Creatures of the world Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-4 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9539-z Authors Karola Stotz, Department of Philosophy, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

This reflexive account is of a phenomenological study that took place over two years. It explores how a group of primary-aged children perceive, express and reflect on their embodiment through movement. Children aged between four and eleven took part in sessions of yoga, somatic movement and developmental play during the school day. The data include field notes, observations, a reflexive journal, photographs of and by the children, their drawings, mark-makings, writing and posters. Children were also interviewed at the end of (...) the study, when they had an opportunity to reflect on all their work and experiences. All the children were capable of expressing and reflecting on their experiences, and the oldest children in particular appeared to enjoy and seemed to benefit from the reflective process. By linking together a sense of self-awareness and reflection, the children appeared able to gain insight into their embodied experience and reflect on emotions, feelings and events. Embodiment is a process as much of a state of being, and as such has implications for perceptions of mind and body, learning, and reflective practice. This approach to embodied reflective practice thus has potential for educators, and teacher trainers as well as direct work with children. (shrink)

Dynamical models of cognition have played a central role in recent cognitive science. In this paper, we consider a common strategy by which dynamical models describe their target systems neither as purely static nor as purely dynamic, but rather using a hybrid approach. This hybridity reveals how dynamical models involve representational choices that are important for understanding the relationship between dynamical and non-dynamical representations of a system.

It is now conventional wisdom that conscious experience — or in Nagel’s canonical characterization, “what it is like to be” for an organism — is what makes the mind-body problem so intractable. By the same token, our current conceptions of the mind-body relation are inadequate and some conceptual development is urgently needed. Our overall aim in this paper is to make some progress towards that conceptual development. We first examine a currently neglected, yet fundamental aspect of consciousness. This aspect is (...) the spontaneity of consciousness, by which we mean its inner plasticity and inner purposiveness. We then sketch a “neurophenomenological” framework for thinking about the relationship between the spontaneity of consciousness and dynamic patterns of brain activity as studied in cognitive neuroscience. We conclude by proposing that the conscious mentality of sentient organisms or animals is active and dynamic, and that this “enactive” conception of consciousness can help us to move beyond the classical dichotomy between materialism and dualism. (shrink)