Just came across this thread. Haven't watched the video as i'm focusing on the older threads right now, but thought i'd share the following info as it may relate to the 'whole body being the brain' issue, in case it is of interest to any of you. Note that this info is 10 years old (some of it even older), so shitloads of progress has probably been made in this field since:
Years ago, I came across an article in The Cosmos Letter entitled "Why The Mind Is Not In The Head" by a beautiful mind called Francisco Varela -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Varela. (Two interesting asides: 1. He was also a Buddhist, and 2. his daughter is the gorgeous actress Leonor Varela -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonor_Varela). Unfortunately, the website it was from (
http://www.expo-cosmos.or.jp/letter/letter12.html) has been reorganised, in a way that really BLOWS, and I cannot find the fucking thing anymore. The best I could do was find some excerpts scattered around the net, which I combined below:
"[T]he last 15 years have witnessed the ascent of an alternative view, that of embodied or enactive cognition. This new wave arose because the computationalist doctrine failed to account even for the most elementary coping with the world: walking, perceiving object in a natural setting, imagination. Slowly the cards turned into considering that the basis of mind is the body in coupled action, that is, the sensory-motor circuits establish the organism as viable in situated contexts. Form this perspective the brain appears as a dynamical process (and not a syntactic one) of real time variables with a rich self-organizing capacity (and not a representational machinery). So in this sense the mind is not in the head since it is roots in the body as a whole and also in the extended environment where the organism finds itself.
Beyond embodied enaction, recent work with young children and monkeys (1995-) has re-discovered the profound importance of the coupling with other conspecifics. This means that the constitution of a mind is always concurrent with the extended presence of other minds in a network. Thus, beyond embodied enaction there is also generative enaction, a trend that points to the beginnings of a science or interbeing, the future for a proper understanding of the necessary unity of mind and nature."
I did, however, find a paper presented after his death, apparently a homage to him by some of his colleagues. I have not read it in full myself, but in case any of you are interested, it can be found here:
http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?pid=S07 ... ci_arttext. Excerpt:
The first step, Francisco claimed, is to consider that "the mind cannot be separated from the entire organism. We tend to think that the mind is in the brain, in the head, but the fact is that the environment also includes the rest of the organism; includes the fact that the brain is intimately connected to all of the muscles, the skeletal system, the guts, and the immune system, the hormonal balances and so on and so on. It makes the whole thing into an extremely tight unity. In other words, the organism as a meshwork of entirely co-determining elements makes it so that our minds are, literally, inseparable, not only from the external environment, but also from what Claude Bernard already called the milieu intérieur, the fact that we have not only a brain but an entire body" (Varela, 1999b). As a consequence of closure, this irreducible embodiment of our biophysical structure appeared to Francisco as a radical prison :"We can't get out from the domain defined by our own body and our nervous system. Only one world exists for us: the one we are experiencing by these physiological processes that make us what we are. We are taken in a cognitive system, from which we can't neither escape, nor chose where it begins or how it works" (Varela, 1988a).
That last part echoes something Morpheus pointed out in "The Matrix" - "What is real, Neo?" if I remember correctly. However, the degree of imprisonment probably varies from individual to individual
.