The rise and fall of disembodiment

Disembodiment is a claim about the nature of the mind. It says that the mind works independently of the body; or, in other words, that the body is irrelevant to understanding how the mind works. Our previous claims of “mind-over-matter” and “matter-over-mind” both assume that the mind is disembodied. Do we have reason to reject this assumption? Yes. But doing so requires reframing how we think about the nature of the mind. We present some of the basic ideas about mental representations and a computational view of the mind. We begin by presenting these views in stark terms, without qualifications. Later, we complicate the picture and introduce important refinements.