Mind incarnate: from Dewey to Damasio

To be a human being requires a functioning human brain, in a living human body, interacting with complex physical, social, and cultural environments, in an ongoing flow of experience. What could be more self-evident than the fact that the human mind is intrinsically incarnate?

And yet, most people do not believe this. Traditional Western philosophical and religious traditions routinely assume the transcendence of mind over body. They assume that our inmost essence is mental and spiritual, which they regard as distinct from the bodily. To live in our culture is to unwittingly soak up the metaphysical mind-body dualism that pervades our commonsense views of cognition, knowledge, language, and values.

Until quite recently, only a handful of intellectually courageous philosophers have outspokenly embraced a nondualistic view of mind and pursued the radical implications of such a view. Baruch Spinoza stands out in this regard, followed much later by Friederich Nietzsche and then the pragmatic naturalists Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey in America, and also the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty in France.

Over the past twenty years, the situation in philosophy has begun to change. The terms 'embodied mind' and 'embodied cognition' have become buzzwords in psychology and the other cognitive sciences - and also, increasingly, in philosophy itself. Taking this change seriously is no small matter. If we give up the notion of a transcendent soul and a disembodied mind, then we must give up as well some of our most commonly cherished assumptions about what it means to be human.

Whenever philosophers want to challenge mind-body dualism, they nearly always criticize René Descartes (1596-1650) - with good reason. Descartes claimed that reflection on our inner experience demonstrates that bodies are physical substances, extended in space and time, whereas minds are mental substances, having no spatial extension. Bodily substance exhibits and supports one set of 'attributes' (e.g., digestion, perception, body movement, locomotion), whereas mental substance supports a quite different set of characteristics (e.g., thinking, willing, reasoning).

The appeal of the idea of disembodied mind - to Descartes and to many people today - appears to be based on three considerations.

First, if the mind exists apart from the body, then life after death would be metaphysically plausible because a 'mind-soul' might be able to...