Hubert Dreyfus on Merleau Ponty, embodyment and intercorporeality

Transcriptions from:

Hubert Dreyfus on Embodiment (I-II)YOUTUBE

Interviwer: discuss a little more about what Merleau-Ponty says 'get a grip on reality' because its much more than about learning; its not just what a distinguished doctor does in the surgery, or a pilot does when he is flying a plane"...
"The basic idea with Merleau-Ponty is that we are always moving to get an optimal grip. And now comes the place beneath what Heidegger was doing: even in perception; even in perceiving this table I am at a comfortable distance; but if I were that close I would sense that it was not the way to see it at its best way to get a grip. To talk Like MP he would say 'to get too close then there is too many details, if you get to far away you lose the details. He talks about how in a museum your body is led by a picture to move to the optimal distance where you experience maximum richness in all the detail, and the maximum clarity in the form."

CV- of interest here for ASJ is this notion of the embodiment of both the muscian 'getting to grips' with the instrument and meta-characters, and the play of improvisation; but also the audience embodying the artwork; finding ways to 'get a grip' by seeking its optimal richness and clarity.

Hubert Dreyfus on Embodiment (II-II) YOUTUBE

'Extract from 'On the Internet' "In cyberspace then, without out embodied ability to grasp meaning, relevence slips through our non existent fingers" ... "The world is a field of significance organised by and for beings like us with our bodies, desire, interest and purpose". Right: and that were Merleau Ponty comes in, non of that would have been said by Heidegger - Heidegger was just interested in how we could disclose the world without mental representation. But Merleau-Ponty sees that there isn't anything mental about it; at its basic level its our bodies and its skills for dealing with things and getting an optimal grip on things is what we need to understand. Then it becomes clear that computers just haven't got it: they haven't got bodies and they haven't got skills. And now something that you just read that is interesting: the world is organinsed by embodied beings like us to be coped with by embodied beings like us. And the computer is lost in the world from the bottom up' (6'30")

[On artificial minds] "Merleau-Ponty said: 'Its our body with its skills which allow us to relate to things by going around them, and with people through this interesting thing called intercorporeality where I don;t have to figure out your gestures - what you are thinking, what you are doing - I respond immediately with mine. MP thought of it as magical; now we have found something called mirror neurons, and these are also responsible for the firing nerves that lead to physical gestures"

CV- this reinforces my statement that ev2 (in CJA) are doing 75% of the work, we are the 'glue'