Embodied cognition resists Cartesian dualism the way a jazz musician resists sheet music—it doesn’t reject knowledge, it just insists that knowing is messy, lived, felt, and happening through a body that’s in the world, not hovering above it in metaphysical cosplay.

Let’s briefly exhume Descartes: he said cogito ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am.” The body, for him, was just a machine. The real action happened in the mind, sealed off from the world like a philosophical submarine.

Embodied cognition replies: you only think because you are a body. A wet, squishy, sensory-motor creature stumbling through space, using tools, touching stuff, and building concepts from the ground up—literally.

🧠 Key Tenets of Embodied Cognition

1. Cognition isn’t just in the brain—it’s distributed across the body.
   Your posture, gestures, gut, and muscle memory contribute to your thinking. You can’t separate “mental” from “physical” like separating egg yolk from white with a spoon.

2. The mind emerges from action in the world.
   We don’t just think about objects—we think with them. Holding a pen changes your cognition. Typing feels different than writing by hand. Ideas aren’t floating—they’re enacted.

3. Perception and thought are shaped by bodily experience.
   You understand time, love, and justice using metaphors based on movement, space, and sensation. (“Looking forward,” “heavy heart,” “feeling crushed.”) Language is soaked in embodiment.

4. Emotion and cognition are intertwined.
   Cartesian models tried to split them. Embodied cognition says: good luck. Emotion is bodily, and without it, reasoning collapses. (See: every AI ethics conference ever.)

5. Meaning arises in interaction.
   Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind introduces enaction: the idea that mind is co-created in the dance between organism and environment.

🧼 Why This Scrubs the Cartesian Residue Off Modern Thinking:

• It says the mind isn't a ghost in the machine; it is the machine—and the dance, and the music, and the floor.

• It blows up the idea of “pure reason” untouched by context. That’s not objectivity, that’s denial.

• It dethrones disembodied models that pretend to “know” without ever being-with.