Lecture session 2
Movement and Thought: On the Minds of Those Who Live Through the Body

This presentation proposes “Movement and Thought” as a new research program inspired by the ideals of cybernetics. While cybernetics has explored the universal principles of control and communication across machines, animals, and societies, “Movement and Thought” foregrounds embodied cognition and bodily epistemology. It highlights domains that traditional cybernetics has not sufficiently addressed, including the primacy of the body, the computational equivalence of tacit and propositional knowledge, and learning and adaptation within human–environment interaction.

Recent findings in cognitive neuroscience demonstrate that conscious and unconscious processes function independently yet complementarily. The case of patient D.F. with visual form agnosia illustrates the limitations of traditional sandwich or experience-based models of motor control: despite impaired visual awareness, visuomotor performance remains intact. This paradox underscores the significance of unconscious motor control via the dorsal stream and automated processing mechanisms. It further suggests that motor control is not merely the outcome of conscious cognition, but rather emerges through the integration of conscious and unconscious mechanisms within closed-loop dynamics of information flow.

From this perspective, disciplines concerned with bodily movement can be restructured as fields for empirically testing and extending embodied cognition theory. Ultimately, “Movement and Thought” is proposed as a new axis of convergent research that integrates phenomenology, cognitive neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, offering both theoretical foundations and practical methodologies for advancing our understanding of the bodily basis of human intelligence.