Filling in the vacuous flesh: Embodiment, constitution, and interoception

Abstract

To many scientists and philosophers, embodied cognition lacks validity, since it fails to offer extraordinary evidence. In this article, we claim that the development of one possible evidence-based embodied cognition could initiate a considerable research project through the inner workings of bodily constitutive neuro-machinery. We call it “interoceptive embodied cognition”; here, the concept of interoception plays the role of filling in the (inner) gap of vacuous embodiment. The most important tenet of embodied cognition for our purpose is the standard of constitution to which we will repeatedly return. We will look back to the three standards of embodied cognition and then regard interoception as the (inner) filling-in echoing the constitution standard of embodied cognition. We will then demonstrate the varieties and constituents of interoception. Next, we will present interoception’s close relationship to at least four subdomains of embodied cognition, which include: (a) sense of embodiment, (b) embodied self, (c) embodied emotion, and (d) embodied social cognition. Finally, we will conclude with the preliminaries of interoceptive embodied cognition.