Book Smart

The Mind Incarnate (MIT Press, 2004) by Lawrence Shapiro, professor of philosophy.

The way your body is configured probably determines in large part how you think, according to Shapiro.

Since at least the 17th century and philosopher Rene “I think therefore I am” Descartes, scholars have acknowledged some sort of relationship between human intellectual activity and the human body. Descartes himself put forth the infamous “ghost in the machine” theory, that consciousness is the product of a supernatural intellect attaching itself to the brain.

Few philosophers today accept his mind-brain dualism, Shapiro says, preferring instead the “multiple realizability” theory, which holds that minds can be realized in a variety of physical machines: There is far less room for multiple realization theory than philosophers and many scientists have assumed.

However, after researching across disciplines including philosophy, educational psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary theory, cognition and more, Shapiro concludes that the human mind, brain and body are much more integrally related than ordinarily supposed.

“How we think and what we think are shaped in many ways by the kind of bodies we have,” he says. “For instance, psychologists are discovering that a person’s body is intimately involved in sensory processing to the extent that beings with different kinds of bodies would not have anything like human perceptual experiences.”

If it sounds as though philosophy is merging with the sciences, Shapiro says that’s probably true for many areas of philosophy.

“One practical consequence of this for philosophers is that it is now harder for them to receive funding — scientific granting agencies aren’t ready to, and probably shouldn’t, accept philosophers as scientists, but many people in the humanities think that philosophy has lost its focus on problems that have traditionally been at the center of research in the humanities.”

— Barbara Wolff