This article examines how the human perception of knowledge is structured in the empirical world. It is often argued by scientists that facts in this empirical world can be perceived, which makes us believe that this world is an objective world. However, the human way of making sense of the world is individual and embodied, which causes the creation of an individual world for every human: a body-world. The empirical world is in this case a shared space for multiple bodies that agree on the causality of certain events and objects in that space. Every body-world therefore has its own partial perspective on the knowledge in this shared space, which is formed by the physiology of the body, the cultural background, and the identity of the person. The theater has the power, through the techniques of re-enactment and disruption, to give its audience insight in other situated knowledges from different partial perspectives. It can therefore connect different situated knowledges and create ecological knowledge: the awareness of the connected network of knowledges that is produced in various body-worlds on what is happening in the shared space. Only then can we emancipate knowledge and embrace the various partial perspectives that this shared space of body-worlds has to offer.
Iatrogenesis is the doctrine that deals with the harmful effects of medical treatment. A substance that, for example, tackles the pathogen may also weaken the body. If it weakens the body and does not address the pathogen sufficiently, it may well be that the resistance of the body itself becomes insufficient precisely because of the treatment, with all conceivable consequences. Our technological world is full of these kinds of dilemmas: if you tackle something, do it firmly, so that you have the maximum chance of success. An important reason that there is no political and scientific interest in technological iatrogenesis (TI) is that it does not yield any money. This makes it clear that economic thinking dominates everything. On the contrary, TI (coincidentally very symbolically a reversal of IT) would dampen the economy. And that is necessary. There is no right-minded person who does not know that infinite growth from finite resources is impossible, and that therefore the economy must be tempered.
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From the article: Abstract Over the last decades, philosophers and cognitive scientists have argued that the brain constitutes only one of several contributing factors to cognition, the other factors being the body and the world. This position we refer to as Embodied Embedded Cognition (EEC). The main purpose of this paper is to consider what EEC implies for the task interpretation of the control system. We argue that the traditional view of the control system as involved in planning and decision making based on beliefs about the world runs into the problem of computational intractability. EEC views the control system as relying heavily on the naturally evolved fit between organism and environment. A ‘lazy’ control structure could be ‘ignorantly successful’ in a ‘user friendly’ world, by facilitating the transitory creation of a flexible and integrated set of behavioral layers that are constitutive of ongoing behavior. We close by discussing the types of questions this could imply for empirical research in cognitive neuroscience and robotics.
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