Abstract

The purpose of this contribution is to highlight the need to place the investigation on human cognition within an integrated naturalistic framework, adopting an approach that is consistent with the developments of evolutionary biology and embodied cognitive sciences. In the study of the mind it is necessary to come out of a position of methodological individualism, in order to consider the embodied and embedded dimension of the object of investigation. Conscious acts have an intentional structure, that is they are always directed towards a reference to the world, not only the physical one, but also the social and cultural one. The theoretical premise of this vision of the mind is that the minimum unit of analysis is the organism-environment system. This dynamic co-implication can already be traced in the bodies modeled by evolution, in perception, in the most basic consonance and resonance with other agents and artifacts, in the flexibility of brain plasticity. The way we come across objects and experience them always depends on a certain contextual background and on the limits imposed by the shape of our body and its position in space. Furthermore, the environment is already meaningful. It is related to the interests and evolutionary needs of each agent. Significance is closely linked to the fitness and survival dimension of groups and individuals. Since this tool has reached its maximum sophistication in human beings, seems interesting to consider the boundary conditions of this latest evolution. In contemporary human societies, indeed, the experience of individuals is increasingly interrupted, marked and disturbed by stimuli, notifications and intrusive warnings that convey the subject’s attention and time into an intersubjective dimension, which nevertheless lacks its most basic level of intercorporeity. Humans live more and more in a virtual dimension apart from their biological, embodied, embedded condition, with the risk of a hiatus between what the subject experiences and the natural flow of reality, leaving the body behind the scenes of experience.