Abstract
This book contributes to the idea that to have an understanding of the mind, consciousness, or cognition, a detailed scientific and phenomenological understanding of the body is essential.
There is still a need to develop a common vocabulary that is capable of integrating discussions of brain mechanisms in neuroscience, behavioral expressions in psychology, design concerns in artificial intelligence and robotics, and debates about embodied experience in the phenomenology and philosophy of mind. This book helps to formulate this common vocabulary by developing a conceptual framework that avoids both the overly reductionistic approaches that explain everything in terms of bottom-up neuronal mechanisms, and the in flationistic approaches that explain everything in terms of Cartesian, top-down cognitive states.
Through discussions of neonate imitation, the Molyneux problem, gesture, self-awareness, free will, social cognition and intersubjectivity, as well as pathologies (such as deafferentation, unilateral neglect, phantom limb, autism and schizophrenia), the book proposes to remap the conceptual landscape by revitalizing the concepts of body image and body schema, proprioception, ecological experience, intermodal perception, and enactive concepts of ownership and agency for action.
Informed by both philosophical theory and scientific evidence, it addresses two basic sets of questions that concern the structure of embodied experience.
First, questions about the phenomenal aspects of that structure, specifically the relatively regular and constant phenomenal features found in the content of experience.
Second, questions about aspects of the structure of consciousness that are more hidden, those that may be more difficult to get at because they happen before one knows it, and do not normally enter into the phenomenal content of experience in an explicit way.
The body schema is innate or not?
Some philosophers and psychologists discussed this question through different opinions.
The traditional view of psychology and philosophy holds that consciousness and experience are the source of the development of body intentions and body schema;
Empiricist think that, conscious experience is the origin of things such as body intentions and body schema.
Eight theorists have demonstrated through their experiments whether the baby has the ability to imitate. Experiments from infants born less than an hour to infants six months old. Piaget and Merleau-Ponty think that, invisible imitation is impossible in 8-12 months ago baby(the body's movements are tactile and sensational to the baby, not visual). But Meltzoff and Moore had a definitely different opinion, their experiments show that invisible imitation exists in newborns, even in infants born less than an hour.
Is the body image innate?
Studies of infant imitation have shown that infants have both a primitive body pattern and a degree of proprioceptive perception. They both provided the baby with an awareness of their abilities. But the human body image is produced in the interaction between the proprioception and the multi-modality and subject of the other's facial vision. Therefore, the body image is not inherently possessed, although the ability to develop a body image can be practiced from birth.
Meltzoff and Moore proposed a psycho-cognitive model, in a multimodal system, proprioception and vision are interrelated. In some cases, what people see is automatically converted into a proprioception of how to move. On this basis, visual perception can help organize information and coordinate movements, and can correct distortions or illusions generated by proprioception. The duality of proprioception is both unconscious and physiological information.
There are two concepts involved here:
1. vision and performance awareness can communicate in multiplex ways.
2. Sensory systems(vision and PA) and motion systems(physiological information) can communicate together.
In order to make invisible imitation possible, Merleau-Ponty proposed "I need to translate my visual image of others (gestures) into (my own) action language."
Opinion:
The above views about newborn imitation can apply in our project about new body language transformation and make us deeply thinking.
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