Embodied, Active, Situated Intelligence: Assumptions III

9 February 2022

In the last few weeks, this blog space has been used to outline conditions necessary to successfully change lives through psychotherapy.  Those conditions are that:

• A unifying soul/self/psyche exists within each of us: genotype + phenotype + X
• We seek to understand and grow.  That growth occurs through self-actualizing a semi-plastic medium—the self, psyche, or soul—manifest throughout the being.
• We are moving, by default, though consciousness of our momentum and direction is a volitional option.  By fostering that self-awareness, we embrace our own agency.
• Health is comprised of consistent, holistic, and wise well-spiritedness.
• Stress/trauma/unhappiness result from experiencing a violation of coherence.

If I had started this series of blogs from scratch, we would now be discussing the work of Aaron Antonovsky, whose work made me aware of the final condition (above).  But, as all the December 2021 blogs were concerned with his salutogenesis, there is plenty of background already available starting here: https://understandings.ca/2021/12/01/coherence-salutogenesis/

Today, we will look at the next premise; one that is gaining more support each time I read about new publications in philosophy of mind or meta-psychology: Embodied, Active, Situated, Intelligence (EASI).  Three warnings: 1) I am still new to this newish school of thought and not nearly as well-read in this subject as I would like to be, 2) these conceptions of the self are not (yet) broadly accepted and, 3) this is complex and challenging reading that may be hard slogging, as it has been for me!

The simplest way to convey my rudimentary understanding of EASI is to begin where I began, with the gut.  By monitoring my own stressors in relation to stomach pains, over the last few decades, I have seen a correlation indicating that more stress means more gut pain, which means interrupted sleep, and a sharp reminder that there’s a life-issue needing attention.  I take the gut-pain as a warning to self that I am failing to deal with something in my life.

Corroboration of the possible causal link, between stress and stomach pain took a large leap forward reading a newspaper article about a German medical student who had written a book, Gut.  When Giulia Enders wrote that book (2015), she stated that, after self-diagnosing her own extraordinary medical condition, she began deeper research.  “Soon, I discovered there was an entire branch of medical research investigating the links between the gut and the brain.  It’s a rapidly growing field of study.  Ten or so years ago, there were hardly any published studies on the subject; now there are several hundred academic articles covering the field” (Enders, 2015, p. 3).  After transcribing that sentence, I used the University of Ottawa search engine with key words “gut, brain, peer reviewed” and had 9,697 hits.  As I scrolled through the first page of papers, articles, and books, a new term “the gut-brain axis” appeared in three of the first ten sources.  Searching on “gut-brain axis” yielded 17,091 results.  I’m sure you get the picture.  But, you may be wondering, what does this have to do with psychotherapy or philosophy.  The answer is everything.

One of the arguments I have heard throughout my studies is that the self exists nowhere in the brain.  It is not the amygdala, the cortex, or the corpus callosum nor does it appear to be a linked series of any known parts of the brain.  So therefore, there is no self.  Hold that thought.

This past Christmas break, I added another book to my reading list on this subject.  That book is The Extended Mind (Paul, 2021).  A reviewer wrote the following:

Use your head.  That’s what we tell ourselves when facing a tricky problem or a difficult project. But a growing body of research indicates that we’ve got it exactly backwards. What we need to do, says acclaimed science writer Annie Murphy Paul, is think outside the brain. A host of “extra-neural” resources—the feelings and movements of our bodies, the physical spaces in which we learn and work, and the minds of those around us— can help us focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively (SCRIBD, 3.ii.22, bold emphasis added). 

The author, Paul, covers biology, social science, and mental health.  In my world, this is an important book.  But, as the numbers above indicate, far from the only one.  In fact, in my own parallel quest to understand phenomenology (the study of phenomena, those things we can perceive, without judgment, preconceptions, or theory) I have come across a plethora of sources ranging from Daniel Stern to Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Linda Finlay, and Steen Haller.  My sense is that I have only just scratched the surface. 

Perceiving, imagining, understanding, and acting are now bundled together, emerging as different aspects and manifestations of the same underlying prediction-driven, uncertainty-sensitive machinery.  For such properties to fully emerge, however, several more conditions need to be met.  The energy-sensitive surfaces whose time-varying (and action-relevant) perturbations are to be predicted need to be many and variegated.  In us humans they include eyes, ears, tongues, noses, and the whole of that somewhat neglected sensory organ, the skin.  They also include a range of more ‘inward looking’ sensory channels, including proprioception (the sense of the relative positions of bodily parts, and the forces being deployed) and interoception (the sense of the physiological conditions of the body, such as pain, hunger, and other visceral states).  Predictions concerning these more inward-looking channels will prove crucial in the core account of action, and in accounting for feelings and conscious experiences.  Most important of all, perhaps, the prediction machinery itself needs to operate in a distinctively complex, multilevel, variegated internal environment.  In this complex (and repeatedly reconfigurable) neural economy, what gets traded are probabilistic predictions, inflected at every level by changing estimates of our own uncertainty (Clark, 2019, pp. xiv-xv, bold emphasis added).

That quote takes work.  But here’s the point: people trying not to nag someone with addictive behaviours knows about interoception: the overwhelming urge to share that burning insight with someone we judge to be badly in need of our wisdom.  Similarly, those who have tried to reduce calories, quit smoking, or leave an addictive behaviour behind, know the whole-body sense of the urge that begs you to snack, fire up a cigarette, or pick up again—that felt experience is interoception. 

The good news is that by experiencing such interoception, you have experienced the compulsive side of self.  By finding the grit to outlast the urge to advise, open a bottle, or snort a line, you can also experience a self choosing to override interoceptive urges through acceptance, self-awareness, and self-discipline.  The more we outlast, the lesser the urges.  This is the self as an embodied, active, situated intelligence. 

Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies.  He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas.  Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.

References

Clark, A. (2019). Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.  Oxford University Press.

Enders, G. (2015). Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ (Revised edition). Greystone Books.

Paul, A. M. (2021). The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain. Mariner Books.