Date: Thursday, 28th November, 4:30 pm (Warsaw time)
Join online: zoom link
Making Up Minds and Getting into a Mess
Abstract
As Alva Noë (2023) has recently pointed out, human beings are not merely integrated with their cultural products but are deeply entangled with them. Any attempt to uncover our unadulterated “human nature” would thus require the impossible: a return to a “make-believe prehistory” (p.31). Noë’s reasoning can be applied to human psychological capacities, like memory, attention and reasoning, which can also be seen as entangled concepts. Recognition of humans as psychologically entangled creatures means that studies of comparative cognition are not as straightforward as we might think, and we cannot lean on evolutionary continuity with quite the same alacrity as we have shown to date. All too often we strip away aspects of human and animal life that are considered to be superficial layers of difference in order to uncover deeply-rooted cognitive similarities. Such a strategy is actually a means of artificially manufacturing similarity because these “superficial layers” are, in fact, the embodied, situated elements, and in the human case, entangled elements, that constitute cognitive processes, and the deep continuities we uncover are, in fact, conceptually lean, overly intellectualized constructs that do not apply to any creature. We can generate a richer and more effective theory of cognitive evolution by returning to a more embodied, more ecological, more entangled view of animal life, with an emphasis on diversity, as well as continuity, in evolutionary processes.