In my first post on Monday, I mentioned that emotions have a complex normative dimension and that noncognitive accounts do not pay enough attention to the normativity of emotions. Embodied accounts (as I argued in yesterday’s post) explain quite nicely the central role that internal arousal, bodily postures, and facial …
In this post I will try to lay out my own account of what emotions are in a nutshell. The claim that emotions are embodied, roughly speaking, is that emotions involve bodily reactions and that these bodily reactions realize, or constitute, a kind of intelligent behavior, or interaction, with the …
Many thanks to John who invited me to blog about my book Embodied Emotions this week. The book explores emotions as embodied, action-oriented representations, providing a non-cognitivist theory of emotions that aims to account for their normative dimensions within a naturalist framework. I will come back to what that all …
Thanks to Eric Thomson (on Facebook) for pointing out this terrific resource, provided by the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston. The full table of contents is available here.
I’m an optimist by nature, and so Surfing Uncertainty mostly explores the positives, laying out the surprising reach and potential of the ‘predictive brain picture’ and celebrating its near-perfect interlock with work on the embodied, extended, and enactive mind. But there’s no doubt that the picture still has plenty of …
Expecting Ourselves? What does it take to be a creature that has some sense of itself as a material being, with its own concerns, encountering a structured and meaningful world? Such a being feels (from the inside, as it were) like a sensing, feeling, knowing thing, and a locus of …
Thanks to John Schwenkler for the invitation to guest-blog this week about my new book Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (Oxford University Press NY, 2016). In the previous post, I spoke about the emerging view of the perceiving brain as a prediction machine. Brains like that are …
