2/16/2023

NEUROSCIENCE AND PHENOMENOLOGY

OF SOCIAL INTERACTION
Dr. Hanna Poikonen
ETH Zurich

”We perceive bodies and bodily expressions, but we do so in

such a way that we perceive and react to the mental life that
those physical forms express.” – Peter Hobson

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• The way I live in my body can be influenced by social and cultural dynamics.
• Rather than being simply a biological given, embodiment is also a category of
sociocultural analysis.
• Social interaction is as such embodied practice.

• Bodily behavior, expression, and action are essential to (and not merely contingent
vehicles of) some basic forms of consciousness.
• What we call mental states (intentions, beliefs, desires) are not simply or purely mental,
they are not floating around inside our heads; they are bodily states that are often
manifested in bodily postures, movements, gestures, expressions and actions.
• As such, they can be directly apprehended in the bodily component of people whose
mental states they are.

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• Intentions are not completely hidden in the mind but also expressed in behavior, and this
has implications for intersubjective understanding.
• Difference, the epistemic asymmetry, between our knowledge of our own action and our
knowledge of the action of others.
• Whereas the latter knowledge is based on observation and “outer” sensory awareness,
agents typically have knowledge of what they are doing from “within”.

• Is it possible to divide action into two components, a psychological component of trying,

and a non-psychological component of bodily movement?
• Does our knowledge bridge or deconstruct the divide between inner and outer?
• Do we have to postulate the existence of hidden mental happenings if we are to interpret
someone’s bodily movement as, for example buying a ticket or gesturing goodbye, or is it
rather the case that intentions are manifested directly in goal-directed movements?

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• ”Who system” as a neuronal model of

action identification.
• The same areas of my brain are activated
when I engage in intentional action and
when I see you performing the same or
similar intentional action (mirror
neurons, “shared representations” in
several areas).
• An additional subpersonal mechanism is
needed to specify who the agent is.

• The stepwise distinctions found on subpersonal neuronal level are also apparent on the
experiential level.
• The neutrality of shared representations: ”Naked intentions”, the intentions or
intentional actions for which agency is yet to be determined.
• An articulation in experience between the perception of intention and the perception of
agency.
• If the brain can process information about intentions without assigning agency to the
intentions, is it legitimate to say that our experience is similarly articulated?

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• Phenomenologically (experientially) intentions in almost all cases come already fully

clothed in agency.
• The ”who” question, which might be rightly posed at the neuronal level, hardly ever
comes up at the level of experience – but see conditions like anarchic hand syndrome.
• Even if the neuronal processes can be defined as involving stepwise process, this does
not mean that a stepwise process needs to show up in experience.
• To be human is already to be action-oriented in the world in a way that defines the
organized usefulness of the things we find around us and then lets us think about them.

• Theory of mind: Our ability to attribute mental states of self and others and to interpret,
predict, and explain behavior in terms of mental states such as intentions, believes and
desires.
• Theory theory (TT) of mind argues that our understanding of others engages detached
intellectual processes, moving by inference from one belief to another.
• The development of theory of mind in children

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Frith U, Happé F(1999) Theory if mind and self-

consciousness: What is it like to be autistic? Mind &
Language.

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• Simulation theory (ST) of mind argues that our understanding of others exploits our own
motivational and emotional resources.
• Explicit simulation: My understanding of others draws on my ability to project myself
imaginatively into their situations (“mental shoes”).
• If I project the results of my own simulation to the other, I understand only myself in
that other situation, but I don’t necessarily understand the other.

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“Whenever we face situations in which exposure to others’ behavior requires a response

by us, be it active or simply attentive, we seldom engage ourselves in an explicit,
deliberate interpretative act. Our understanding of a situation most of the time is
immediate, automatic and almost reflex like.” – Vittorio Gallese

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• Our understanding of others is mediated by implicit and automatic simulation process,

something of which we are not aware.
• Overlapping neural areas in the frontal and parietal cortices are activated when 1) In
engage in an intentional action, 2) I observe some other person engage in that action, 3) I
imagine myself or another person engage in that action, and 4) I prepare to imitate
another person’s action.

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• Maybe the neural processes are part of the processes that underlie intersubjective
perception rather than the extra cognitive step of simulation.
• These processes regarded as underpinning a direct perception of the other person’s
intentions, rather than a distinct mental process of simulating their intentions.
• Perception as a temporal and enactive phenomenon involving motor processes.
• Mirror neuron activation is not the initiation of simulation; it is part of an enactive
intersubjective perception of what the other is doing.
• I immediately see that is their action, gesture, emotion or intention, and it is extremely
rare that I would be in a position to confuse it with my own.

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• The only mind I have access to is my own.

• How can the perception of another person’s body provide me with information about
their mind?
• I infer by analogy that the behavior of other bodies is associated with experiences similar
to those I have myself.
1) One is at home in oneself and has to project into the other what one already finds in
oneself.
2) We can never experience others’ thoughts or feelings: for us they exist based on what
we perceive, their bodily and behavioral appearances.

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• Rejection of assumptions 1) and 2): We should not fail to acknowledge the embodied and
embedded nature of self-experience, and we should not ignore what can be directly
perceived about others.
• Our initial self-acquittance is not purely mental and it doesn’t take place in isolation
from others.
• Affective and emotional states are not simply qualities of subjective experience: they are
also expressive phenomena expressed in bodily gestures and actions, and visible to
others.
• It’s difficult and artificial to divide a phenomenon neatly into a psychological aspect and
a behavioral one.

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• Phenomenological views emphasize non-mentalizing and embodied perceptual

approaches in the problem of intersubjectivity.
• The body of others presents itself as radically different from any other physical entity –
the bodily presence of other as a lived body.
• Sartre highlights that the body of another is given to me as part of a situation or
meaningful context.

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• Phenomenologists consider empathy a basic, perceptual form of understanding (not

emotional contagion, sympathy or compassion).
• When I experience the facial expressions or meaningful actions of another, I am
experiencing another’s subjectivity, and not merely imagining it, simulating it, or
theorizing about it.
• Husserl points out that if I had the same access to the consciousness of the other as I
have to my own, the other would cease being an other and would instead become part of
myself.
• The otherness of other manifests in the elusiveness and inaccessibility.

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• Since intersubjectivity is possible, there must exist a bridge between my self-

acquaintance and my acquaintance with other – my own subjectivity must contain an
anticipation of the other.
• The bridge or common ground is embodied being-in-the-world – acting and living in the
world.
• I am experiencing a certain way of engaging with the world that already involves others
and in a way that anticipates my possible response to others.

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• In seeing the actions and expressive movement of other persons, one already sees them
meaningful.
• Expressive behavior is saturated with the meaning of the mind: it reveals the mind to us.
• We should avoid constructing the mind as something visible to only one person and
invisible to everyone else.
• We don’t overstate the difference between self-experience and the experience of others
(conceptual problem of other minds), nor we downplay the difference between self-
experience and the experience of others neither (the otherness of the other).

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• Brain science is ultimately concerned in explaining the way the physical processes of the
brain conspire to produce the phenomena of human experience.
• Phenomenological account of a given aspect of human behavior can provide a description
of the characteristics of that behavior.
• It also offers theoretical accounts that can challenge existing models and background
assumptions – like in social perception and embodied interaction.

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• Perception is interactive: Perception-for-interaction

• Perceptual experience of other person’s bodily postures, movements, gestures, facial
expression, directed gaze and actions, are tightly coupled to our own bodily movements,
gestures, and so on.
• From birth, the infants are pulled to these interactive processes.

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• At six months, infants start to perceive grasping goal directed, and at 10-11 months
infants can parse some kinds of continuous action according to intentional boundaries.
• They follow the other person’s eyes, and perceive various movements of the head, the
mouth, the hands, and more general body movements as meaningful, goal-directed
movements.
• Such perceptual and interactive experiences give the infant, by the end of the first year
of life, a non-mentalizing understanding of the intentions and dispositions of other
persons.
• All of this predates the child’s development of social perspective-taking at around two
years.

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• 18-month-old children comprehend what another person intends to do with an

instrument in a specific context.
• We perceive others as agents whose actions are framed in their practical activities.
• Children are not passive observers, but they interact with others and develop further
capabilities in the context of those interactions.
• Our typical understanding of other is contextual, and empathy is an ability to experience
behavior as expressive of mind – an ability access the life of the mind of others in their
expressive behavior and meaningful action.

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• We-intentionality is considered to be essential for the creation and maintenance of

social norms, conventions, and institutional practices involving such things a money,
elections, marriages and nation-states.
• It refers to an ability to jointly be directed at objects and goals and has been discussed
under various labels, like “distributed cognition”, “team reasoning”, joint agency”, or
“shared” or “collective intentionality”.
• Group-membership affects the mind and transforms one’s sense of self, one’s relation to
others, and the way one experiences the world.

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• Groupthink: Rather than groups being able to correct individual biases, the general findings suggest that
groups exaggerate those biases.
• On the other hand, we keep much of our memory in other people’s heads, called transactive memory.
• For example, training groups together so that they form a robust transactive memory system tends to
lead to better group performance, compared to training group members separately and then bringing
them together.
• Individual-level thought follows developmentally from interpersonal communication, which is prior and
primary (Lev Vygotsky):
• It is less insightful to say that group cognition is like individual cognition than it is to observe that
individual thinking is a lot like thinking in groups.

Smith ER, Conrey FR (2008) The social context of cognition. The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition.

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”I am not merely for myself, and the other is not standing opposed to me as an other,
rather the other is my you, and speaking, listening, responding, we already form we, that is
unified and communalized in a particular manner.” – Husserl

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• Primary intersubjectivity is not primary simply in developmental terms; it remains

primary throughout the life span and underpins explanation or prediction of the mental
states of others.
• We can understand others as 1) animate beings, 2) intentional agents, 3) mental agents.
• Group-membership affects the mind and transforms one’s sense of self, one’s relation to
others, and the way one experiences the world.
• We don’t overstate the difference between self-experience and the experience of others
(conceptual problem of other minds), nor we downplay the difference between self-
experience and the experience of others neither (the otherness of the other).

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