Who Are We?

The question is put to us by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in the Introduction to their work, "Philosophy in The Flesh - The Embodied Mind And Its Challenge to Western Thought", where they examine the consequences for the philosophical foundations of Western culture arising from the three major findings of cognitive science that:
- the mind is inherently embodied;
- thought is mostly unconscious;
- abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

They challenge traditional philosophy with the following:

"...Let us start with the changes in our understanding of reason.

Reason is not disembodied as the tradition has largely held, but arises from the nature of our brains, bodies and bodily experience. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment. The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes of reason. Thus, to understand reason we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanisms of neural binding. In summary, reason is not, in any way, a transcendent feature of the universe or of disembodied mind. Instead, it is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable details of the neural structure of our brains, and by the specifics of our everyday functioning in the world.

Reason is evolutionary, in that abstract reason builds on and makes use of forms of perceptual and motor inference present in "lower" animals. The result is a Darwinism of reason, a rational Darwinism; Reason, even in its most abstract form, makes use of, rather than transcends, our animal nature. The discovery that reason is evolutionary utterly changes our relation to other animals and changes our conception of human beings as uniquely rational. Reason is thus not an essence that separates us from other animals; rather, it places on us a continuum with them.

Reason is not "universal" in the transcendent sense; that is, it is not part of the structure of the universe. It is universal, however, in that it is a capacity shared universally by all human beings. What allows it to be shared are the commonalities that exist in the way that our minds are embodied.

Reason is not completely conscious, but mostly unconscious.

Reason is not purely literal, but largely metaphorical and imaginative.

Reason is not dispassionate, but emotionally engaged.

This shift in our understanding of reason is of vast proportions, and it entails a corresponding shift in our understanding of what we are as human beings. What we now know about the mind is radically at odds with the major classical philosophical views of what a person is."
(Introduction, pp. 4-5)


In this video, Carl Sagan gives us a view of the mind and physical brain functions that serves to increase our understanding of the tenets of cognitive science argued by Lakoff and Johnson: