Our Own Minds: Sociocultural Grounds for Self-Consciousness (Bradford Books)

But I have argued more extensively elsewhere Malafouris , in press a , forthcoming , and I will argue again in this paper, that the above view of mind and self does not necessarily has to be the case. But let us first start with the commonplace. As mentioned, the ring was recovered from the famous Grave Circle A at Mycenae.

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It was intentionally placed there most probably as part of the elaborate funerary depositional processes that we witness in the early Mycenaean funerary record. Intentional burial is, of course, one of those unique behavioural traits of the sapient mind that we can take for granted in the late European prehistory. What it signifies in this case is the emergence of a new, i. By the same token, the change from single contracted to collective extended inhumations that took place during that period in the Greek mainland Dickinson ; Rutter ; Voutsaki does not tell us anything about the human symbolic capacity and self-awareness per se but simply signifies one of the countless possibilities about how this symbolic capacity can become actualized and transmitted in ritual, and thus cultural, time and space.

Separating biology from culture may sometimes make good analytic sense but it should not obscure the most interesting issue of how they are combined.

Radu Bogdan (Tulane University): Publications - PhilPeople

Thus, it might be useful to remind ourselves that behind the intentional deposition of the ring as a funerary gift beside the dead Mycenaean body lays an autonoetic Tulving , conceptualization of human selfhood. This autonoetic self, although embodies millennia of cognitive evolution, needs to be instantiated anew, generation after generation, in cultural space and time.

Through the act of burial and intentional deposition, the human sense of personal identity and continuity transcends the limits of human biology projecting into the supernatural realm of post-mortem personal continuity. For now, having made those basic points concerning the ring as a funerary offering and as a part of the burial practice, it is important to keep in mind that, most probably, this ritual or funerary dimension of the ring constitutes only a small part, probably the last part, of its cultural biography and life history.

Thus, more important to consider is the possible efficacy of the ring as a component of the Mycenaean-lived body and phenomenal self. To this end, already, simply by looking at the variety of material and personal ornaments arrayed around the Mycenaean dead body from the same context that this ring was found Dickinson , one can get a first idea about the range of biographical possibilities Kopytoff , p.

This new awareness is testified in a number of important changes, one of which is the emphasis on the depiction of the human figure, and of the Mycenaean warrior in particular, that we see emblematized and commemorated on the signet ring. Or, is it simply that new techniques of the body Mauss [] and of social memory become active or available during that period? Whatever the correct answer, the fact remains that, from a long-term perspective, artefacts like the ring potentially signify important changes in the Mycenaean experience and understanding of what means to be a self and having a body.

Thus, the critical question we need to tackle concerns the precise nature of the relation between the Mycenaean ring and the Mycenaean self in the above process of cultural change. That is, we need to ask what the ring does and how it might have affected the Mycenaean self and body. What, in other words, is the causal efficacy of the ring in the Mycenaean cognitive and self-system? These are the sort of questions I wish to explore in the following sections by introducing the notions of extended self and tectonoetic awareness.

To begin with, let me clarify that the notion of extended self I propose here is not confined to the temporal autobiographic dimension of personal continuity, or else the sense of oneself as an individual existing over time, that Neisser proposed. Even though the self is by nature grounded and inextricably bound up with the body, it also escapes the natural confines of any single body or brain.

The extended self I am proposing here is not simply a self embodied; it is a self enacted through the act of embodying. This minor shift in perspective, from embodiment to the act of embodying , has some important implications that should be better spelled out. No doubt, with the advent of the embodied cognition approach, a successful step has been made towards resolving the traditional mind—body dichotomy. Despite stretching the mind as far as the body's surface, the conventional use and understanding of the embodied character of the human cognitive agent remains, more often than not, trapped inside the biological boundaries of the individual.

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Consequently, the traditional drawback of cognitive science, i. Obviously, the purpose of the above remarks is not to dispute the close interdependence of hand and brain function. What I am suggesting here is nothing more than what the classical phenomenological question of the blind man's stick pointed out some decades ago: Where does the blind man's self begin?

More simply, if there is such a thing as the embodied self, then it is a self that constantly projects and extends itself beyond the skin actively engaging and incorporating its material surroundings via the interface of the body. Embodiment is not a delimiting property—far from it. It is instead the main perturbatory channel through which the world touches us , is attached to us and even becomes part of us. But how does all these hold up against empirical evidence?

At first sight, the above premises might seem difficult to follow from the perspective of neuroscience. For one thing, understanding the precise effects of things on the functional anatomy of the human brain is not an easy task and the evidence that bears on this question is hard to come by, especially in humans.

Nonetheless, recent studies of visuotactile interactions exploring the effects of the temporary or permanent incorporation of inanimate objects such as clothes, jewellery, tools, etc. Thus, a more careful look at some recent findings in this domain, combined and informed with some classical phenomenological observations, might help us expose some basic aspects of the hidden bio-social anatomy of extended selfhood.

Both animal and human neurophysiological studies show clear evidence that these two types of behavioural space are not represented homogeneously in the brain. What is more significant for our present purposes, however, is that this neural dissociation between near and far spaces can be associated with the use of tools.

This case study published originally at Neuroreport Aglioti et al. The peculiarity of this case was that the patient while able to see and describe the rings she had worn for years and was currently wearing on her left, now disowned hand, she resolutely denied their ownership.

Our own minds : sociocultural grounds for self-consciousness

What makes this case even more interesting is that the patient immediately recognized these rings as her own when they were shifted to her right hand or displayed in front of her. In fact, not only she could identify the rings as her own but also was able to produce a great deal of autobiographical information about them. We should also note that the patient could easily acknowledge ownership of other personal belongings e. Neurological findings, such as those presented above, cannot be easily extrapolated to fit our proposed scheme of extended selfhood.

Nonetheless, they offer valuable indications and often resonate with our key premise that objects and tools attached to the body can be seen or treated as parts of the body as the biological body itself.

From the perspective of archaeology and the material engagement approach, the crucial question lies on how precisely do we go about to understand the nature of these systematic associations between biology and culture or brains and things. This brings us to the notion of tectonoetic awareness. I introduce this term for two main reasons. First, in order to signify the form of enactive knowing through that characterizes human self-awareness in the context of material engagement.

A good way to illustrate the key property and distinctive feature of tectonoetic awareness relevant to our previous discussion of extended selfhood is by placing it against the background of the distinction between noetic and autonoetic consciousness initially proposed by Tulving in his Elements of episodic memory This will also enable us to link our discussion of self with the issue of memory, which, we should not forget, is probably the key property for the constitution of self as a historical object. For Tulving, the key difference between noetic and autonoetic awareness lies in the following: Thus, for Tulving, autonoetic consciousness is the defining property of episodic memory, whereas noetic awareness is identified with semantic memory.

Seen from the angle of our previous considerations, two major drawbacks can be easily identified relevant to this model. On the other hand, although according to Tulving , , episodic memory develops later in ontogeny compared with semantic memory, his theory offers no specific guidelines about how the two memory systems interact in the course of their developmental ontogenetic and phylogenetic trajectories.

Thus, Tulving's interpretation of infantile amnesia, as associated with the absence of a truly developed episodic memory and self-awareness prior to the age of five, leave us with no explanation about what makes possible this transition from noetic awareness to autonoetic self-awareness. Following that one may argue that the notions of noetic and autonoetic awareness, although successfully pointing out the significance of subjective time and remembrance in the constitution of self, lack the ecological grounding that would have enabled the material anchoring of autonoetic consciousness.

This is precisely the role that tectonoetic awareness comes to play signifying the active mediating role of material culture in the ontogenetic and phylogenetic passage from noetic to autonoetic consciousness. The basic assumption behind tectonoetic awareness is simple: Tectonoetic consciousness should not be understood as a distinct separate stage between the two—although this can be argued to be the case from an ontogenetic viewpoint—but as a scaffolding process of ongoing structural coupling that grounds in action and integrates the noetic and autonoetic aspects of selfhood.

But where does all this leave us? How the above theoretical premises can help us answer our previous question about the causal efficacy and relationship of the ring with the Mycenaean self-system? Elsewhere I have used the example of the blind man's stick to develop a hypothesis proposing that the functional structure and anatomy of the human brain is a dynamic construct remodelled in detail by behaviourally important experiences which are mediated, and often constituted by the use of material objects and artefacts which for that reason should be seen as continuous integral parts of the human cognitive architecture Malafouris forthcoming.

I suggest that the relationship between tectonoetic awareness and the Mycenaean ring can be understood along similar lines. In particular, the thing we should probably note first is that the ring, beyond its significance as a personal ornament, embodies strong mnemonic potential. Objects are culturally constructed to connote and consolidate the possession of past events associated with their use or ownership.

They are there to be talked about and invested with the memories and striking events associated with their use. The link between past, present and future is made through their materiality. Objects of a durable kind assert their own memories, their own forms of commentary and therefore come to possess their own personal trajectories. First, the biological limits of working memory 7 plus or minus 2; Miller no longer apply.

Second, the structure of the cognitive process has changed. The ring has reorganized the circuitry and thus the nature of the cognitive operations involved. The noetic, semantic knowing, grounded in the physical and thus permanent structure of the ring is transformed to an autonoetic, episodic remembering, which is now constitutively intertwined with the ring's social life figure 1. Thus, the ring as a portable and transparent bodily attachment enables the passage to explicit self-recognition through objectification.

It should be borne in mind that the importance of the physicality of the artefact derives from its ability to act as a bridge between the mental and physical worlds. In our case, the materiality of the ring offers a bridge between personal and peripersonal space and grounds in action the different aspects of Mycenaean self-consciousness. Incorporated by the Mycenaean body, the ring potentially liberates the self from the here and now of ordinary experience; that is, from the temporal simultaneity and spatial coincidence of the subjective body so it can now be enchained into its social surrounding.

In this connection, a possible synergy between object ownership and body ownership might offer an interesting link between the way humans come to feel that they own their body in comparison with other aspects of their material surrounding. Of course, it needs to be underlined that Mycenaean self-objectification manifests in many different forms and is realized through a variety of material media. Another salient example of this process can be found in the case of the Mycenaean sword. The act of grasping the Mycenaean sword involves much more than a purely mechanical process of visuo-proprioceptive realignment of the Mycenaean body; it is also an act of incorporation which provides a new basis for self-recognition and self-awareness.

The intentional stance of the Mycenaean person is partially determined by the skilled embodied engagements made possible by the use of the sword. Similar to what we discussed in the case of the ring, the Mycenaean sword becomes a means of self-objectification and offers a portable material anchor for the blending of time, memory and consciousness see Hutchins The sword should not be seen as an isolated detached object, because, once in the hand of the warrior, it is already an inseparable organic part of the warrior's body; an artificial, yet fully incorporated, body part in itself.

Maybe it is the lack of a true tectonoetic consciousness that deprives the nut-cracking Kanzi from becoming a fully conscious agent. If it is not legitimate can it be eliminated?

Is its fate tied to our understanding of consciousness? Should we approach its concepts and generalizations from the standpoint of conceptual analysis or from the philosophy of science? Eliminativism about Propositional Attitudes in Philosophy of Mind. An exploration of why and how the human competence for predication came to be. Intentionality in Philosophy of Mind. Propositional Attitudes in Philosophy of Mind. An argument that in response to sociocultural pressures, human minds develop self-consciousness by activating a complex machinery of self-regulation.

Evolution of Phenomena in Philosophy of Biology. Evolutionary Biology in Philosophy of Biology. Eliminativism assumes that commonsense psychology describes and explains the mind in terms of the internal design and operation of the mind. If this assumption is invalidated, so is eliminativism. The same conditional is true of intentional realism. Elsewhere Bogdan I have argued against this 'folk- theory-theory' assumption by showing that commonsense psychology is not an empirical prototheory of the mind but a biosocially motivated practice of coding, utilizing, and sharing information from and about conspecifics.

Here, without presupposing a specific Direct download 3 more. This is how guidance of behavior to goal grounds and explains cognition and the main forms in which it manages information. Information is the fuel of cognition. At its most basic level, information is a matter of structures interacting under laws. The notion of information thus reflects the relational fact that a structure is created by the impact of another structure.

The impacted structure is an encoding, in some concrete form, of the interaction with the impacting structure. Information is, essentially, the structural trace in some system of an interaction with another system; it is also, as a consequence, the structural fuel Information takes various forms because the world has many levels of compositional and functional complexity, under different constraints. The key constraints that matter in the understanding of information are natural patterns of organization, or types, and systematic correlations among types, or laws.

These level- sensitive constraints, in the form of types and laws, shape the very form in which information is tokened in some structure, that is, the very form in which it is encoded. As a result, the information-producing interactions bring about different sorts of structures, with various sorts of causal effects and functions, whence so many ways in which information is coded and utilized. Aside from brute force, there are several philosophically respectable ways of eliminating the mental.

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In recent years the most popular elimination strategy has been directed against our common sense or folk psychological understanding of the mental. The strategy goes by the name of eliminative materialism or eliminativism, in short. The motivation behind this strategy seems to be the following. If common sense psychology can be construed as the principled theory of the mental, whose vocabulary and principles implicitly define what counts If the theory is shown to be false, then its subject matter does not exist.

If, in other words, common sense psychology can be shown to describe and explain nothing real in human cognition, then the mental itself is a fiction. Direct download 6 more. What is it that one thinks or believes when one thinks or believes something? A sentence in some natural language?

Or perhaps an abstract proposition? The current story of content is fairly ecumenical. It says that a number of aspects, some mental, other semantic, go into our understanding of content. Yet the current story is incomplete. It leaves out a very important aspect of content, one which I call incremental information. It is information in It is in the form of such increments that information drives cognition and behavior. This is why, perhaps of all aspects of content, it is incremental information which matters most when we want to understand cognitive attitudes and performances.

This in turn must have an impact on our philosophical notions of content, propositional attitudes, inference, justification and knowledge. If there is a dogma in the contemporary philosophy of the cognitive mind, it must be the notion that cognition is semantic causation or, differently put, that it is semantics that runs the psyche. This is what the notion of psychosemantics and often intentionality are all about. Another dogma, less widespread than the first but almost equally potent, is that common sense psychology is the implicit theory of psychosemantics. The two dogmas are jointly encapsulated in the following axiom.

This is why they are called propositional attitudes. Mental attitudes have causal powers in virtue of their semantic properties. The content of an attitude has causal powers qua semantic, or more exactly in virtue of its syntactic structure which reflects relevant semantic properties and relations. The Best Books of Check out the top books of the year on our page Best Books of Looking for beautiful books? Visit our Beautiful Books page and find lovely books for kids, photography lovers and more.

Other books in this series.

• SearchWorks Catalog.
• Recetas para novatos: Más allá del bocadillo de chóped (Spanish Edition);
• Irresistible (Deseo) (Spanish Edition).
• Our Own Minds: Sociocultural Grounds for Self-Consciousness (Bradford Books);
• Précis dhistoire de la radio et de la télévision (French Edition).

Sweet Anticipation David Huron. Streetlights and Shadows Gary A. Origins of Human Communication Michael Tomasello. Subjectivity and Selfhood Dan Zahavi. Honest Signals Alex Pentland. Cognition in the Wild Edwin Hutchins. Being There Andy Clark.