accurate are people at knowing what is happening inside their bodies?
Were people utterly inaccurate at judging their body state and reporting on it, clinical medicine would be deprived of a critical tool. Evidence has accumulated that in certain circumstances, some people are evidently able to access information about the physiological processes inside of their bodies, and to report on it. Experiments seem to demonstrate that [...]
A critical look at the information-processing theories used to explain body-knowledge
The psychologist Raymond Gibbs (2006) in Embodiment and Cognitive Science asks (pg. 28) “What underlies people’s abilities to move as they do and have any awareness of their bodies?”
The conventional answer given by psychology, medicine, and cognitive neuroscience is physiological and cognitive systems using information-processing. Gibbs cites the work of Bermudez, Marcel, and Eilan (1995) [...]
more on the status of introspection in psychology and in neuroscience
An index of the status of introspection within psychology comes from Medin, Markman, and Ross (2004) in the textbook Cognitive Psychology, which notes (pg.20) that:
“Although introspection is not an infallible window to the mind, psychological research is leading to principles that suggest when verbal reports are likely to accurately reflect thinking“
These perspectives all can be [...]
neurophenomenology and body alienation in cognitive science
It is worth exploring the historical, Cartesian “body alienation”, or default privileging of depersonalized, dismebodied, system-centric theories of mind, of much or most of the fields grouped under the label of cognitive science and neuroscience. Psychologists, linguists, philosophers, and neuroscientists have spent decades using computational and information-processing metaphors and models to explain behavior, problem-solving, memory, [...]
