David Breeden is speaking all week about embodied cognition

Transcript:

Hello, I’m David Breeden. I’m the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically Humanist congregation. This is Coffee and Wisdom. This week we’ve been looking at different aspects of “embodied cognition.” I have been contrasting the two phrases: I think therefore I am, and I am because we are. Of course, “I think therefore I am (cogito ergo sum)” comes from Rene Descartes, leading to ideas about dualism and materiality and spirituality as being split in some way. The full phrase is dobito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum: I doubt therefore I think, I think therefore I am. Doubt then being the confirmation of personhood and selfhood and of the I. Well, that’s all up in the head, isn’t it? And that then is distinguished from other things we’ve been looking at. For example, this term “embodied cognition,” which I have not yet exactly defined, because we did want to go into various aspects of it before we thought through too much about it. But the American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology says this “the thesis that the human mind is largely determined by the structures of the human body (morphology, sensory and motor systems) and its interactions with the physical environment. This concept emerged from work in late 20th century linguistics, cognitive psychology and philosophy. So again, the thesis that the human mind is largely determined by the structures of the human body (morphology, sensory and motor systems). So no, we can’t actually have a brain in a jar, if we want to preserve the personality. Basically this is what embodied cognition is telling us: You’ve got to have the body as part of the brain in order to have what we would consider to be personality or a self or this thing we call I. I said earlier in the week, Amishi Jha is a neuropsychologist. She says, “Emotional function and cognitive function aren’t unrelated to each other. They are completely intertwined.” So our emotions and our thinking, our cognition, which also then encompasses the body, are all a matrix of things, actually, and then we can separate them out. But these are abstractions that we’re separating out, not the actual thing. Now, this goes back to some very ancient wisdom that is still with us today. We talk about the Western world and Descartes’ dualism, but many parts of the world have never been touched by this particular kind of idea. I quoted Michael Onyebuchi Eze yesterday: “The ‘I am’ is not a rigid subject, but a dynamic self-constitution dependent on this otherness creation of relation and distance.” This in his book, Intellectual History in Contemporary South Africa. Many philosophers and scholars in various African nations are nowadays talking about embodied cognition. That is part and parcel, very much of the way of thinking in tribal groups, ancient parts of African culture that has not been stamped out by Western religions, as we’ll see in just a moment. Another word we do need to learn is entrain: “to fall gradually into synchrony with a rhythm or something that varies rhythmically.” Entrainment is when various things do become synchronous, people can do that as well. We can become synchronous through music, drumming, movements of various kind, tai chi, that kind of thing. Entrainment then embodies the cognition and pulls people into or out of their own heads and into a larger organism, a group. One way that we can entrain that we’ve talked about is marching, off we go. And especially goose-stepping is a very great way to entrain people. As you see, it becomes quite mechanical,