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previous processes. There is no static self to be found; it is all process. You find thoughts but no thinker,
you find emotions and desires, but nobody doing them. The house itself is empty. There is nobody
If you found this passage odd, foreign, threatening, then you're ready for the upwind message
we've been tacking for. Classification is as deep as it gets. It's what binds us and separates them.
Understanding and behavior are rooted in taxonomy, as are religion, philosophy, reason, and
ethics. Ontology is behind our senses of fairness, risk and reward, even visual perception. Cat-
egories are the cornerstones of cognition and culture. That's why it's so hard for us to grok
Buddhism. We're weird. And by that I mean western, educated, industrialized, rich, and demo-
cratic (“WEIRD”).
It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it
appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others - and even the way we perceive reality -
makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancest-
ors.
xxiii
Of course, when we're not consumed by the pursuit of happiness, we too struggle with the onto-
logy of existence. While we may have inherited the mind/body dualism of our favorite reduc-
tionist, René Descartes, who concluded the mind (or soul) can exist without the body, we need
not stay bound by what Gilbert Ryle called “the ghost in the machine.”
xxiv
In recent decades, the countervailing framework of embodied cognition has built momentum
with respect to empirical research. This thesis holds that the nature of the mind is largely de-
termined by the form of the body. Unlike computationalism, which views the brain as a central
processing unit with inputs (sensory) and outputs (control), this theory of mind recognizes that
how and what we think is shaped by the body's systems of perception, action, and emotion. Our
bodies constrain the nature and content of our thoughts, and cognitive processing is distributed
beyond our brains. In short, cognition isn't just in the head.
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