John Haugeland

from Having Thought: Essays in the metaphysics of mind

"In particular, interrelationist accounts retain a principled distinction between the mental and the corporeal--a distinction that is reflected in contrasts like semantics versus syntax, the space of reasons versus the space of causes, or the intentional versus the physical vocabulary.[...] The contrary of this separation--or battery of separations--is not interrelationist holism, but something that I would like to call the intimacy of the mind's embodiment and embeddedness in the world. The term 'intimacy' is meant to suggest more than just necessary interrelation or interdependence but a kind of commingling or integralness of mind, body, and world--that is, to undermine their very distinctness." (208)

"It is particularly important for our purposes to counter this impression, since the corporeal discontinuity between our bodies and the world--the very discontinuity that determines these bodies as bodies--misleadingly enhances the apparent significance of bodily surfaces as relevant interfaces for the understanding of other phenomena, such as intelligence." (214)

"In other words, which close interactions matter, when considering the scope and structure of systems, depends fundamentally on what we're interested in--that is, what we're trying to understand." (217)

"If, on the other hand, there is constant close coupling between the ant and the details of the beach surface, and if this coupling is crucial in determining the actual path, then, for the purposes of understanding that path, the and and beach must be regarded more as an integrated unit than as a pair of distinct components. This is the simplest archetype of what I mean by intimacy." (217)

"On the contracy, however, I want to suggest that the human mind may be more intimately intermingled with its body and its world than is any other, and that this is one of its distinctive advantages." (223)

"By contrast, the alternative that I have been sketching sees these nerves as carrying high-bandwidth interactions (high-intensity, in Simon's terms), without any simple, well-defined structure. Thus, by the same criterion, we would not get two relatively independent separable components--a rational mind and a physical body, meeting at an interface--but rather a single closely-knit unity." (227)

"The unity of mind and body can be promoted wholesale, perhaps, on the basis of general principles of monism or the unity of science. Such arguments are indifferent to variety and substructure within either the mental or teh physical: everything is unceremoniously lumped together at one swoop. Here, by contrast, integration is offered at retail. In attempting to undermine the idea of an interface between the mind and the fingers, I am staking no claim to the liver or intestines. (Simon may be right about the glands and viscera.) The idea is not to wipe otu all distinctions and homogenize everything on general principles, but rather to call certain very familiar divisions into question, on the basis of considerations highly peculiar to them." (228)

"As our ability to cope with the absent and covert, human intelligence abides in the meaningful--which, far from being restricted to representations, extends to the entire human world. Mind, therefore, is not incidentally but intimately embodied and intimately embedded in its world." (237)