On the Phenomenology of Reading and its Relation to the Embodied Mind

8/6/2019 On the Phenomenology of Reading and its Relation to the Embodied Mind

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On the Phenomenology of Reading

and its Relation to the Embodied Mind

Romke van der Meulen

April 29, 2011

Abstract

Examining the case of a person reading a book of fiction, I posit that phenomenologically, anunusual situation arises: the reader is no longer aware of the book, the pages, the words, butinstead becomes aware of the world of the story as if he or she were actually in this world.Using this unusual situation as a touchstone, I examine a range of theories that fall underthe umbrella term embodied mind. I begin with the question whether representation playsany role in the process of reading. Then I relate the sensorimotor approach to consciousnessto the conscious experience of reading. I proceed to examine enactivism in terms of meaningand its relation to reading, and finally end with the application of the extended mind to therelation between reader and book. I conclude that although embodied mind theories cangive interesting insights into the phenomenology of reading, their domain of focus is too farapart from reading to give any comprehensive explanation.

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own. - William Hazlitt

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his arent very new after all.- Abraham Lincoln

Student Human Machine Communications, Department of Artificial Intelligence, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen


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In stead, she is aware of a man walking through a desert. In this world, she isnot aware of herself as a participant, nor even as an observer. She seems to takesomething of a god-eye view: she can see the current scene from any angle shechooses, even from the perspective of one of the characters. Additionally, she hasaccess to the mans thoughts and feelings. The man is trying to get to an oasis to

find water. This is important to the man, therefore it is important to her.

In this essay, I will analyze how this situation relates to theories of the embedded, embodied,enacted and/or extended mind. Many of these theories deal with the phenomenology of everyday experience. It should prove interesting to see how they may be applied to this unusual phe-nomenon, especially as the transported mind becomes anything but embodied. By relating eachtheory and issue to this example, I hope to gain a better understanding of the phenomenologyof reading and at the same time highlight some of the strong points and/or shortcomings ofeach theory.

The issue of representation

One of the stumbling blocks of traditional cognitive theory, leading to renewed interest in thealternative of the embodied approach, was the problem of representation. Explicit mentalrepresentations or models of the world ran into a number of problems, such as the relevancy orframing problem. This led artificial intelligence researcher Rodney Brooks to begin his questfor intelligence without representation.3 He advocated an approach where the world was itsown model, and explicit representation was no longer necessary. He built robots that couldinteract with the environment by building layers of behaviour producing circuitry, each morecomplex. Though his approach has thus far been unsuccessful in approaching more complex

levels of behaviour, it does explicate one of the first questions we must ask about the givenexample. Is there a role for mental representation, and if so, what is it?

The approach of letting the world be its own model does not seem to apply here: there is ahuge different between the physical world, which consists of a woman holding a collection ofpaper and ink, and the phenomenal one, where the woman is present in a desert wasteland.Could it be possible that the text in the book triggers this experience in the woman withoutintervening representations? The traditional model of interpreting text is one of lexical parsing,sentence construction, all based on abstract, representational computation. A theory whichposits otherwise would be a radical departure.

Tim van Gelder offers such a theory.4

He suggests that cognition may be viewed as a very com-plex dynamical system, continually changing in concert with the changing world and adaptingits behavior. There is a certain elegance in interpreting the situation from the example usingthis theory. In this interpretation, the perception of the book is continually altering the womanin a complex dynamic manner, the phenomenological result of which is the woman experiencinga world other than the one she is physically in.

There is an immediacy in this interpretation that is lacking in the computational approach:the words on the page immediately trigger the woman to perceive new events in the imagined

3R.A. Brooks. Intelligence without representation. In: Artificial Intelligence 47.1-3 (1991), pp. 1391594Tim van Gelder. What Might Cognition Be, If Not Computation? In: The Journal of Philosophy 92.7

(1995), pp. 345381. url: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2941061

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world. The traditional approach would have the woman scanning the page, translating visualinput into representations of letters, a number of such perceptions would be combined to formwords, these combined to form sentences, and these in turn analyzed based on existing symbolicknowledge to interpret them semantically. And after all this, the computational approach wouldstill have to explain how the phenomenological experience of a different world can arise from

such processing.

The point of contention here is whether or not to define the imagined world itself as a representa-tion. Those in favor of computationalism would argue that the fact that the woman is aware of aworld that does not physically exist is itself proof of the existence of representation. To becomeaware of something that is not there, you must mentally represent it. Non-computationalistson the other hand might argue that the conscious experience of a non-existing world derivesdirectly from the perception of the book in a manner we do not currently understand.

I suggest that both positions are currently defensible but lacking. Non-computationalists stillhave to explain how reading, a skill taught and acquired in a manner that suggests mentalrepresentation, can give rise to meaning without the intervention of representation. Compu-

tationalists on the other hand have to explain how symbolic manipulation can give rise toconscious experience, especially one as rich and yet problematic as an entire imagined world.

Sensorimotor theory

The question of how consciousness can arise from physical processes, such as firing neurons,has been the subject of philosophical debate for over a century. In their sensorimotor theory,5

ORegan, Myin, and Noe explain this by referring to the special nature of the input of thosesensory neurons as they interact with the world. They identify two special properties of the

real world that are unique, allowing the mind to differentiate between direct observation of theworld and reliving a memory or imagining something. These properties are corporality andalerting capacity.

Corporality refers to the high degree in which input from the real world can differ from onemoment to the next. When we look at the world around us, we implicitly know that if we blink,our visual input will temporarily cease. If we turn our head, the input will drastically change,though we can still relate it to the previous input through extensive processing. This is not thecase in our imagination: when we imagine a certain object, the input will stay the same evenif we stand on our heads our close our eyes, and, according to ORegan et al., we are implicitlyaware of this fact. Thus the world around us has corporality, while the imagined world does

not.

Alerting capacity is the other distinguishing property of input from the real world around us. Ifwe remember the face of our grandmother, and we should at the next moment fail to include inthis input her glasses because we cannot remember what they looked like at the moment, we arenot immediately aware that the input has changed in any significant way. On the other hand, ifour grandmother were here and we looking at her, the sudden appearance or disappearance ofher glasses would be a cause of immediate attention. Attention to sudden changes is somethingthat is built into the sensory systems of many types of animals at a very low level. Thus, the

5J.K. ORegan, E. Myin, and A. Noe. Sensory consciousness explained (better) in terms of corporality andalerting capacity. In: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (2005), pp. 369387

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capacity of an input signal to trigger these mechanisms is a direct indication that this signalcomes to us from the real world, and not an imagined one.

According to this theory, the woman from our example should at all times be able to tell thatwhat she is perceiving (the desert, not the book) is not the real world: it has neither corporality

nor alerting capacity in the sense of this theory. I would say that it is self evident that thewoman can tell that she is reading, and the desert world is imaginary. Corporality and alertingcapacity seem like fine criteria by which the woman could make this judgment. Still, I have a fewnotes. Though neither corporality nor alerting capacity as defined by ORegan et a. are presentin the imaginary world, there are some properties of this world that are somewhat analogous,which might explain why this world could appear to the woman to be similar to the real world.

I will start with the issue of corporality. It is true that the womans view of the imaginaryworld is entirely uninfluenced by the position of her head. If she should close her eyes, however,something does occur. The imagined world does not disappear as the real world would. However,for the moment, the woman cannot read on, and so the story stalls for a time, remains suspended.This does not translate to the woman perceiving the hero of the story as somehow frozen in

mid-step. In stead, the imagined world continues on in the same state in which it was whenthe woman closed her eyes. When the woman closed her eyes, the hero was walking throughthe desert. While her eyes are closed, the man keeps walking and his world, though not frozen,does not change. Once she opens her eyes and reads on, the story progresses, and the imaginedworld starts changing again.

Furthermore, though the input that the woman gets from her imagined world does not drasti-cally change with the movement of her body, this does not mean that sudden changes in inputare precluded. It can be the case that the woman suddenly changes her perspective on theimagined scene, for example from a third person view to a first person view from the perspec-tive of the hero. Such sudden changes are different from a moving head, in that the input after

the change is only loosely connected to that before the change, where as a head movement willresult in a more connected, streaming change in input. But such streaming changes in inputare also entirely possible inside an imagined world, for instance when mentally perceiving a newvista that the hero encounters by slowly mentally rotating the view. The fact that we haveexperienced these input changes from reality all our live, is what enables us to perform a similarchange to input from our imagination.

On the matter of alerting capacity, again it is true that the woman will not encounter in herimagined world some input that will trigger change sensitive mechanisms in her eyes: her eyesare focused on the book, which hardly changes at all. But here we also encounter a type ofscenario which is similar to the physical alerting capacity. Imagine that a passage of the book

the woman was reading went like this:

With the sun beating down overhead, Thomas struggled onward, concentrating onlyon moving one foot at a time. Left foot, right foot, left foot... Each step seemed totake an eternity, and each held the promise of being his last.

Suddenly, his glazed eyes caught a glint as he was heaving himself forward. Fromthe corner of his eye, he had caught a star shining bright across the desert: a gleamof reflected light that held the promise of life saving, cleansing water on the horizon.

Reading this passage does not trigger the womans physical change perception. But mentally,by experiencing the imaginary world through the hero, she perceives the world as though her

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change perception had been engaged, endowing the gleam on the horizon with some kind ofvirtual alerting capacity.

I suggest that these variants of corporality and alerting capacity inside the imagined world aredissimilar enough from their real world counterparts for a person to be able to tell reality from

fiction. On the other hand, they have certain functional similarities, even in their phenomeno-logical perception. This parallel is what makes us perceive an imagined world as similar tothe real world, not only in the worlds own form and structure, but even down to the way weperceive such a world. When we read a book and enter an imaginary world, we do not seethat world like some computer wireframe, or experience the whole world at once, even thoughthe world may be in our mind as a whole. In stead, we perceive the imaginary world as wewould the real one: through virtual eyes we receive input from our imagination that has virtualcorporality and virtual alerting capacity.

The enactive approach to cognition

Enactivism is part of the biogenic approach to cognition, piloted by Maturana and Varela, whichanalyzes cognition in a bottom up approach by defining characteristics of all live, includingsingle celled organisms. They defined the autopoietic unit as any system with a semi-permeablemembrane produced within the system whose components are continually regenerated by thesystem itself.6 This system is continually interacting with its environment. It internally givesmeaning to parts of the environment as they relate to the system (sense-making), and it shapesits environment in its interactions, typically to improve its own living conditions. This entireidea is referred to as enactivism, and it has been equated with cognition by some.

The perspective of this theory as it applies to our example is quite interesting. The woman

here is the autopoietic unit, which is interacting with its environment, specifically the book.In her interaction, the woman assigns meaning to it. This meaning can be interpreted on twolevels. There is the meaning of the book as an object, and how the woman relates herself toit and books in general. More interesting, however, would be to interpret the imagined worldthe woman experiences as her attributed meaning to the book (or more specifically the currentpage). This would account for one very specific fact: that no two people by reading the samebook interpret it identically, or find themselves in identical imagined worlds.

Let us repeat the central point about this interaction: the environment has itsown structural dynamics and, although independent of the organism, it does not

prescribe or determine the changes in it. It induces a reaction in the organism, butthe accepted changes are determined by the internal structure of the organism itself.It is the structure of the living system and its previous history of perturbations thatdetermines what reactions the new perturbation will induce.6

Translating this low-level description of the enactive process and applying it to reading: twopeople will experience different imagined world because the nature of their interpretation ofthe text, their attributed meaning, the form of their imagined worlds, are determined by theirpersonality, history, natural tendencies and sociological upbringing.

6P.L. Luisi. Autopoiesis: a review and a reappraisal. In: Naturwissenschaften 90 (2003), pp. 4959

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Though enactivism thus provides an elegant answer to the difference between the imaginedworlds of different people, it makes no statements as to how exactly this sense-making, orattributed meaning, is done. Furthermore, though not explicitly so, the enactive approach iscentered around active interaction between the autopoietic unit and the environment. Perceivingis action. This might not apply very well to the activity of reading, where the environment (the

book) remains unchanged, static, and the activity of the woman is largely passive: she reads thebook, but does not alter the book by doing so. In a sense we have one way traffic: informationflows from the book to the woman, but not the other way around. The woman gives newmeaning to the book in her own personal imagined world, but this remains internal and doesnot influence her environment (unless we count the way in which the womans future actionson the environment are altered by her current experience).

There are a number of theories which go even further than enactivism in relating cognition toactivity. Hans Jonas7 and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone8 consider movement the defining criterionof living, cognitive beings. Such theories hardly seem applicable to reading, a process almostexclusively associated with sitting still. Still, there is a way in which we can see the imagined

world as an end-product of a process dependant foremost on movement. Let us ask ourselves:how can the woman imagine the man in the desert walking? She can imagine this becauseshe herself has seen other people walk. More importantly, she herself know what it is to walk,because she herself has walked. She has walked because through walking she came to knowabout the world she lived in. In such ways the motility centered theories do apply to ourexample.

But almost immediately, we can also cite another situation, that would be far harder to explainwith this line of reasoning. Suppose the woman comes to some passage in her book in which thehero has magically been granted the ability to fly. Once the hero takes flight, the woman canstill image the world in which this is possible. Moreover, she can imagine what the hero feelslike, flying through the air, even though she herself has never flown. Of course, her imaginationwill needs be an approximation of the feeling, but it phenomenologically present none the less.And conversely, we can also imagine a woman who was a quadriplegic from birth reading abook about a man walking, and being able to imagine what the man feels. This relates to otherphilosophical debates (Nagels What Is it Like to Be a Bat? springs to mind) which we willno discuss here, but at the very least it forms a question that the motility-centered approacheshave to answer.

Extended consciousness

Andy Clark and David Chalmers introduced the notion of the extended mind in 1998.9 Themind, they argued, is not isolated inside the skull: it leaks out. The prototypical example isa person doing long divisions, using a notepad to hold intermediate results. In this case thenotepad becomes an integral part of the cognitive process. Now, if some external item wassimilarly involved in one of the activities traditionally associated with mind, such as havingbeliefs, then we would have part of the mind external to the body, and thus extended into the

7Hans Jonas. The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. In: Delta, New York, 1966.Chap. Fouth essay: to Move and to Feel: on the Animal Soul, pp. 99107

8Maxine Sheets-Johnstone. Animation: the fundamental, essential, and properly descriptive concept. In:Continental Philosophy Review 42 (2009), pp. 375400

9Andy Clark and David Chalmers. The extended mind. In: Analysis 58.1 (1998), pp. 1023

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world. Clark and Chalmers provide a thought experiment which is meant to show just this.They present Otto, an Alzheimer patient who carries a notebook in which he notes facts hewishes to remember. They argue that, as it is written in the notebook that the museum is on53rd street, it might be reasonably said that Otto has the belief that the museum is on 53rdstreet, even though that belief happens to be stored in a notebook instead of the brain.

Of all theories presented in this paper, this theory seems to fit our example the best. However,we must first determine whether it strictly applies. Does the book qualify as part of extendedcognition, or even of extended mind? Not surprisingly, none of the examples described by Clarkis directly comparable to our situation. To make an intelligent determination anyway, I willapply the parity principle:

If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, wereit to go on in the head, we would have no hesitation in accepting as part of thecognitive process, then that part of the world is (for that time) part of the cognitiveprocess.9

Now, if the part played by the book in our example were instead located inside the womanshead, then the woman would be imagining the story of the man walking through the desertentirely on her own, and this would most certainly be referred to as a cognitive process. Inthis sense, it would be logical to refer to the book as part of the womans extended cognition.On the other hand, there is an important difference between the book and other objects thatClark often cites as examples of extended cognition, and this is that the woman has neitherwritten the book, nor is she altering it as she reads, nor has she necessarily consciously endorsedthe contents of the book before. These are all properties that Clark associates with extendedcognition.

Let us for the moment assume that the book qualifies as part of the womans extended cog-nitive process as she reads. Then, since the activity we are talking about, imagination, is onetraditionally associated with the mind, we may also say that the book is part of the womansextended mind. Interpreting the scene from our example in this way does seem to make sense:the woman forms an extended mind by including the book, and in this way is able to do some-thing she would otherwise not be able to: to imagine the entire story as it is written in thebook.

This also has another nice feature when compared to some of the previous theories. In thepreviously discussed theories, the book was accorded little to no special status: it was simplypart of the womans environment, a trigger for the imagined world, but the woman herself

did all the work. This does not match our intuitive understanding of reading: the resultantimagined world is caused in part by the contents of the book and in part by the imaginationof the woman, which is shaped by her personal history. The extended mind story matches thisintuition more closely.

I would propose taking the analysis one step further: instead of the book being part of thewomans extended mind, can we not more accurately claim that it is part of her extendedconsciousness? After all, the process involved does not only influence the womans mind, itradically alters her conscious experience.

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David Chalmers already addresses the question of extended consciousness in his foreword toClarks Supersizing the Mind:

what about the big question: extended consciousness? The dispositional beliefs,cognitive processes, perceptual mechanisms, and moods [...] extend beyond theborders of consciousness, and it is plausible that it is precisely the non-consciouspart of them that is extended.10

But where Chalmers suggests that only non-conscious parts of cognition are extended, I wouldargue that our example, in which a woman is transported out of her environment and is consciousof an entirely different world, qualifies exactly as that: extended consciousness. As I said: theconscious experience here derives in part from the womans imagination and in part from thewords in the book. Together they form a system, and the imagined world is the result.

Conclusion

When trying to analyze the situation of a transported reader using embodied approaches, onewould expect there to be little overlap: the embodied philosophies heavily rely, by design, onthe body, whereas reading is an activity in which the physical body plays no big role. Still, wehave seen an unexpected result in that embodied mind theories can be related to this situation.Non-computational, non-representational theories have given us an alternative to the classicsymbolic theories of reading which might account for the phenomenological transparency of thewords as the readers becomes less conscious of the text itself and more of the imagined world.ORegan et al.s sensorimotor theory has shown us a possible way in which we can distinguish

the imagined world from the real one, and yet have them be similar in a way that accountsfor the similarity of the experience of imagined worlds as compared to experience of the realworld. Enactivism has given us a plausible reason why the imagined world will be unique foreach reader, as each readers imagination is formed by their entire history and form as a being.And most importantly, the concept of the book being part of the readers extended mind andeven extended consciousness provides an elegant description of the phenomenon of reader andbook as a whole.

On the other hand, we have seen a number of occasions where embodied theories failed to applyto reading, focused as they are on the body, the low-level processes, biology, motility, activeinteraction with the environment and other aspects of cognition that may be salient in day to

day experience, but are entirely absent in a reader whose only activity during reading is theoccasional turning of the page. And while traditional, computational, representational cognitiondoes not answer the hard question of how the experience of the imagined world arrives from theperception and processing of the text in the book, neither does non-representational, embodiedcognition yet have any explanation in what mystical way the perception of the book triggers inthe reader the imagined world.

10David Chalmers. Supersizing the Mind. In: Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009. Chap. Foreword, pp. ixxviii

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In conclusion, I would say that although embodied theories can give interesting insights intothe experience of reading, the domain of focus for embodied cognition is too far apart from thatof reading as a phenomenological fringe case. On the other hand, we might end on the positivenote that when embodied theories of cognition have grown mature enough to be able to explainthe conscious experience of imagination and reading, it will have proven itself as a serious and

comprehensive theory of mind.

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On the Phenomenology of Reading and its Relation to the Embodied Mind