It is improper, or at least it seems so to us, to say that the soul, the spirit, or intelligence are embodied. If it were so, we would thus return to a dualistic conception of human nature. Such dualism is always present in the tradition of Western thought, though it is often disguised in forms that, rightly or wrongly, are deemed politically more correct. Today nearly all cognitive scientists declare themselves to be monists and physicalists. Nevertheless, the conception still dominant today about the cognitive structure of humans and their functions draws a clear-cut and apparently unsolvable division between linguistic-cognitive processes and sensory-motor processes. It matters little that everybody admits that both are in some way referable to the biological physicality of the brain. The brain, according to classical cognitivism, is divorced from the body and conceived of as a box of algorithmic wonders.
Classical cognitivism sees the body as an appendix of little or no interest for decoding the supposed algorithms reportedly presiding over our cognitive life. Such is a cognitive life with very little vitality, totally divorced not only from effectual reality, as we try to show here, but also from our daily phenomenal experience. It is not by chance that the language usually used to describe cognitive processes is borrowed from artificial intelligence: algorithms, information processing, etc.
Humans, however, cannot be assimilated to information-processing entities. Even less acceptable is the thesis that the concept of meaning is wholly assimilable to the concept of information. Classical cognitivism has maintained for decades that intelligence depends on the algorithms that substantiate it and not on the material substrata on which the algorithms themselves are believed to be implemented. This is the so-called principle of the multiple realizability of cognitive processes. Embodied Simulation and its relation to language and cognition casts severe doubts on this principle and adds arguments in support of the thesis that human cognition is tightly and necessarily dependent on the kind of body we have. As such, the mechanism of Embodied Simulation and the role it plays in human cognition provide further arguments in support of the idea that the principle of multiple realizability is false. We are who we are because we evolved by adapting to a physical world that obeys a series of physical laws, such as that of gravity.
As the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin wrote in his 1886 Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur, if we were exclusively optical creatures, aesthetic judgment of the physical world would be precluded to us. Are the amazement and sense of elevation transmitted to us by the contemplation of a Gothic cathedral conceivable in purely algorithmic terms? Is it conceivable to divorce aesthetic experience from our daily muscular, tactile, and viscero-motor experience of reality? Wölfflin (and together with him many others, among them Merleau-Ponty) maintained it was not, and we think that he was right.
We believe that our “natural” propensity to dualism is, on the one side, the product of our being asymmetrically positioned between mind and body, as Helmuth Plessner (2006) maintained. We are corporeal beings, but at the same time we maintain that we have a body. On the other side, the account of the historical result of the progressive de-centralization of the anthropological dimension leads us to be dualist. We are no longer the living image of God, we are no longer at the centre of the universe, and perhaps in post-modern times we are no longer even subjects or selves. What are we left with but with the claim of the total otherness and discontinuity of our cognitive social life and its underlying processes? Their immaterial nature, or more exactly their total otherness in relation to a corporeity whose animal origin or essence is—evolutionarily speaking—pretty much clear, is perhaps the only way of reaffirming our uniqueness. The dualism between mind and body become, thus, a mechanism of defence. The so-called mental Rubicon that separates us from other non-human living beings is a very powerful anti-depressive argument for a disorientated humanity.
At this point, however, a clarification is required in order to avoid unpleasant misunderstandings. It is beyond doubt that the least intelligent among humans is incommensurably different and other in relation to the most intelligent among chimpanzees, despite their almost complete sharing of a genetic endowment. The point is that this quantum leap can be explained, perhaps, by remaining within an evolutionary framework that does not look for discontinuities founded on theories of “cognitive catastrophes,” genetic big bangs (as in the case of the so-called “grammar gene” invoked by Pinker), and so forth. The mysterious uniqueness—and loneliness—of humankind in the universe proves more comprehensible, or at least more easily approachable, if empirically investigated after having set aside the anti-continuist and self-consoling recipes of classic cognitive science. In our continuist approach, humankind is not special, because his evolution follows the same laws that regulate evolution of all other animals and is in continuity with evolutionary paths of other animals. However, our peculiar evolutionary path leaded us to acquire species-specific characteristics that only human beings share.
Sigmund Freud realized long before others how much the self is a bodily self (1923). Freud also helped us to understand how little we know about who we are, particularly when aspiring to ground this knowledge solely on self-questioning rationality. What are the drives of which Freud spoke but a further manifestation of the double status of our flesh? We are Körper (objectual and represented body) and Leib (lived body), as Edmund Husserl maintained. Today cognitive neuroscience can shed new light on the Leib by investigating the Körper. The point is not to reduce the Leib to the Körper, but to understand that the empirical investigation of the Körper can tell us new things about the Leib.