The Cosmos Forum calls for a re-enchantment of the unity of humans and their environment. The tradition of western science and technology introduced its opposite: the sharp distinction between mind and physical matter, required by the distance between observer and observation (the core of science) and of control (the core of technology). This dualistic paradigm has become dominant worldwide, and a key component of our modern ecological crisis.
My lecture will examine a growing trend that may contribute to help beyond this mind-body, human-environment split. This trend takes its roots from scientific research itself since modern science has recently taken as its own object the study of mind itself - the cognitive and brain sciences, the science and technology of cognition (STC), which are undergoing a revolution today.
It is necessary to distinguish two steps in the evolution of the STC. In a first stage (1950-1970) they were based on the traditional mind-body split, and adopted the notion of cognition as some form of computational mechanism, i.e. the mind is the software and the brain the hardware. The basic tenet here is that all cognitive functions are , in the end, a set of rules handling symbolic entities that represent correctly items of the world. This computationalist doctrine was dominant for many years, and it is still the common sense in the large public. From this point of view, the mind is necessarily in the head, and is largely representational machinery for control and action.
But the last 15years have witnessed the ascent of an alternative view, that of embodied or enactive cognition. This new wave arose because the computationalist doctrine failed to account even for the most elementary coping with the world: walking, perceiving object in a natural setting, imagination. Slowly the cards turned into considering that the basis of mind is the body in coupled action, that is, the sensory-motor circuits establish the organism as viable in situated contexts. Form this perspective the brain appears as a dynamical process (and not a syntactic one) of real time variables with a rich self-organizing capacity (and not a representational machinery). So in this sense the mind is not in the head since it is roots in the body as a whole and also in the extended environment where the organism finds itself.
Beyond embodied enaction, recent work with young children and monkeys (1995-) has re-discovered the profound importance of the coupling with other conspecifics. This means that the constitution of a mind is always concurrent with the extended presence of other minds in a network. Thus, beyond embodied enaction there is also generative enaction, a trend that points to the beginnings of a science or interbeing, the future for a proper understanding of the necessary unity of mind and nature.