"Embodied Cognition" -- empirio-criticism rides again

An article in Scientific American on "Embodied Cognition" prompted a commenter to declare: "The phrase "embodied simulation" is confusing." I agreed and added the following comment as a rider to a previous comment I made referring to Lenin's book on empirio-criticism:

jayjacobus is right about the confusion. There's an interplay between reality and perception of it, and perception itself is a reality, so we have perceptions of perception. It's like consciousness and self-consciousness, and this relationship has been a central problem for philosophy. One of the most primitive responses has been to invent a previous cause, and stop the infinite regression by calling some given cause final or ultimate or prime or whatever. This "embodied simulation" nonsense is the same kind of thing - what it doesn't do is answer the question of reality, ie what is being simulated.
This is a philosophical perpetuum mobile that pretends it isn't. 
Now Kant was smart, so he stopped his infinite regression pain by claiming that the ultimate ground for everything was ultimately unknowable, which was the agnostic thing to do. Hegel was smarter but far less diplomatic, and said "look, reality and our perception of it is full of contradictions, live with it", and moved beyond Kant, opening the way for Marx to move beyond the whole supernatural 'perception/consciousness/thought first' approach. 
For empirical beings, we are very attached to abstract ideas. The reason is simple - we process continuous empirical reality including ourselves using discrete abstract reflections of it in thought. So if you want to call this processing 'simulation', be my guest. Ditto if you want to be empirical by calling it 'embodied'. Well done. Which leaves us as bodies that think. Square one.
Moving in a world of discrete, abstract reflection our mirror minds naturally assume everything is discrete and abstract as soon as it thinks about it, except that the basic presupposition for our survival in reality is concrete continuity. And since survival is opportunistic and iconoclastic, we survive in reality at the expense of broken intellectual dogma, icons and fetishes. 
This drama is entertainingly embodied for me in Lucretius's great Latin poem On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura), and in Hegel's two great works The Phenomenology of the Spirit and The Science of Logic. These are guaranteed pre-Marxist so clear of any ideological tarring and feathering that anything written after 1848 might risk. For a scientific mind they are immensely rewarding, and even a short dip is very invigorating!

Higher education as public relations

Mary Beard blogged about the Open University's absurd ads for spin doctors.
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2012/08/university-publicity.html

I commented:


I think they're just seeing how far they can push us without getting their shins hacked. Or their spins reversed.
There's a more general aspect to this zeitgeist stuff. It ties in with the Romantic dissolution of genre boundaries (exploding in the novel form in the Enlightenment, and culminating in things like Brecht's "epic drama" and Joyce's "poetic novel" last century). For some decades now it's been eroding the boundaries between fiction and documentary (ficumentaries and reality shows etc).
The historical ground for it of course is the dissolution of class (ie rigidly, materially hierarchical) society. The philosophical ground is the transition from analytical to dialectical reason/logic (A equals A, you say? Hmmmm). Living, moving and becoming more than dead, static and either/or.
Which affects us in our everyday lives by making us conscious that we are not just living but being seen to live. And exist in a permanent state of metamorphosis through our interactions. We make ourselves (poesis) not just invent, but make, shape.
Except that society (still rigidly class-determined) is struggling to the death against this change. It might as well struggle against the tide of course, but as a result of its resistance all this is happening but no one is aware of it. ("They do not know it, but they do it", as Marx comments in Capital.)
And examples of it happening are all around us, particularly in the US, the most dialectically contradictory country on earth. Like the focus in schools on shaping yourself in relation to your classwork - oral presentation. You are your image. A company or institution is its perception. Careers and billions in profit depend on this.
And people being what we are, we examine it and make a science out of it, excising all the critical bits on the way.
It's international and damn near universal now, because the social transformation is so delayed. The zeitgeist juice impregnates the whole body of the world system deeper and deeper because of the immense material pressures involved.
So humans are the deliberate synthesis of their social conventions and their innate selves. However, the refusal to grasp what's going on means that the innate self bit - the "poor, bare, forked animal" - is obliterated. What's left is the social self that flatters the system. The "furred robes". But since the times are in a state of chassis the unconscious forces itself on us in the form of nightmare and dystopian imaginings. The emperor's new clothes are both furred robes and dissolved in air, flickering before our eyes like strobe lights.
Which means we get spin doctors and social masseurs and Big Media pushing the Big Lie with the straightest of faces and immense self-importance, while a few brave souls (Chomsky, Wikileaks) are busy trying to slow down the strobe and reveal the emptiness at the heart of the Emerald City, so to speak.
Mary is on the side of the angels here, asking who is managing the light show, and why. So our small, voluntary, blog community is standing up to the huge, professionally funded educational institution, and can point to the rising tide, or at least the rising pressure it is exerting.
The nice thing is that keeping the zeitgeist locked up demands a huge amount of effort and resources. And although it takes resources and effort to liberate it, they are infinitesimal in proportion. This will be evident in some decades when capitalism has disappeared down the plughole and sucked bourgeois society down the drain with it.
In the meantime, the truth is a mighty warrior, and a warm and sexy companion to boot. Blake wrote: "Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed." Which is basically what we're doing as we make and shape ourselves in our opposition to the absurdity and inhumanity of the prophet Gobbledegook and incomprehensible Profit.