Consciousness and Embodiment

Religious Roots of Scientific Approaches to Consciousness and Embodiment

The beginning of mind-body debate that ultimately gave rise to the current embodiment movement is often traced back to the 16th-century French philosopher René Descartes, who simultaneously believed in the reality of the material and the reality of the spiritual. According to Descartes, while the former was comprised of substance (i.e., matter) entailing spatial and temporal boundaries, the latter (i.e., mind) was infinite and did not possess spatiotemporal properties. According to such a position, what is most often referred to as dualism, human consciousness falls on the spiritual, subjective side of the dichotomy, while the body falls on the matter, objective side.

Understanding Descartes' dualism and his motivations for creating it proves important to an understanding of consciousness and embodiment, for while his commitment to the reality of the spiritual is traceable to his religious convictions, his commitment to the reality of matter stemmed from his scientific convictions. As scholars responded to Descartes' dualism, they either rejected his account of the spiritual or his account of the material. For example, Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza, a 17th-century philosopher, rejected the mind-body dialectic at the root of Descartes' dualism by arguing against Descartes' notion of substance and against the idea that the mind and the body were constituted of different types of substance. Spinoza argued that in order for something to constitute substance, it (a) could not rely on anything else for its existence, (b) could not be caused by anything else, and (c) could not be reduced to anything else. And the only thing he believed met all three conditions was everything in total. John Locke on the other hand, another 17th-century philosopher, attacked [Page 195]Descartes' assertion that the mind was a spiritual phenomenon. Specifically, Locke argued the mind was a natural phenomenon that entailed all the spatiotemporal properties of any other material object. As a result, Locke felt that the mind was best understood via the scientific method.

The point of discussing different reactions to Descartes' dualism is not to assess the viability of any of the options per se but to point out that although very few modern scholars agree with dualism, the debate regarding consciousness and embodiment continues to be framed in dualism's internal-external, subjective-objective framework. For example, since roughly the middle of the 19th century, the Western scholarly community has tended to side with Locke and advocate the “naturalization” of consciousness. To naturalize consciousness means to denounce dualism and claim that consciousness is actually part of material reality. This move toward naturalism was fueled primarily by the success of the sciences, and while it removes the spiritual from scholarly conceptualizations of consciousness, it still entails dualism's division between internal-external and subjective-objective reality. Instead of conceptualizing consciousness as an internal, spiritual phenomenon, however, contemporary naturalism tends to conceptualize it as an internal, mental function that takes place in the brain and allows one to represent the external world and behave within it.

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