The Future of Feminism is Embodied Cognition

May 30, 2019 1:21 PM

Feminists never bought the idea of the computational mind set free from its body. Cognitive science is finally catching up.

"Their [bio-hacking tech billionaires'] transhumanist ideal resembles a late-capitalist rendering of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man: an individual super-human, armed with a wealth of cognitive and physical enhancements, elevated to a state of unassailable strength and power, devoid of all dependency, and, often enough, endowed with the ability to reproduce without the inconvenience of women. As they describe it, ‘immortality’ sounds like nothing so much as manspreading into the future. What’s most instructive about transhumanism, though, isn’t what it exposes about the hubris of rich white men. It’s the fact that it represents a paradigm case of what happens when a particular cast of mind, made from the sediment of centuries of philosophy, gets taken to its logical extreme."

Sally Davies writes for Aeon about the legacy of the mind-body split in Western philosophy, and evolving a feminist biopolitics.

posted by Kitty Stardust (33 comments total)

Disapproving Drake: Ray Kurzweil
Approving Drake: Donna Harraway

(Though it's somewhat insulting to Harraway to make the comparison at all, even in meme form, since Kurzweil is an absolute hack who would barely merit any attention at all if not for the fact that so many rich, influential idiots worship him as a prophet.)

Anyway, I'm not sure I buy this idea that feminists "turned away" from biological sciences. Rather, I think the rise of evo-psych is more easily explained as a backlash to feminism by existing patriarchal power structures, Men of Science defending their male privilege by making unsupported assertions about what is "natural", the way they always have.

That's really just a minor quibble in what's otherwise a very thought-provoking article, though.
posted by tobascodagama at 2:44 PM on May 30, 2019 [13 favorites]

I realize now that the reason why it's important to teach kids to code isn't so they can get better jobs in the future, but so they can write the viruses that will disable the transhumanists' cyber-bodies and leave their brains trapped in limbo for eternity
posted by prize bull octorok at 3:11 PM on May 30, 2019 [25 favorites]

I Have No Couth, and I Must Scream
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 3:29 PM on May 30, 2019 [7 favorites]

it’s my policy to always refer to Kurzweil as “musical instrument designer Ray Kurzweil,” since making synthesizers is the primary thing he’s actually good at.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 3:31 PM on May 30, 2019 [13 favorites]

It has been a long, long time since Kurzweil instruments were cool
posted by grumpybear69 at 3:52 PM on May 30, 2019 [2 favorites]

This article is mostly Heidegger, and I have read Being and Time a couple of times but can't hold it in my head all at once. For this reason, I am going to have to be superficial.

As I understand it, Heidegger replaces the Cartesian notion of a mind like a container of ideas attached to a machine-like body that provides it with the input from which it constructs these ideas, with the notion of a mind projected out, not only into the body, but through the body into the world. In Descartes, the mind is directly conscious only of its existence and its ideas. In Heidegger, the mind's values and intents are written directly into the world itself, so that everything comes with a value, a use, and an orientation relative to the current project presented as part of itself. The problem in Descartes is whether one's ideas of the world correspond in any way to any world. The problem in Heidegger is figuring out where the world leaves off and you commence, insofar as it does and you do.

[I am hurting some professional philosopher by saying this so badly. I'm very sorry. I am doing my best.]

What I can't figure out is how Heidegger's view is more feminist than Descartes's. Feminism, so far as I understand, is the belief that gender is not relevant to how rights and privileges should be distributed. How, exactly, does the nature of consciousness and the source of human knowledge pertain to that?

Granted, Plato gives primacy to the mind and to men. Gnostics, however, held that the mind is wholly different from the body, and that the body is wholly corrupt, and made this the basis for egalitarian treatment of women. If minds are wholly independent of bodies, then the sex of any particular body is irrelevant to its mind's nature, and men's and women's minds, and therefore men and women, are equal. You can interpret body-mind dichotomy that way as easily as as male minds controlling female bodies.
posted by ckridge at 5:13 PM on May 30, 2019 [6 favorites]

This article is so cis-facing it makes me frustrated.

Once again transgender people are totally blocked from the body mind divide discussion and our bodies are wrenched back into a cis frame.

Signed, a biohacking trans woman.
posted by nikaspark at 5:18 PM on May 30, 2019 [27 favorites]

Once again transgender people are totally blocked from the body mind divide discussion and our bodies are wrenched back into a cis frame.

How are you blocked from the discussion? I am not arguing, I am asking, and even though I will want to argue when I understand, because I always do, I won't, because you probably don't need to hear it.
posted by ckridge at 5:26 PM on May 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

Here’s a couple of pointers:

Biological sex is a total crapshoot based on a crapload of independent variables and gender is an emergent social phenomena that refuses Eurocentric binary classification.

Bodies do not behave according to the sex binary, and using the sex binary as some kind of absolutist approach to the inquiry of how transhumanism is rooted in misogyny or somehow anti feminist can very quickly diverge into TERF-land real quick.

The reproductive capability only speaks to the reproductive potential of the body and to map a binary essentialist monolithic construct over all bodies is doing an injustice to all trans, intersex, DSD and non-Eurocentric people.

Just keep this in mind as you internalize this article. It is not the extent of the human body experience by a long damn shot.
posted by nikaspark at 5:28 PM on May 30, 2019 [25 favorites]

Also “blocked” is a strong word, I should have said “erased” or “not considered at all”
posted by nikaspark at 5:33 PM on May 30, 2019 [5 favorites]

Copy. I will read the article over with your objections in mind.
posted by ckridge at 5:35 PM on May 30, 2019 [7 favorites]

Thank you I appreciate that. I’m so totally okay with articles focusing on how a subset of people experience their bodies, I just wish these kinds articles would enumerate the people who are being excluded from the analysis, otherwise what ends up happening is that someone will take this article then weaponize it again trans women. (I’ve seen it over and over...I’m tired)

Again thank you for being willing to hear me it really means a lot.
posted by nikaspark at 5:38 PM on May 30, 2019 [7 favorites]

Not willing, eager. This is new information. Thank you for taking the chance.
posted by ckridge at 5:46 PM on May 30, 2019 [4 favorites]

gender is not relevant to how rights and privileges should be distributed

I expect there are feminists who approach it that way, but I think the more common perspective is that "how rights and privileges should be distributed" is another thing that can't be disembodied from its home, history in this case, and further that history can't be separated from its thousands of years of widespread severe misogyny.

So we can't divorce the concept of rights as we understand them from "the history of how Rehnquist's view of Jefferson's view of Locke's view shaped how the curriculum of the State of Texas affected how the curriculum of the State of Where We Grew Up affected how we learned about what the proper and improper words for 'debating' what rights are are."
posted by traveler_ at 6:03 PM on May 30, 2019 [2 favorites]

The cyborg in me recognizes the cyborg in you.
posted by gucci mane at 6:22 PM on May 30, 2019 [4 favorites]

The cyborg in me wants to smash the patriarchy and dance in the moonlight.
posted by loquacious at 6:46 PM on May 30, 2019 [7 favorites]

It’s worth adding that there are also feminist historians of philosophy who find liberatory potential in Descartes. After all, if minds are fundamentally distinct from bodies, then bodily sex doesn’t entail any constraint or limitation on the mind. On the Cartesian picture, a mind is a mind is a mind—and biological sex doesn’t count for shit.

It’s popular now to dunk on Descartes, but this particular way of doing so is more problematic than it may appear...
posted by voltairemodern at 8:08 PM on May 30, 2019 [5 favorites]

Mind is one, and it expresses itself in infinite ways.
posted by No Robots at 8:28 PM on May 30, 2019

Once again transgender people are totally blocked from the body mind divide discussion and our bodies are wrenched back into a cis frame.

I'm a bit confused by this since the article explicitly addresses that issue and quotes Paul Preciado on the subject as someone who rejects the binary. (The second paragraph is Preciado's)

There are certainly hints of what a more malleable and creative feminist biopolitics might look like. In Testo Junkie (2008), the Spanish activist and writer Paul Preciado, previously Beatriz Preciado, gives a vertiginous account of his illicit application of topical testosterone. Preciado is clear that he’s not after any kind of ‘standard’ transition from one sex or gender to another; he does not take himself to be peeling away the female to reveal some concealed, genuine, male essence:

The truth about sex is not a disclosure; it is sexdesign … I don’t want to change my sex, and I don’t want to declare myself dysphoric about whatever it may be; I don’t want a doctor to decide how much testosterone a month is suitable for changing my voice and making me grow a beard; I don’t want to have my ovaries and breasts removed.

The idea of embodied cognition as I read it here and have read it elsewhere, most notably in Siri Hustvedt's excellent books, is one that tries to better capture the experience of the mind and the world through perspectives other than the that favored by historical patriarchy. It suggests our bodies necessarily inform our understanding of the world, which is something I would have thought speaks to important transgender issues. The article traces a longer history that has long seen sex and gender as a binary, but isn't supporting that idea, decidedly more calling it into question as a "truth" that makes the notion of a mind/body split all the more difficult to support.
posted by gusottertrout at 11:10 PM on May 30, 2019 [7 favorites]

I missed that, thank you.

I still think the article doesn’t go far enough to provide representation and shelter to trans women though.
posted by nikaspark at 11:28 PM on May 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

Yeah, it definitely needs some fleshing out, but I think the basic ideas are pretty strong for making the case that we understand/experience the world through our bodies as much as our minds alone and ignoring that has been used as a tool of the patriarchy for asserting truth is aligned with the perspectives of straight white men and their experience. I find the arguments for the embodied mind pretty empowering for demanding a broader way of seeing, though this article only touches on some of the concepts that has been more thoroughly explored elsewhere.
posted by gusottertrout at 11:40 PM on May 30, 2019 [2 favorites]

Embodied cognition -> panpsychism -> neo-animism -> spiritual guidance of humanity returned to its rightful authority, witches.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 3:33 AM on May 31, 2019 [4 favorites]

A mind without a body strikes me as at least as incoherent a notion as a swim without a swimmer. My mind is something I do, not something I am.
posted by flabdablet at 5:04 AM on May 31, 2019 [5 favorites]

I thought it was cis-centric but I really didn't see it as essentialist. Fausto-Sterling's contribution to this area of work includes the observation that the doctors medicalized the gender binary in the 20th century with the ability to manipulate both hormone and surgical treatment with much lower risk than the 19th century. Gender ambiguity and transgender persons went from a concern that people kept private among intimate family to a medical condition that demanded radical treatment. Fausto-Sterling makes the point that most of the characteristics considered to be the mark of an "ideal" woman are both highly variable and independently variable.

My take is influenced by educational psychology, where it's pretty obvious that only a subset of human knowledge can be reduced to a formal and generalized system of rules and heuristics. Explaining a bike isn't the same as riding a bike, and there are lots of areas where we just identify the pain points and create safe environments for novices to engage in structured play as novices. (Yes, you can create robots that ride bikes, but I'd argue that robots use radically different feedback mechanisms compared to human balance.)

More critically, I think there's a number of areas where arguing about rights absent concern for bodies is a mistake, because then the default becomes white, cis, male, and without disabilities. Some of the areas I see here include rationing of menstrual products within prisons, the harms of solitary confinement, differential health outcomes, oppressive violence, and access to basic government bureaucracy. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to argue rights in an abstract disembodied mode of pure mind when the violations of those rights are frequently embodied. And on the flip side, how can I talk about things like hetero/cisnormativity while placing the physical off limits?

I'll put a plug in for Tiptree winner Rupetta, which is a weird alt-history novel based, in part, on "I feel, therefore I . am."
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 6:24 AM on May 31, 2019 [6 favorites]

I am still having a lot of trouble with the argument that body/mind dichotomy is sexist because the people who devised it were sexist, but that postulating embodied cognition is not. The notion of mind, body, and world existing as a whole that is separable only by logical distinction comes directly out of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. They were men of their time and place. Heidegger was a Nazi and Merleau-Ponty an apologist for Soviet state terror. Why does historical critique stop sharply just short of them? How on earth does Heidegger wind up as an alternative to the views of straight white men?

The value, it seems to me, of the notion of embodied cognition, or of hermeneutic phenomenology as it is called in other circles, is that it makes clear that we were always already cyborgs or transhumans. A man who works all day cutting down trees and rooting out stumps by hand is a different kind of thing from one who works in an office. A woman who has borne five children and raised three while carrying hundreds of pounds of wood and water every day is a different kind of thing from one who works in an office. Someone who learns to read and gets a head full of dead people talking and half their memories stored on shelves is a different kind of thing from someone who lives wholly in an oral culture. Someone who spends hours with their consciousness spread out over the internet is a different kind of thing from someone who does not.

To put abstractly what I just tried to convey by example: if your mind is wholly projected out through your body and your body is wholly projected out sensorily and actively into the world, then there is no separation between your mind and the world. If the world changes, it will change you. If society changes, it will change you. This happens all the time, and faster all the time, as society changes more quickly. We conceal it from ourselves so as to maintain coherent narratives, but we are not the same people we were, and possibly not even the same sort of people we were.

This view of the world makes a particular kind of conservatism very uncomfortable, because it makes it clear that human nature is likely to change at any time as the result of conditions we don't understand and can't control. This discomfort does not necessarily make people into liberals or radicals, however. Sometimes it throws them into existential panic and makes them reactionary and xenophobic. Heidegger, remember, became a Nazi.
posted by ckridge at 8:42 AM on May 31, 2019 [4 favorites]

I am still having a lot of trouble with the argument that body/mind dichotomy is sexist because the people who devised it were sexist, but that postulating embodied cognition is not.

That's a strange way to phrase the issue, making it about who gave voice to the idea, as if they then own it and are thus attached to it in some personal fashion rather than it being about the concepts themselves. Even were that not the case, the feminist positions I've read on the subject tend to give ample emphasis to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia's correspondence with Descartes as a key starting point for disagreement, and not simply attributing ownership to Heidegger for being the more celebrated figure. That in itself suggests something about the nature of the subject and how it influences thought.

It isn't the ownership or origination of the idea of a mind/body split that matters as much as belief in something like "pure rationality" that comes from it and is wielded to defining the world to the measures of those who have access to power. One of the most notable aspects of the notion of embodied cognition is in the awareness of constraints it places on the speaker. Heidegger or anyone else can't be representative of the thought process because of the inherent limitations involved in embodied cognition. A mind free of constraints can claim to speak from rationality alone and thus take on an attitude of unwarranted representation of the whole.
posted by gusottertrout at 10:47 AM on May 31, 2019 [2 favorites]

That's a strange way to phrase the issue

I am following the article's line of argument. She talks about various philosophers who have argued that minds are distinct from bodies, and talked about how this is part of a character and world-view that included fear or disdain of women. If character and world-view counts for them, it counts for Heidegger and for Merleau-Ponty.

>Since Plato, generations of philosophers have been gripped by a fear of the body and the desire to transcend it – a wish that works hand-in-hand with a fear of women, and a desire to control them. In the dialogue Timaeus, Plato likens the force of his ideal, immaterial forms to a disciplinarian father, imposing order on all this unwieldy material stuff that was nonetheless ‘the mother and receptacle of all created and visible and in any way sensible things’. Here Plato deploys a well-worn technique for suppressing corporeal angst: carving off the mind (rational, detached, inviolable, symbolically male) from the body (emotional, entangled, weak, symbolically female).<>Women and the female body, the presumed targets of men’s sexual desire, therefore bore the semiotic burden of sin. The theologian St Augustine, for example, chastised himself for repeatedly succumbing to lustful urges in his youth, where women ‘found my soul beyond its portals, dwelling in the eye of my flesh’.<>Francis Bacon, a polymathic pioneer of the scientific method, was particularly fond of deploying sexual imagery to capture the relationship between reality and its observer. ‘Let us establish a chaste and lawful marriage between Mind and Nature,’ he wrote in The Refutation of Philosophies (1608) – with nature, of course, assuming the role of the docile wife. For Bacon, the ‘good scientist is a gallant suitor’, as the Australian philosopher Genevieve Lloyd notes in The Man of Reason (1984), while nature ‘is mysterious, aloof – but, for all that, eminently knowable and controllable’.<
posted by ckridge at 11:22 AM on May 31, 2019 [1 favorite]

[A digression:

So much has been made of Bacon's feminization of nature that I went and searched his Novum Organum for examples. It is far, far kinkier than generally known.

> . . . a natural history compiled on its own account, and one collected for the mind’s information as a foundation for philosophy, are two different things. They differ in several respects, but principally in this--the former contains only the varieties of natural species without the experiments of mechanical arts; for as in ordinary life every person’s disposition, and the concealed feelings of the mind and passions are most drawn out when they are disturbed--so the secrets of nature betray themselves more readily when tormented by art than when left to their own course. (XCVIII)

> Knowledge and human power are synonymous, since the ignorance of the cause frustrates the effect; for nature is only subdued by submission, and that which in contemplative philosophy corresponds with the cause in practical science becomes the rule. (III)

> Now the empire of man over things is founded on the arts and sciences alone, for nature is only to be commanded by obeying her. (CXXIX)

So, we are to torment her artfully till she betrays the concealed feelings of her mind and passions, and then submit to her and obey her. Ooh, la la. I wonder if special outfits are involved. ]
posted by ckridge at 11:31 AM on May 31, 2019

A mind free of constraints

I had one of those for a while. It felt fantastic but it wasn't very practical.
posted by flabdablet at 7:19 PM on May 31, 2019

I am not sure if there was, intellectually, much danger in being too structuralist and having the all-science bio people do their evo-psych things. Politically, yes, but not really, because it takes a pretty good understanding of feminist gender things to be able to navigate the enormous biases that you have to do to even conceive of or interpret scientific results.
posted by fleacircus at 7:23 PM on June 1, 2019

Evo-psych not really evolutionary biology and barely psychology. Most of its thunder involved Dawkins talking out of his ass with mememtics and Pinker setting up a straw behaviorism that ignored biological factors behind cognition for the purpose of a "you can't handle the truuuuuth." It is primarily a political and contrarian position based on rejecting prior work in developmental psychology.

And causal theory of "some humans do this, therefore selective pressure in the paleolithic" has never made sense to me without either the molecular genetics or cladistics to back it up.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 6:43 AM on June 3, 2019 [2 favorites]

Andy Clark has been writing about embodied cognition for some time. Here's his latest in Edge:

Perception As Controlled Hallucination: Predictive Processing and the Nature of Conscious Experience

Perception itself is a kind of controlled hallucination. . . . [T]he sensory information here acts as feedback on your expectations. It allows you to often correct them and to refine them. But the heavy lifting seems to be being done by the expectations. Does that mean that perception is a controlled hallucination? I sometimes think it would be good to flip that and just think that hallucination is a kind of uncontrolled perception.

posted by homunculus at 4:28 PM on June 9, 2019 [2 favorites]

Something that I thought was perhaps missing from the debate was a full emphasis on the importance, first of all, of having a general-purpose objective function. Rather than setting out to be a good Go player or a good chess player, you might set out to do something like minimize expected prediction error in your embodied encounters with the world.

Bam! Give that researcher a cigar.
posted by flabdablet at 12:21 AM on June 10, 2019