Current conceptualizations of socio-ecological systems (SESs) are biased toward the so-called computational model of human cognition, according to which the human mind is an entity separate from its social and material environment: informational input from the environment is transformed via sensory systems into symbolic representation and further processed by the mind into human action upon the environment. In contrast, in the embodied model of human cognition, abstractions of the mind are not symbolic representations but rather neurally grounded in concrete sensorimotor experience. Hukkinen argues that the embodied perspective suggests fundamental qualifications to the computational view of SESs, both in terms of how human-environmental interaction is conceptualized and what environmental policies stem from such conceptualization.
Janne I. Hukkinen (born 1957; PhD, University of California, Berkeley, 1990; MSc, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland, 1984) is professor of environmental policy at University of Helsinki. He is a board member of the European Society for Ecological Economics and chair of the Finnish Society for Environmental Social Science. Professor Hukkinen is an Expert Counsellor on the Environment for the Supreme Administrative Court of Finland and a member of the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme Environment and Climate Scientific Advisory Group.
Moderation: Professor Dr. Konrad Ott