Embodied Introspection

Embodiment is hot these days in philosophy of psychology. Andy Clark, Alva Noe, Rob Wilson, and others have argued that cognition and perception are not processes confined within the brain, but rather transpire in extended brain-body-environment systems. Tactile perception, the argument goes, is not a brain process in response to stimulation of the skin; rather, it is a looping process that includes as a part one's active bodily movement and environmental exploration. Thinking about Scrabble moves can happen perhaps entirely in the brain if one visually imagines shuffling the tiles; but if shuffling the wooden tiles with one's fingers serves a similar functional role, that fingered shuffling is as much a part of Scrabble cognition as is imaginary shuffling.

Introspection, it might seem, is not embodied in the same way. After all, you can just close your eyes and introspect, no body involved, right? Introspection seems to be entirely interior -- a kind of attunement to one's internal stream of experiences, or the activity of the brain's self-monitoring systems.

Yet I think proper appreciation of the tangle of processes that drive introspective judgments points toward treating introspection as embodied. Consider two examples:

(1.) I think about what I am emotionally experiencing right now. That process involves, among other things, attending to my bodily posture and bodily sensations -- a tightness in my throat, a tingle in my cheeks, my rumpled brow. Noticing this bodily stuff contributes crucially to my introspective judgment, say, in this case the judgment that I'm feeling tense about an impending deadline. But this attention to my bodily condition or bodily experience is not merely a passive registering of that condition or experience. I actively explore my bodily condition or experience: I feel an impulse to rub my brow and to breathe deeply. This impulse is not an accidental side occurrence, disconnected from my introspective act. Rubbing my brow and breathing deeply are exploratory activities that directly contribute to the introspective result. If rubbing my brow seems to dissolve the feeling of tension up there as I continue to think about the deadline, that tilts me toward the judgment that I am not really so tense about the deadline, or at least that I am not experiencing that tension in my brow -- maybe it was just a habitual posture or remnant of an earlier but now-past emotion. If my breath catches as I rotate my shoulders back and inhale deeply, that tells me something important about my emotional-bodily condition, which informs my introspective judgment. If perception is an active, looping process that involves the body, rather than just passive reaction to stimulation of the bodily surfaces, so too is emotional introspection.

(2.) I think about how broad the field of clarity is in my vision. Do I experience a broad field (say thirty degrees) of stable visual clarity all at once (as most untutored introspectors seem to think when I first ask them)? Or is does my visual experience really involve a tiny range of clarity (one or two degrees of arc) bouncing very rapidly around an indistinct background (as some cognitive scientists say)? Crucial to reaching this judgment, I think, is prying apart attention and eye movement. First, one holds one's eyes fixed on some point and attends to the visual field outside the point of fixation. Then, one starts allowing one's eyes to move around while still attending away from the points of fixation -- for example, by attending to a region and allowing one's gaze to flit around near it but not in it. Manipulation of eye gaze is, I suggest, best conceived of as part of an integrated, exploratory introspective process rather than just a bodily precondition of introspection.

The core issue about embodiment is this: Where is it most natural or truest to the phenomena to draw the lines around a cognitive process? If we draw narrow, tight lines, we end up with many short processes with many fast input-output transitions. If we draw broad, inclusive lines, many of what would otherwise be inputs and outputs are reclassified as states within the cognitive process. Friends of embodiment prefer a liberal drawing of the lines and don't treat brain tissue as fundamentally different in kind from other sorts of structures that serve similar functional roles. My thought today is that the same issues arise, in much the same way, for introspective cognition as for other sorts of cognition, and that if we find embodiment arguments persuasive for perception and the like, then similar arguments probably apply to the case of introspection.