• DOI:10.1007/S40732-014-0090-3
• Corpus ID: 143391228

Dynamic Interactions With the Environment Make Up Our Psychological Phenomena: A Review of Noë’s Out of Our Heads

@article{Lazzeri2015DynamicIW,
  title={Dynamic Interactions With the Environment Make Up Our Psychological Phenomena: A Review of No{\"e}’s Out of Our Heads},
  author={Filipe Lazzeri},
  journal={The Psychological Record},
  year={2015},
  volume={65},
  pages={215-222}
}

• F. Lazzeri
• Published 1 March 2015
• Psychology
• The Psychological Record

The traditional, and still standard, view of psychological (or mental) phenomena in some empirical sciences holds that they take place inside the organism’s body and can be individuated independently of external factors. The organism’s behaviors are, according to this view, mere effects, rather then constituents, of psychological phenomena. And the fact that, for example, an organism is desiring something instead of something else is taken to be a matter entirely of what is inside the organism. The current versions of the view are usually couched in materialistic terms, identifying psychological phenomena with brain phenomena. However, as Noe, in this book, and some other authors (e.g., Bennett and Hacker 2003; Rowlands 2003) point out, such approaches are still Cartesian in spirit. Despite doing away with the nonphysical dimension of Descartes’ doctrine, they too believe our psychological phenomena (e.g., desires, expectations, emotions) are inner causes of behavior and can be, in principle, individuated independently of reference to external factors. Visual perception, for example, is often taken as something that happens essentially in our brains, starting from supposed impoverished stimulation on the retina and, after some sorts of inferences said to be made by the brain, ending with the production of representations of the environment in the visual cortex, largely independently of the organism’s surroundings. Nobel Prize–winning biologist Francis Crick once suggested the identification of mind with the brain is an “astonishing hypothesis,” but Noe draws attention to the fact that this hypothesis is not astonishing at all, for it is basically Descartes’s perspective in materialistic guise (p. 5). Noe’s (2009) Out of Our Heads is aimed at a broad audience interested in matters related to psychological phenomena. The book (i) calls into question the traditional view, which enjoys popularity not only within academic contexts but also in our culture more generally, and (ii) tries to convince the public of a quite different look (which bears resemblances to the views exposed by authors such as Kantor 1947; Rachlin 1994; Ryle 1949; Skinner 1976/1974), according to which, mind (i.e., psychological phenomena), particularly consciousness (i.e., the experiential psychological phenomena, such as perceptual processes; e.g., seeing, touching), is rather more like dancing than digestion: That “the locus of consciousness is the dynamic life of the whole, environmentally plugged-in person or animal” and “the phenomenon of consciousness, like that of life itself, is a world-involving dynamic process” (p. xiii). In other words, the book puts forward, as an alternative to the traditional view, the idea that psychological phenomena are made up of dynamic interactions of the whole organism with its environment, sometimes even incorporating concrete objects of the environment. As a corollary, the book (iii) urges that the brain-centrist sciences of psychological phenomena, such as mainstream cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience, are misguided and need rethinking from the ground up. According to the author, a science of these phenomena should instead be centered on the dynamic interactions of the organism as a whole with its environment. Brain structures and processes are important as well, of course, but mainly because of the crucial role they play in subserving these interactions.