American philosopher Shaun Gallagher (b. 1948) is one of the world’s leading thinkers in the field of embodied and social cognition. In this interview, he discusses his understanding of enactivism and how it relates to questions about embodiment, social institutions, and emerging technologies. According to enactivism, mental capacities like perception, memory, or thinking are not only the result of the skull-bound machinery of the brain but constituted through interactions of individuals with their environment – and this has manifold implications for our understanding of the social and technological world and their role in our cognition.
Shaun Gallagher was in Finland in September for the philosophy of mind conference “Action in Perception 2024: Presence, Art, Making, Life”, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the book Action in Perception (2004) by his friend and colleague Alva Noë. In this book, Noë develops the enactivist claim that “perception is not something that happens to us […] It is something we do”1Alva Noë, Action in Perception. MIT Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 2004, 1., creating a theory according to which our perceptual experiences are dependent on movement – on “sensorimotor activity” – in the world. Bringing together key thinkers in the field, the conference aimed to reassess the main ideas of enactivism and embodied cognition and their wide-ranging influences on questions in philosophy of mind, aesthetics, psychology, and ethics of technology.
Gallagher’s own work touches upon all of these topics and ranges from thinking about embodiment and movement to intersubjectivity, empathy, psychopathology, and the role of narratives in human interaction. He has developed an enactivist approach to cognition rooted in ideas from phenomenology and hermeneutics. Tapping into further explanatory potentials of enactivism, he combines an action-oriented account of cognition with critical theory, thinking about the ways society and its institutions and structures shape experiences, for better and for worse.
Interdisciplinary exchange has been instrumental to Gallagher’s work in order to better understand the mutual directions of influence between brain, body, and the social and material world. Together with collaborators from cognitive neuroscience, he has specified different dimensions of our bodily self by investigating individuals with acute sensory neuropathy (a diminished sense of location and self-movement and a partial loss of touch).2Shaun Gallagher & Jonathan Cole, “Body Image and Body Schema in a Deafferented Subject”. Journal of Mind and Behavior. Vol. 16, 1998, 369–390. These dimensions have been termed body schema and body image, and they refer to how we move in space and how we perceive our own bodies. This conceptual distinction has also turned out to be fruitful for understanding psychopathological phenomena like eating disorders or schizophrenia.3Aviya Ben David & Yochai Ataria, “The Body Image-Body Schema/Ownership-Agency Model For Pathologies: Four Case Studies”. Yochai Ataria, Shogo Tanaka & Shaun Gallagher (Eds.), Body Schema and Body Image: New Directions. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2021, 328–347.
On a macro level of analysis, Gallagher has investigated how also our engagement with the larger social world still rests on body-based capacities for cognition. He has introduced the notions of the “socially extended mind”4Shaun Gallagher, “The Socially Extended Mind”. Cognitive Systems Research. Vol. 25, 2013, 4–12. and “mental institutions”5Shaun Gallagher & Anthony Crisafi, “Mental Institutions”. Topoi. Vol. 28, 2009, 45–51.. Institutions in this broad sense, starting from language to the legal system or media and from architectural arrangements to corporations and cryptocurrencies, can, for one, be seen as collective tools that support our practical and cognitive capacities.Then again, these highly complex and shared “tools” may also cause harm to their users because their complexity and consequences are difficult to oversee. As “socially extended minds”, we are particularly susceptible to this harm, as these institutions appear as self-evident and neutral means to navigate the social world. These potential risks have become especially pressing in the wake of the rapid development of AI-based digital technologies.
How would you summarize the key idea of enactivism?
Enactive approaches to cognition are really action-oriented approaches. There are a lot of different types of enactivism – sensorimotor enactivism, autopoietic enactivism, radical enactivism – but I think that in all of them the common element is that action is the kind of motivating or central concept to take into account. Whether we take it into account by approaching it from the perspective of sensorimotor mechanisms6Noë 2004. or thinking of it in terms of dynamical systems theory7Andreas Weber & Francisco Varela, “Life after Kant: Natural Purposes and the Autopoietic Foundations of Biological Individuality”. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. No. 1, 2002, 97–125., we’re in some sense always trying to think of it in terms of a systemic approach. Some people might refer to it as a holistic approach that takes the brain, body and environment together as the unit of explanation rather than just the brain or just what’s going on inside the head, for example.
One important conceptual distinction in your work is the one between the body schema and the body image which you have developed on the basis of the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) and early neuroscientists like Sir Henry Head (1861–1940), as well as in collaboration with contemporary neuroscientists. The distinction ties in with the embodied-enactive perspective in an interesting way, but also brings with it a social aspect. How do you see the role of embodiment in what we are as subjects in the social world?
We can think of embodiment – if we think along the lines of phenomenology and especially the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty – as involving a number of different aspects, of course. But one has to do with the body schematic processes, which are very closely related to the type of thing that Alva Noë talks about in Action in Perception. These are sensorimotor processes, but specifically for motor control. They have to do with our posture, our ability to move around the world, our ability to reach out and grasp things and do things with the world. All of this ties very closely to the enactive approach.
So body schematic processes are, mainly, some would say, sub-personal processes: not necessarily conscious, although one can become conscious of them. But they are processes that shape perception – that shape the way we encounter the world. So if, for example, we’re disabled and in a wheelchair, then our perception of the world is somewhat different from being able to stand up and walk around and get around that way. The body schema is therefore all about movement, motor control, and our abilities to walk around the world.
The body image, in turn, has to do more with our awareness of our own body. This awareness can come in a number of different forms, but oftentimes it is visual awareness of our body. How does it look? How does it look to others? Suddenly there’s a social element. However I would say that there’s a social element in body schematic processes, too. We might move differently when we’re with different kinds of people and so forth. But the body image, of course, has a role to play in thinking about certain pathologies: phenomena like anorexia, for example, involve body image problems. You could also think of some of the body image problems that arise maybe due to social context. There has been a lot of work done on cultural products that are marketed in ways that convince people to be much more attuned – much more attentive – to their bodily appearance, and some of these issues have been addressed by critical theory perspectives that say “this is what culture is doing to us”. So there is a kind of institutional effect that is not necessarily a good one.
This connects to your recent book Action and Interaction (2020) in which you make an intriguing link between enactivism and critical theory, also in the more specific sense of the Frankfurt School. These are two different strands of theory which at first glance do not appear as combinable. One is a theory about cognition and embodiment, the other about social structures or social injustice. Put differently, critical theory analyzes the potential harmful effects of institutions on individuals. Enactivist approaches, in turn, have mainly focused on how the bodily actions of an individual and social interactions between individuals shape cognition.
But then the environment comes into play here, right? It’s not just the brain, it’s not just the body, but it’s also the brain-body-environment. And the environment is a social environment that’s organized in a certain fashion: we might say that the social environment is organized in the same way that the physical layout of the room is organized. And one of the things that organizes the social environment are institutions.
I’ve done some work on what I refer to as the ‘socially extended mind’. I’m talking about, specifically, cognitive institutions – institutions that serve an epistemic function, for example – and how these institutions start to get formed out of our intersubjective interactions with other people. But then these institutions, in some respects, take on a life of their own and then loop back into our social relations and start to shape them – sometimes shaping them in good and productive ways, but other times shaping them in ways that start to distort our social interactions. It’s just here that a question comes up about whether these institutions are doing a good job, or if they’re not doing such a good job: if they are in fact organized in such a way that they distort our cognitive processes and our social relationships. At that point critique is important.
”I think that cognitive science, even enactive cognitive science, is an attempt to explain how things work. But once we know how they work and then see that maybe they’re not working quite the way we want them to work, then there’s plenty of room for critical theory to come into play and ask: Now what should we do? How should we reorganize and make these kinds of institutions better for us?”
I think that cognitive science, even enactive cognitive science, is an attempt to explain how things work. But once we know how they work and then see that maybe they’re not working quite the way we want them to work, then there’s plenty of room for critical theory to come into play and ask: Now what should we do? How should we reorganize and make these kinds of institutions better for us?
The Mind, Body, and Technology
In yesterday’s panel discussion about the mind, body, and how technologies shape us8”Mind, Body, Technology: The Big Unanswered Questions”. Think Corner, University of Helsinki, September 5, 2024. you referred to the phenomenological idea of transparency and mentioned a threefold distinction between how we engage with technological tools. You suggested that it might be useful to distinguish between experiential, epistemic, and hermeneutical transparency. Could you elaborate on this and are there specific social problems associated with the lack of transparency?
I should say that the first and second are very much discussed in the literature, the third one is something I’m just sort of throwing in there as a complication.
The first one is experiential transparency and that’s closely tied to the notion of the body schema that we talked about. One can think about how we use and incorporate tools. I think I used Heidegger’s example of the hammer and how a carpenter who can pick up a hammer knows how to use it – he doesn’t have to think about it, and it’s almost as if it’s an extension of his own hand.9Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927). Translated by J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson. SCM Press, London 1962. Technology also can work that way. We can be so accustomed to using a technology we don’t even notice that we’re using it. We don’t think about it – and in that case, this can be a virtue. We want some technologies to be just like that: we don’t want the actual mechanisms to get in the way of our use of them. So experiential transparency is something good with many kinds of technologies. Virtual reality, for example, is one example that I think of.
”We can be so accustomed to using a technology we don’t even notice that we’re using it.”
The second kind of transparency is epistemic transparency. In this case, I think, a lot of people would like to know how things work. So epistemic transparency is the idea that if a technology is epistemically transparent, then we know how it works and we have a pretty good understanding of how to control it and so forth. There are different perspectives involved: we can think of whether the engineer understands it, or whether the user understands it – and these might be different understandings. A user may not know precisely how a technology works but may understand what the technology can do, and that’s also a kind of epistemic transparency. Finally, there are questions about whether epistemic transparency is something important or not: something to really worry about or not.
The third kind, I’ve called hermeneutical transparency where hermeneutics, in this particular case, has to do with a kind of self-understanding. The issue here is whether we understand what the technology is doing to us. So, when we engage and use the technology, it might be experientially transparent and it’s easy to use, but then, we might use it so often that it starts to change us, and the question is whether we understand those changes and whether we understand how that technology could change our minds in ways that we didn’t expect – or could hijack our minds in a certain way. There are some examples of this in artificial intelligence.
So those are the three different conceptions. I think that the third one, the hermeneutical conception, is closely related to questions about ethics and why we might be or should be concerned about what technology is doing and how it operates. And maybe that’s the reason why we do need epistemic transparency to understand how it works. Then we can maybe figure out what it’s doing to us and solve the hermeneutic transparency issue.
You also seem to be skeptical about the idea of “mind uploading” – the idea that the mind could be uploaded to a “computer”. What does this idea amount to and what are the theoretical presumptions for this idea in the first place? And do you or why do you think that the prospects for such a mind uploading to be possible are rather bleak?
I think the very idea of mind uploading is predicated on the highly cognitivist notion that our brains are functioning like computers: that brains are simply processing information in some fashion and that our brains could then be replicated in silicon, because it’s the same computational functions and we just carry them over into a different material base. If we could create computers that are sophisticated enough, fast enough and close enough to how the brain actually operates, we could simply transfer the information processed in the brain: just transfer that information that purportedly makes us who we are, upload it to the computer and there we are. Some people have talked about this as a form of “life after death”: the biological body can die, but we can still have the person’s information and therefore have just what the person is. Now, I think enactive and embodied approaches really have questioned that, since what is uploaded seems to be supposedly a form of identity that does not depend on biology or embodiment. The body is simply unimportant, and that’s exactly what is being challenged by embodied and enactive approaches.
So, the enactivist challenge to the very idea that cognition and our own personal identity are simply brain-bound – something that happens in the head – would also be a challenge to the very notion of uploading.
In that sense, could we also say that an enactivist perspective is a corrective to maybe naïve or overly science fiction-driven approaches to ourselves and our minds?
The word naïve is interesting because some of these approaches are very sophisticated, right? We have computational models that are very sophisticated. But the question is whether they capture in the right way the very workings of cognition, or whether that’s a kind of distortion or inadequate, or just a mistake, in trying to explain cognition that way.
