In the past fifteen years there has been a tremendous interest in embodiment, or how the body helps to constiute the mind. But do we understand the body? Dennett, Blackmore and others have repeatedly warned of temptations for a Cartesian fallback, that is, of the creeping presence of unwanted Cartesian dualism. Perhaps the last such Cartesian foothold is the Cartesian ‘mindization’ of the body.
Embodiment implies the paradox that (despite an opposite rhetoric) the concept supports a strongly Cartesian view of the organism, where experiences of an irreducible subjective self inhabit the center of embodied concepts, like force, direction or action.Consequently, in embodiment there is too much concern with the content (first-person) of the embodied mental states and too little with the coordination (third-person) of the physical interactions with biological meaning. Still differently: the flesh is typically understood just as source of a particular kind of structured experience, or ‘input’. This ‘input’ is selected from the point of view of the experiencer, and boils down to what is accessible for her via the movie of consciousness. How about the rest?