Embodied Metaverse and ‘Sense of Thought’ - Focused on the ‘Body-Schema’ and ‘4E Cognition’

This research investigates how the metaverse, as a pervasive digital environment, reshapes the human body and mind. The ‘metaverse’ is conceptualized broadly, encompassing not only immersive technologies such as VR and AR but also existing digital platforms such as internet finance, social networks, and cloud services, as well as future virtual worlds. By examining the interplay between the virtual life-world constructed by digital technologies and the analog life-world rooted in our bodily experiences, the study highlights how humans navigating these dual realities experience transformations in their bodily schemata. These bodily changes, in turn, influence the relationship between body and mind. To analyze this evolving relationship, the research adopts the ‘4E cognition’; framework in cognitive science, which emphasizes the embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive nature of cognition. This approach is deeply informed by Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and the concept of ‘otherness,’ linking embodiment to social cognition, intersubjectivity, and empathy. Central to this inquiry is the question: how do shifts in bodily schemata within a metaversified world alter human thought processes? To address this, the study engages with Markus Gabriel’s concept of ‘the sense of thought,’; providing a new perspective on the body-mind problem within the embodied metaverse as the ‘Nooscope’. Through this approach, the researcher argues that redefining the concept of the metaverse based on the notions of 4E cognition and the sense of thought can contribute to a deeper understanding of the mind-body problem.