Consilience as Embodied Cognition

Join us for a Workshop hosted by our community, the ProSocial Commons. ProSocial Commons member, Jim Freda, will be sharing with us about consilience as embodied cognition starting with a presentation and followed by a discussion and a series of exercises to understand the theory in practice. In his own words:

I would like to start a discussion about Consilience. Consilience is a useful concept because it helps us think about scientific revolution in terms of perception and evolution. Consilience is a historical concept that dates back to the work of the influential 19C polymath William Whewell on inductive science. Whewell was an important influence on Maxwell and Darwin, authors of the two greatest syntheses of the 19C., on electromagnetism and evolution respectively. Today Consilience is an excellent way to think about the major paradigm shift occurring in the broad interdisciplinary fields of complexity theory. Consilience, I argue, is less a grand unified theory of everything than the perceptual basis for it.

“To find a world free of suffering, look inside any healthy organism.” (Atlas Hugged by David S Wilson)

Rather than an abstract cognitive theory of Consilience I want to offer an embodied cognition approach that is based on the synergistic anatomy of the axial line, a primordial structure that we share with the entire chordate phylum. Called the deep front line or deep core by Thomas Myers, this major myofascial synergy is our postural core and both organizes our movement and holds us together from the inside out. I argue that embodied self-awareness and an awareness of the whole starts with this rich interoceptive structure. Our active and sensory motor recognition of this body-wide system within ourselves is a basis for recognition of homologous patterns of the whole in the world and others. This I argue is the bodily perceptual basis of Consilience.

‍"I have argued that there is intrinsically only one class of explanation. It traverses the scales of space, time, and complexity to unite the disparate facts of the disciplines by consilience, the perception of a seamless web of cause and effect.”(Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by E. O. Wilson)

You do not need to be a ProSocial Commons Member to join us. If you are interested in joining, please book an intro call here