And finally, flying pigs teaches us that when you engage your visual system to understand language, you do so creatively and constructively. You can take previously experienced percepts (such as what pigs look like) and actions (such as flying) and form new combinations out of them. What flying pigs means depends on merging together independent experiences, because you have probably never experienced anything in the real world that corresponds to flying pigs (unless you spent a lot of time at Pink Floyd concerts in the 1970s). That makes flying pigs an extreme case, but even when language refers to a corresponding real-world entity—even in mundane cases—you still have to build up a simulation creatively.
Consider the totally boring expression yellow trucker hat. Now, surely there exist yellow trucker hats in the world. You have probably seen one, whether or not you were so moved by the experience as to remember it. But unless you have a specific stored representation of a particular yellow trucker hat, the mental images that you evoke to interpret this string of ordinary words have to be fabricated on the spot. And to do this, you combine your mental representation of trucker hat with the relevant visual effects of the word yellow. When words are combined—whether or not the things they refer to exist in the real world—language users make mental marriages of their corresponding mental representations.
The next step is to put the idea of embodied simulation under a microscope and really put it to the test. But how? The currency of science is observable, replicable observations that confirm or disconfirm predictions, but, as I noted earlier, meaning doesn’t lend itself willingly to this kind of approach because it’s quite hard to observe. So, what to do? Facing this quandary as you are, you’re in pretty much the same place where the field of cognitive science was in about the year 2000. There was this exciting, potentially groundbreaking idea about simulation and meaning, and yet we had no idea how to test it.
And that’s when the ground shifted. Right about at the same time, a handful of trailblazing scientists started to develop experimental tools to investigate the embodied simulation hypothesis empirically. They flashed pictures in front of people’s faces, they made them grab onto exotically shaped handles, they slid them into fMRI scanners, and they used high-speed cameras to track their eyes. Some of these approaches failed completely. But the ones that worked rocketed meaning onto the front page of cognitive science. And they provided us with instruments that now allow us to scrutinize humans in the act of making meaning.
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Add Comment"Furthermore, if we indeed make meaning through simulating sights, sounds, and actions, that would mean that our capacity for meaning is built upon other systems, ones evolved more directly for perception and action."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"built upon other systems, ones evolved more directly for..." seems to be one option. Nevertheless, in my opinion a more consistent understanding, and one that has been around for a very long time, is that meaning is and has always been co-constructed, and has always co-evolved, with systems for perception and action.
kahea
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor an earlier and infinitely more interesting discussion of this kind of projective nonsense, check out the debate between Lenin and Ernst Mach regarding empirio-criticism. Here are a couple of links to Lenin's 1908 book, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which contains all the further references needed:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://marxistphilosophy.org/LenEmpCrit1.pdf
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/index.htm
Simulating my godlike hand in the jaws of Fenrir the wolf is one thing, simulating the movements of quarks and muons, or the behaviour of brutalized atoms in the core of the sun or a black hole is quite another. Thought, language and meaning are articulated and mediated in ways that a MRI scan still can't quite capture. In a lot of ways the discussion hasn't really progressed beyond Hegel, who managed to dissolve the antinomial agnosticism of Kant and move on, and opened the way to materialist dialectical realism in science, more or less consciously in the work of Marx, Einstein, and Chomsky, and unconsciously and reluctantly in the work of all scientists worthy of the name.
If a book like Benjamin Bergen's can revive the debate, so much the better. But "new science"? Hah.
I have always thought of pigs-wings as batlike.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn a planet with small gravity and dense atmosphere they would be functional.
The mental blueprint for this creature was probably the "Overlords" in Arthur C Clarkes novel Childhoods End.
This discussion evokes the Cambridge EEG research that indicates when we use the word 'arm' in sentence it produces an excitation in the motor homunculus at the site controlling arm movements.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisReading the April, 2007 article,"The Movies in our Eyes" will inform those interested that the eyes send crude imagery over 12 separate circuits to the cortex which hallucinates that which we perceive as reality. Lucid dreaming produces this same hallucinatory experience as the same level of perception. Feedback sensation, walking etc. is also complete as touch and sensory input. For Embodied Cognition, it's a complete experience.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is sometimes a need for new words because existing words are ambiguous, imprecise, confusing or technically obsolete.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Qualia" is a word that begs to be replaced because only a few people comprehend its meaning therefore it is confusing to many people.
"Soul" refers to the essential, conscious self but most people think of the soul as immortal. A new word is needed to satisfy non-believers who question immortality.
A new word for "memory" may be needed as well but this is not obvious to me.
Embodied simulation describes a physical process or the results of a physical process?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf I simulate the potential damage of a hurricane, the simulation is not real. The simulation has no purpose without human analysts to react to the simulation.
If the insurance company or civil planner reacts to the simulation, their reactions are not part of the simulation.
Embodied simulated of sound is what I hear or the testable neurological signals that arise from sound waves?
Sound (or any other sense) has no meaning without the awareness of the inner self.
The phrase "embodied simulation" is confusing.
jayjacobus is right about the confusion. There's an interplay between reality and perception of it, and perception itself is a reality, so we have perceptions of perception. It's like consciousness and self-consciousness, and this relationship has been a central problem for philosophy. One of the most primitive responses has been to invent a previous cause, and stop the infinite regression by calling some given cause final or ultimate or prime or whatever. This "embodied simulation" nonsense is the same kind of thing - what it doesn't do is answer the question of reality, ie what is being simulated.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is a philosophical perpetuum mobile that pretends it isn't.
Now Kant was smart, so he stopped his infinite regression pain by claiming that the ultimate ground for everything was ultimately unknowable, which was the agnostic thing to do. Hegel was smarter but far less diplomatic, and said "look, reality and our perception of it is full of contradictions, live with it", and moved beyond Kant, opening the way for Marx to move beyond the whole supernatural 'perception/consciousness/thought first' approach.
For empirical beings, we are very attached to abstract ideas. The reason is simple - we process continuous empirical reality including ourselves using discrete abstract reflections of it in thought. So if you want to call this processing 'simulation', be my guest. Ditto if you want to be empirical by calling it 'embodied'. Well done. Which leaves us as bodies that think. Square one.
Moving in a world of discrete, abstract reflection our mirror minds naturally assume everything is discrete and abstract as soon as it thinks about it, except that the basic presupposition for our survival in reality is concrete continuity. And since survival is opportunistic and iconoclastic, we survive in reality at the expense of broken intellectual dogma, icons and fetishes.
This drama is entertainingly embodied for me in Lucretius's great Latin poem On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura), and in Hegel's two great works The Phenomenology of the Spirit and The Science of Logic. These are guaranteed pre-Marxist so clear of any ideological tarring and feathering that anything written after 1848 might risk. For a scientific mind they are immensely rewarding, and even a short dip is very invigorating!
When a person talks about the perception of reality, he is in the inside looking out, but when he talks about his own perception he is in the inside looking in.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEmbodied simulation describes a theoretical process to explain the reality of the mind. But can the mind be understood by looking outside from within. The mind is not real except from inside looking in.
In other words, I am aware of the cave, but you must take my word for it. You cannot see that I am aware of the cave by using your senses.
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