Cognition is Not to be Understood

If you want to understand cognition, go first to your direct, embodied experience, and only secondarily to concepts and abstract analysis. Go to movement, feeling, and sensation. The reasons for this are simple:

First, around 99% of human cognition is non-conceptual, or subconceptual. Some researchers would say "subconscious," but this is inaccurate. The dimensions of cognition inhabiting - and inhabited by - the body are most definitely conscious. Every moment of our lives, our bodily intelligence is in direct, indirect, and complex interaction with countless aspects of our environment. We are detecting and responding to light, color, sound, sensation, movement, speed, temperature, humidity, and many other forms of qualitative information, long before the conceptual mind can catch up and try to make explicit sense of anything that's happening around us. The subconceptual mind operates much more quickly than the conceptual mind, which on balance is actually rather slow and cumbersome. (I'll explore this more in a later post.)

So, the body is highly aware of countless aspects of any given situation we find ourselves in, which we have not yet reflectively focused on through conceptual analysis. This conscious somatic awareness constitutes 99% of cognitive function in humans.

Second, we go to movement, sensation, and feeling to "understand" cognition because the characteristic nature of this 99% subconceptual cognition is qualitative. The qualitative includes a vast array of phenomena, including sensory perceptions; gut feelings; intuitions; aesthetics; imagination; anticipation; emotions; and other similar experiences. In short, it's all the things we can feel but not directly conceptualize. The sciences have definitively and emphatically shown that the vast majority of what exists - what constitutes reality - is ineffable. (This is a bold claim that I'll explore more in a later post, because it is often misunderstood...and ironically so! It is ironically misunderstood because many people try to make analytic, abstract, conceptual sense of the idea that most of reality is ineffable. Now, how much sense does that really make?)

But, make note: in saying that the large majority of reality is ineffable, I do not mean that "there's a lot of mystery that just hasn't been analyzed and conceptually defined yet." This is true. But even beyond those aspects of reality we haven't yet analyzed, and theoretically can name and understand through concepts, there are dimensions of reality that are ineffable as such. To be ineffable means that something in principle cannot be conceptually defined. And direct, intuitive experience, as well as evidence from hundreds of scientific disciplines, confirms that the majority of reality is qualitative ineffability.

By definition, we cannot conceptually understand qualitative ineffability, but we can feel it. And we feel primarily through movement (although, there are dimensions of feeling/sensation/somatic perception best experienced in stillness, but that's a post for another day).

So, to recap:

To understand cognition, go first to movement, sensation, and feeling, and only secondarily to abstract, conceptual analysis such as scientific data, philosophy, or quantitative measurement of any sort.

"There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy."
-Nietzsche