While traditional theories of cognition tend to conceive of mental capacities as disembodied or merely supervenient on brain states, in recent decades the insight has spread that mental processes cannot be confined to activities inside the skull alone. The paradigm of enactive embodiment endeavors to overcome the limitations of traditional cognitive science by reconceiving the cognizer as an embodied being and cognition as enactive. According to a well-known early definition, cognition depends on “the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities” (...
At the center of this essay is the question of how libertarianism can contribute to the foundation of free will. It has often been argued against the libertarian actor-causal approach that it is inconsistent in itself and incompatible with scientific research findings. This book argues that the objections based on natural-philosophical, ontological and phenomenological investigations are not valid. It is also the aim of the study to show in a critical comparison the strengths of the actor-causal approach versus purely event-driven libertarian positions. In its closing part, central assumptions of actor-causal libertarianism are therefore subjected to further substantiation under aspects of enactivity within the framework of a theory of embodiment. An example of this is the view that persons as substances are subject to causal relations.
There is an ongoing debate how one can integrate the subjective (first-person) dimension of experiences more thoroughly into neuropsychological research. In cognitive experimental memory research, for instance, cognitive psychology begins by separating the act of recollection from the context where recollections occur, so as to make memory research suitable for study in the experimental conditions of the laboratory. It is the claim of this article that the challenge for memory research consists not merely in the (possible) loss of meaning entailed by transforming embedded recollected experiences into operationalized cognitive functions. Rather, from the outset, the first-person experiential basis of the entire research procedure is often insufficiently elaborated and hence risks neglecting or misrepresenting significant dimensions of the phenomena it studies. I demonstrate this with regard to habits understood as procedural memories. Research based on the paradigm of embodied cognition and phenomenology has shown that procedural memory-based skills and habits are not necessarily confined to sub-personal (unconscious) processing mechanisms. This paradigm states that some cognitive processes involve not only the brain but also the pre-reflectively experienced lived-body. The key idea is that we have experiential access to bodily processes that are not yet conceptualized or reflexively mediated. In the final part of my paper, I delineate how such experiences can be integrated into the neuropsychological study of habits via the method of ‘front-loaded phenomenology.’
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