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G. Riva, M.T. Anguera, B.K. Wiederhold and F. Mantovani (Eds.)
From Communication to Presence: Cognition, Emotions and Culture towards the
Ultimate Communicative Experience. Festschrift in honor of Luigi Anolli
IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2006, (c) All rights reserved - http://www.emergingcommunication.com
workload;
4. The environment is part of the cognitive system. As in Distributed Cognition, the
mind alone is not a meaningful unit of analysis;
5. Cognition is for action. As in Situated and Distributed Cognition, the main
function of the mind is to guide action;
6. Off-line cognition is body based. The activity of the mind is grounded in
mechanisms that evolved for interaction with the environment.
One of the first authors to address the last point was George Lakoff [23, 25, 28].
Since the publication of Metaphors We Live By [23] he has suggested that almost all
of human cognition depends on the sensorimotor system. Particularly he underlined
the role of metaphors in the development of thought and their link with spatial
relationships.
To explain this point Anderson used the metaphorical mapping “Purposes are
Destinations,” [29]:
“We imagine a goal as being at some place ahead of us, and employ strategies for
attaining it analogous to those we might use on a journey to a place. We plan a
route, imagine obstacles, and set landmarks to track our progress. In this way, our
thinking about purposes (and about time, and states, and change, and many other
things besides) is rooted in our thinking about space. It should come as no surprise
to anyone that our concepts of space—up, down, forward, back, on, in—are deeply
tied to our bodily orientation to, and our physical movement in, the world.” (p. 105).
This example underlines two points. First, metaphors allow the understanding of a
conceptual domain in terms of another one through a process of mapping: to know a
conceptual metaphor is to know the mappings that applies to a given source-target
pairing. Second, at the core of this process there are some pre-linguistic schemas
concerning space, time, moving, controlling, and other core elements of our bodily
experience. These reflections pushed different researchers to better explore the link
between body and experience. If we look at the features of the phenomenal level - the
level of description in science which deals with immediate experience - it is possible
to distinguish [30] between four ones (pp. 33-34):
1. Location: all the experience have a spatial location within the sphere of our
subjective experiences;
2. Duration: An experience comes into existence at some point in time and it
ceases to exist at some later point;
3. Intensity: Experiences vary along a dimension of strength;
4. Quality: Any experience has a qualitative feature that makes it the kind of
experience it is.
Nevertheless, even if it is possible to decompose the features of the phenomenal
level, our phenomenal experience is just one. What does it unify the phenomenal
level as a whole? The answer suggested by many cognitive researchers and
philosophers of mind is surprisingly similar to the Heidegger’s one: phenomenal
space is the basic unifying feature of human consciousness.
To support this point Metzinger [31] underlines how, in human beings, sensory
and motor systems are physically integrated within the body of a single organism: