CONCEPT
Embodied Coping
The skilled practitioner's immediate, bodily, pre-reflective engagement with a task—a way of knowing built from the body up that no disembodied system can possess, because knowing-how is not information.
Embodied coping is the phenomenon at the heart of
Hubert Dreyfus's critique of artificial intelligence: the carpenter driving a nail, the surgeon's hands navigating tissue, the experienced driver adjusting for a patch of ice before she has consciously registered it. In each case a being is engaged with the world through its body in a way that is immediate, pre-reflective, and sensitive to the situation's demands in a manner no set of rules or representations could capture. Drawing on
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Dreyfus argued that the skilled practitioner's knowledge is not stored in a mental representation the mind consults and the body executes—it is in the hands, which know the keyboard the way the tongue knows the mouth. This is practical knowledge, knowing-how rather than knowing-that, and it cannot be extracted from the body that has it and transferred to a system that has no body, because knowing-how is not information. In the cycle that began with
[YOU] on AI, embodied coping names exactly what