The authors are methodical, returning faithfully to the three concepts from cognitive science that demand an update of our philosophical software: the cognitive unconscious, the embodied mind/embodied realism, and metaphorical thought: What would happen if we started with these empirical discoveries about the nature of mind and constructed a new philosophy? The answer is that an empirically responsible philosophy would require our culture to abandon some of its deepest philosophical assumptions. Johnson and Lakoff’s goal is to blend the findings of cognitive science with the Western philosophical tradition in order to distinguish between historical claims that fit the facts and those that don’t: The philosopher-linguist duo that brought us Metaphors We Live Byin 1980 followed up in 1999 with a much longer and more ambitious work addressing “The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought.” Two decades later, the book has mostly aged well, despite some notable flaws. While Mark Johnson and George Lakoff’s Philosophy in the Fleshcannot be fairly characterized as a comprehensive rejection of the mind-body dualism that has plagued Western philosophy from its earliest origins, it’s not a bad place to start. “I’ve got just the book for you,” I told him, “and it’s been almost a decade since I first read it. It also becomes easier to nail down the provenance and primary executor of human nature: it’s the brain, right? My friend intuitively rejected this reasoning, and felt that something important was missing––some truth or set of truths that could only be revealed by a more inclusive and intimate examination of the human body in its entirety.

When we do this, it becomes easier (albeit still daunting), to imagine successfully simulating a brain using computer software. This lacuna, he said, arose from a tendency to treat the brain as a discrete, self-contained information-processing and experience-producing system. In a recent discussion, a friend of mine identified a conspicuous lacuna in our cultural conversations about the human mind and technology.

Lakoff and johnson