On the Phenomenology of Reading and its Relation to the Embodied Mind

Romke van der Meulen April 29, 2011

Abstract Examining the case of a person reading a book of ction, I posit that phenomenologically, an unusual situation arises: the reader is no longer aware of the book, the pages, the words, but instead becomes aware of the world of the story as if he or she were actually in this world. Using this unusual situation as a touchstone, I examine a range of theories that fall under the umbrella term embodied mind. I begin with the question whether representation plays any role in the process of reading. Then I relate the sensorimotor approach to consciousness to the conscious experience of reading. I proceed to examine enactivism in terms of meaning and its relation to reading, and nally end with the application of the extended mind to the relation between reader and book. I conclude that although embodied mind theories can give interesting insights into the phenomenology of reading, their domain of focus is too far apart from reading to give any comprehensive explanation.

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own. - William Hazlitt

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his arent very new after all. - Abraham Lincoln

Student Human Machine Communications, Department of Articial Intelligence, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

Introduction
Almost everyone can relate to the feeling of loosing yourself in a book. Especially at the level of the ctional narrative, we human beings seem geared toward immersing ourselves in a story to the point where we enter a new level of consciousness, that of loosing awareness of our immediate surroundings and experiencing the story as if we were there. This state of consciousness is of course very much dierent from our day to day experiences, and as a phenomenological fringe case, it might be interesting to use it as a means of testing some phenomenological theories, particularly those of the embodied mind. First, let us establish the validity of this informal description of a state of mind. The phenomenon of readers immersed in a story has been the object of some scientic study. Melanie Green and Timothy Brock did empirical research and developed transportation theory, named after a phrase used by Richard Gerrig: Someone (the traveler) is transported, by some means of transportation, as a result of performing certain actions. The traveler goes some distance from his or her world of origin, which makes some aspects of the world of origin inaccessible. The traveler returns to the world of origin, somewhat changed by the journey,1 Green and Brock were interested in the power of narrative to persuade, subtly altering the readers opinions. They developed a measure for transportation, based on how much the answers of readers on a series of questions deviated from the expected norm.2 Of course, these measures are geared toward a particular end, and not direct indications of what happens to our minds or consciousness during reading. I failed to nd any neurological research in this direction: we are talking about a very abstract, high-level process, whereas neurology has only just started making progress on explaining more concrete, low-level phenomena. Still, it seems clear that the phenomenon of readers becoming immersed in stories is neither new, nor disputed. Now that we have established the concept of the transported reader, let us imagine the following situation: A woman is sitting in a room, reading a book of ction. Around her, two people are engaged in conversation, while another is currently cutting vegetables, preparing dinner. The woman does not hear the noises this produces: she has immersed herself in the ctional world described in the book. As she has done so, she not only has lost almost all awareness of the world around her, but also, in part, of herself, and even of the fact that she is in fact even reading a book. The process of seeing and decoding symbols, recognizing words, parsing sentences, has become to her completely transparent. What lls her awareness is none of the above things.

R.J. Gerrig. Experiencing narrative worlds: on the psychological activities of reading. Yale University Press, 1993. isbn: 9780300054347 (pp. 10-11) 2 M.C. Green and T.C. Brock. The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives. In: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79.5 (2000), pp. 701721

In stead, she is aware of a man walking through a desert. In this world, she is not aware of herself as a participant, nor even as an observer. She seems to take something of a god-eye view: she can see the current scene from any angle she chooses, even from the perspective of one of the characters. Additionally, she has access to the mans thoughts and feelings. The man is trying to get to an oasis to nd water. This is important to the man, therefore it is important to her. In this essay, I will analyze how this situation relates to theories of the embedded, embodied, enacted and/or extended mind. Many of these theories deal with the phenomenology of every day experience. It should prove interesting to see how they may be applied to this unusual phenomenon, especially as the transported mind becomes anything but embodied. By relating each theory and issue to this example, I hope to gain a better understanding of the phenomenology of reading and at the same time highlight some of the strong points and/or shortcomings of each theory.

The issue of representation

One of the stumbling blocks of traditional cognitive theory, leading to renewed interest in the alternative of the embodied approach, was the problem of representation. Explicit mental representations or models of the world ran into a number of problems, such as the relevancy or framing problem. This led articial intelligence researcher Rodney Brooks to begin his quest for intelligence without representation.3 He advocated an approach where the world was its own model, and explicit representation was no longer necessary. He built robots that could interact with the environment by building layers of behaviour producing circuitry, each more complex. Though his approach has thus far been unsuccessful in approaching more complex levels of behaviour, it does explicate one of the rst questions we must ask about the given example. Is there a role for mental representation, and if so, what is it? The approach of letting the world be its own model does not seem to apply here: there is a huge dierent between the physical world, which consists of a woman holding a collection of paper and ink, and the phenomenal one, where the woman is present in a desert wasteland. Could it be possible that the text in the book triggers this experience in the woman without intervening representations? The traditional model of interpreting text is one of lexical parsing, sentence construction, all based on abstract, representational computation. A theory which posits otherwise would be a radical departure. Tim van Gelder oers such a theory.4 He suggests that cognition may be viewed as a very complex dynamical system, continually changing in concert with the changing world and adapting its behavior. There is a certain elegance in interpreting the situation from the example using this theory. In this interpretation, the perception of the book is continually altering the woman in a complex dynamic manner, the phenomenological result of which is the woman experiencing a world other than the one she is physically in. There is an immediacy in this interpretation that is lacking in the computational approach: the words on the page immediately trigger the woman to perceive new events in the imagined
R.A. Brooks. Intelligence without representation. In: Articial Intelligence 47.1-3 (1991), pp. 139159 Tim van Gelder. What Might Cognition Be, If Not Computation? In: The Journal of Philosophy 92.7 (1995), pp. 345381. url: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2941061
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world. The traditional approach would have the woman scanning the page, translating visual input into representations of letters, a number of such perceptions would be combined to form words, these combined to form sentences, and these in turn analyzed based on existing symbolic knowledge to interpret them semantically. And after all this, the computational approach would still have to explain how the phenomenological experience of a dierent world can arise from such processing. The point of contention here is whether or not to dene the imagined world itself as a representation. Those in favor of computationalism would argue that the fact that the woman is aware of a world that does not physically exist is itself proof of the existence of representation. To become aware of something that is not there, you must mentally represent it. Non-computationalists on the other hand might argue that the conscious experience of a non-existing world derives directly from the perception of the book in a manner we do not currently understand. I suggest that both positions are currently defensible but lacking. Non-computationalists still have to explain how reading, a skill taught and acquired in a manner that suggests mental representation, can give rise to meaning without the intervention of representation. Computationalists on the other hand have to explain how symbolic manipulation can give rise to conscious experience, especially one as rich and yet problematic as an entire imagined world.

Sensorimotor theory
The question of how consciousness can arise from physical processes, such as ring neurons, has been the subject of philosophical debate for over a century. In their sensorimotor theory,5 ORegan, Myin, and No explain this by referring to the special nature of the input of those e sensory neurons as they interact with the world. They identify two special properties of the real world that are unique, allowing the mind to dierentiate between direct observation of the world and reliving a memory or imagining something. These properties are corporality and alerting capacity. Corporality refers to the high degree in which input from the real world can dier from one moment to the next. When we look at the world around us, we implicitly know that if we blink, our visual input will temporarily cease. If we turn our head, the input will drastically change, though we can still relate it to the previous input through extensive processing. This is not the case in our imagination: when we imagine a certain object, the input will stay the same even if we stand on our heads our close our eyes, and, according to ORegan et al., we are implicitly aware of this fact. Thus the world around us has corporality, while the imagined world does not. Alerting capacity is the other distinguishing property of input from the real world around us. If we remember the face of our grandmother, and we should at the next moment fail to include in this input her glasses because we cannot remember what they looked like at the moment, we are not immediately aware that the input has changed in any signicant way. On the other hand, if our grandmother were here and we looking at her, the sudden appearance or disappearance of her glasses would be a cause of immediate attention. Attention to sudden changes is something that is built into the sensory systems of many types of animals at a very low level. Thus, the
J.K. ORegan, E. Myin, and A. No. Sensory consciousness explained (better) in terms of corporality and e alerting capacity. In: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (2005), pp. 369387
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capacity of an input signal to trigger these mechanisms is a direct indication that this signal comes to us from the real world, and not an imagined one. According to this theory, the woman from our example should at all times be able to tell that what she is perceiving (the desert, not the book) is not the real world: it has neither corporality nor alerting capacity in the sense of this theory. I would say that it is self evident that the woman can tell that she is reading, and the desert world is imaginary. Corporality and alerting capacity seem like ne criteria by which the woman could make this judgment. Still, I have a few notes. Though neither corporality nor alerting capacity as dened by ORegan et a. are present in the imaginary world, there are some properties of this world that are somewhat analogous, which might explain why this world could appear to the woman to be similar to the real world. I will start with the issue of corporality. It is true that the womans view of the imaginary world is entirely uninuenced by the position of her head. If she should close her eyes, however, something does occur. The imagined world does not disappear as the real world would. However, for the moment, the woman cannot read on, and so the story stalls for a time, remains suspended. This does not translate to the woman perceiving the hero of the story as somehow frozen in mid-step. In stead, the imagined world continues on in the same state in which it was when the woman closed her eyes. When the woman closed her eyes, the hero was walking through the desert. While her eyes are closed, the man keeps walking and his world, though not frozen, does not change. Once she opens her eyes and reads on, the story progresses, and the imagined world starts changing again. Furthermore, though the input that the woman gets from her imagined world does not drastically change with the movement of her body, this does not mean that sudden changes in input are precluded. It can be the case that the woman suddenly changes her perspective on the imagined scene, for example from a third person view to a rst person view from the perspective of the hero. Such sudden changes are dierent from a moving head, in that the input after the change is only loosely connected to that before the change, where as a head movement will result in a more connected, streaming change in input. But such streaming changes in input are also entirely possible inside an imagined world, for instance when mentally perceiving a new vista that the hero encounters by slowly mentally rotating the view. The fact that we have experienced these input changes from reality all our live, is what enables us to perform a similar change to input from our imagination. On the matter of alerting capacity, again it is true that the woman will not encounter in her imagined world some input that will trigger change sensitive mechanisms in her eyes: her eyes are focused on the book, which hardly changes at all. But here we also encounter a type of scenario which is similar to the physical alerting capacity. Imagine that a passage of the book the woman was reading went like this: With the sun beating down overhead, Thomas struggled onward, concentrating only on moving one foot at a time. Left foot, right foot, left foot... Each step seemed to take an eternity, and each held the promise of being his last. Suddenly, his glazed eyes caught a glint as he was heaving himself forward. From the corner of his eye, he had caught a star shining bright across the desert: a gleam of reected light that held the promise of life saving, cleansing water on the horizon. Reading this passage does not trigger the womans physical change perception. But mentally, by experiencing the imaginary world through the hero, she perceives the world as though her 5

change perception had been engaged, endowing the gleam on the horizon with some kind of virtual alerting capacity. I suggest that these variants of corporality and alerting capacity inside the imagined world are dissimilar enough from their real world counterparts for a person to be able to tell reality from ction. On the other hand, they have certain functional similarities, even in their phenomenological perception. This parallel is what makes us perceive an imagined world as similar to the real world, not only in the worlds own form and structure, but even down to the way we perceive such a world. When we read a book and enter an imaginary world, we do not see that world like some computer wireframe, or experience the whole world at once, even though the world may be in our mind as a whole. In stead, we perceive the imaginary world as we would the real one: through virtual eyes we receive input from our imagination that has virtual corporality and virtual alerting capacity.

The enactive approach to cognition

Enactivism is part of the biogenic approach to cognition, piloted by Maturana and Varela, which analyzes cognition in a bottom up approach by dening characteristics of all live, including single celled organisms. They dened the autopoietic unit as any system with a semi-permeable membrane produced within the system whose components are continually regenerated by the system itself.6 This system is continually interacting with its environment. It internally gives meaning to parts of the environment as they relate to the system (sense-making), and it shapes its environment in its interactions, typically to improve its own living conditions. This entire idea is referred to as enactivism, and it has been equated with cognition by some. The perspective of this theory as it applies to our example is quite interesting. The woman here is the autopoietic unit, which is interacting with its environment, specically the book. In her interaction, the woman assigns meaning to it. This meaning can be interpreted on two levels. There is the meaning of the book as an object, and how the woman relates herself to it and books in general. More interesting, however, would be to interpret the imagined world the woman experiences as her attributed meaning to the book (or more specically the current page). This would account for one very specic fact: that no two people by reading the same book interpret it identically, or nd themselves in identical imagined worlds. Let us repeat the central point about this interaction: the environment has its own structural dynamics and, although independent of the organism, it does not prescribe or determine the changes in it. It induces a reaction in the organism, but the accepted changes are determined by the internal structure of the organism itself. It is the structure of the living system and its previous history of perturbations that determines what reactions the new perturbation will induce.6 Translating this low-level description of the enactive process and applying it to reading: two people will experience dierent imagined world because the nature of their interpretation of the text, their attributed meaning, the form of their imagined worlds, are determined by their personality, history, natural tendencies and sociological upbringing.
6

P.L. Luisi. Autopoiesis: a review and a reappraisal. In: Naturwissenschaften 90 (2003), pp. 4959

Though enactivism thus provides an elegant answer to the dierence between the imagined worlds of dierent people, it makes no statements as to how exactly this sense-making, or attributed meaning, is done. Furthermore, though not explicitly so, the enactive approach is centered around active interaction between the autopoietic unit and the environment. Perceiving is action. This might not apply very well to the activity of reading, where the environment (the book) remains unchanged, static, and the activity of the woman is largely passive: she reads the book, but does not alter the book by doing so. In a sense we have one way trac: information ows from the book to the woman, but not the other way around. The woman gives new meaning to the book in her own personal imagined world, but this remains internal and does not inuence her environment (unless we count the way in which the womans future actions on the environment are altered by her current experience). There are a number of theories which go even further than enactivism in relating cognition to activity. Hans Jonas7 and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone8 consider movement the dening criterion of living, cognitive beings. Such theories hardly seem applicable to reading, a process almost exclusively associated with sitting still. Still, there is a way in which we can see the imagined world as an end-product of a process dependant foremost on movement. Let us ask ourselves: how can the woman imagine the man in the desert walking? She can imagine this because she herself has seen other people walk. More importantly, she herself know what it is to walk, because she herself has walked. She has walked because through walking she came to know about the world she lived in. In such ways the motility centered theories do apply to our example. But almost immediately, we can also cite another situation, that would be far harder to explain with this line of reasoning. Suppose the woman comes to some passage in her book in which the hero has magically been granted the ability to y. Once the hero takes ight, the woman can still image the world in which this is possible. Moreover, she can imagine what the hero feels like, ying through the air, even though she herself has never own. Of course, her imagination will needs be an approximation of the feeling, but it phenomenologically present none the less. And conversely, we can also imagine a woman who was a quadriplegic from birth reading a book about a man walking, and being able to imagine what the man feels. This relates to other philosophical debates (Nagels What Is it Like to Be a Bat? springs to mind) which we will no discuss here, but at the very least it forms a question that the motility-centered approaches have to answer.

Extended consciousness
Andy Clark and David Chalmers introduced the notion of the extended mind in 1998.9 The mind, they argued, is not isolated inside the skull: it leaks out. The prototypical example is a person doing long divisions, using a notepad to hold intermediate results. In this case the notepad becomes an integral part of the cognitive process. Now, if some external item was similarly involved in one of the activities traditionally associated with mind, such as having beliefs, then we would have part of the mind external to the body, and thus extended into the
Hans Jonas. The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. In: Delta, New York, 1966. Chap. Fouth essay: to Move and to Feel: on the Animal Soul, pp. 99107 8 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone. Animation: the fundamental, essential, and properly descriptive concept. In: Continental Philosophy Review 42 (2009), pp. 375400 9 Andy Clark and David Chalmers. The extended mind. In: Analysis 58.1 (1998), pp. 1023
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world. Clark and Chalmers provide a thought experiment which is meant to show just this. They present Otto, an Alzheimer patient who carries a notebook in which he notes facts he wishes to remember. They argue that, as it is written in the notebook that the museum is on 53rd street, it might be reasonably said that Otto has the belief that the museum is on 53rd street, even though that belief happens to be stored in a notebook instead of the brain. Of all theories presented in this paper, this theory seems to t our example the best. However, we must rst determine whether it strictly applies. Does the book qualify as part of extended cognition, or even of extended mind? Not surprisingly, none of the examples described by Clark is directly comparable to our situation. To make an intelligent determination anyway, I will apply the parity principle: If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it to go on in the head, we would have no hesitation in accepting as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (for that time) part of the cognitive process.9 Now, if the part played by the book in our example were instead located inside the womans head, then the woman would be imagining the story of the man walking through the desert entirely on her own, and this would most certainly be referred to as a cognitive process. In this sense, it would be logical to refer to the book as part of the womans extended cognition. On the other hand, there is an important dierence between the book and other objects that Clark often cites as examples of extended cognition, and this is that the woman has neither written the book, nor is she altering it as she reads, nor has she necessarily consciously endorsed the contents of the book before. These are all properties that Clark associates with extended cognition. Let us for the moment assume that the book qualies as part of the womans extended cognitive process as she reads. Then, since the activity we are talking about, imagination, is one traditionally associated with the mind, we may also say that the book is part of the womans extended mind. Interpreting the scene from our example in this way does seem to make sense: the woman forms an extended mind by including the book, and in this way is able to do something she would otherwise not be able to: to imagine the entire story as it is written in the book. This also has another nice feature when compared to some of the previous theories. In the previously discussed theories, the book was accorded little to no special status: it was simply part of the womans environment, a trigger for the imagined world, but the woman herself did all the work. This does not match our intuitive understanding of reading: the resultant imagined world is caused in part by the contents of the book and in part by the imagination of the woman, which is shaped by her personal history. The extended mind story matches this intuition more closely. I would propose taking the analysis one step further: instead of the book being part of the womans extended mind, can we not more accurately claim that it is part of her extended consciousness? After all, the process involved does not only inuence the womans mind, it radically alters her conscious experience.

David Chalmers already addresses the question of extended consciousness in his foreword to Clarks Supersizing the Mind : what about the big question: extended consciousness? The dispositional beliefs, cognitive processes, perceptual mechanisms, and moods [...] extend beyond the borders of consciousness, and it is plausible that it is precisely the non-conscious part of them that is extended.10 But where Chalmers suggests that only non-conscious parts of cognition are extended, I would argue that our example, in which a woman is transported out of her environment and is conscious of an entirely dierent world, qualies exactly as that: extended consciousness. As I said: the conscious experience here derives in part from the womans imagination and in part from the words in the book. Together they form a system, and the imagined world is the result.

Conclusion
When trying to analyze the situation of a transported reader using embodied approaches, one would expect there to be little overlap: the embodied philosophies heavily rely, by design, on the body, whereas reading is an activity in which the physical body plays no big role. Still, we have seen an unexpected result in that embodied mind theories can be related to this situation. Non-computational, non-representational theories have given us an alternative to the classic symbolic theories of reading which might account for the phenomenological transparency of the words as the readers becomes less conscious of the text itself and more of the imagined world. ORegan et al.s sensorimotor theory has shown us a possible way in which we can distinguish the imagined world from the real one, and yet have them be similar in a way that accounts for the similarity of the experience of imagined worlds as compared to experience of the real world. Enactivism has given us a plausible reason why the imagined world will be unique for each reader, as each readers imagination is formed by their entire history and form as a being. And most importantly, the concept of the book being part of the readers extended mind and even extended consciousness provides an elegant description of the phenomenon of reader and book as a whole. On the other hand, we have seen a number of occasions where embodied theories failed to apply to reading, focused as they are on the body, the low-level processes, biology, motility, active interaction with the environment and other aspects of cognition that may be salient in day to day experience, but are entirely absent in a reader whose only activity during reading is the occasional turning of the page. And while traditional, computational, representational cognition does not answer the hard question of how the experience of the imagined world arrives from the perception and processing of the text in the book, neither does non-representational, embodied cognition yet have any explanation in what mystical way the perception of the book triggers in the reader the imagined world.

10 David Chalmers. Supersizing the Mind. In: Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009. Chap. Foreword, pp. i xxviii

In conclusion, I would say that although embodied theories can give interesting insights into the experience of reading, the domain of focus for embodied cognition is too far apart from that of reading as a phenomenological fringe case. On the other hand, we might end on the positive note that when embodied theories of cognition have grown mature enough to be able to explain the conscious experience of imagination and reading, it will have proven itself as a serious and comprehensive theory of mind.

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