From Embodied Cognition to Free Will - Humana.Mente

Introduction
Agency: From Embodied Cognition to Free Will
Duccio Manetti*
duccio.manetti@unifi.it
Silvano Zipoli Caiani**
silvano.zipoli@unimi.it
Traditional theories about experience have always represented the subject as a
passive recipient of sensory stimuli, which get processed through successive
layers of the brain cortex and culminate in a phenomenal experience, omitting
any mention of the role of the personal sense of agency. According to this
formulation, experience emerges as a combination of biological and
phenomenological descriptions, linking mechanical processes to subjective
qualitative reports. Conceptual frameworks provided by neuroscience and
phenomenological analysis are alternative descriptive systems originally
conceived for alternative explanatory purposes. Here is the origin of many of
the theoretical tensions in cognitive science. Today, after years in which
dualism and reductionism have been the only games in town, the idea of an
embodied dynamicism is emerging in the field of cognitive science with
support from substantial empirical evidence. As perceptual experience is
shaped by action execution, it seems necessary to assume a theoretical
framework within which the interconnection between the perceiving subject’s
conscious states, his body and the environment is adequately emphasized.
For the phenomenological debate, the notion of embodiment coincides
with the rebuttal of what is usually considered the Cartesian dualism, that is,
the segregation of any bodily influence from the subjective experiential
domain. Crossing the history of western thought, this problem acquires a
critical dimension in the twentieth century philosophical debate. The way to
understand the relationship between body and consciousness finds a new style
after the establishment of the phenomenological framework. Following the
path originally drawn by Husserl and successively developed by Merleau-Ponty,
* University of Florence
** University of Milan