[1]
Due to lack of a better concept, the term “interaction” will be used throughout this article even though it entails clearly separable entities that have previously been independent—an assumption that is contested by the approach suggested here. Moreover, due to limited space, this commentary cannot take into account the aspect of intersubjectivity. The relevance of others with whom interaction takes place is inherent in the concept of mind and its interdependence with the environment (see e.g., De Jaegher & di Paolo 2007).
[2]

The importance of the body was put forward by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of perception: “[t]he body”, he wrote,“ is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to be involved in a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be” “continually committed to them”' (1962, p. 82), and further: “[o]ur bodily experience of movement is not a particular case of knowledge; it provides us with a way of access to the world and the object, with a ‘praktognosia’, which has to be recognized as original and perhaps as primary. My body has its world, without having to make use of ‘symbolic’ or ‘objectifying function’” (1962, p. 140–141; emphasis mine). This has been elaborated and enriched in the last years with views on recent empirical work by Shaun Gallagher (2005), who offers an account of the body that emphasizes the role of embodied action in perception and cognition.

[3]
Curiously, there is little direct reference to the pragmatists and in particular to John Dewey’s work. Notable exceptions are Mark Johnson (e.g., 2007) and Jay Schulkin (2009), who offer nuanced and explicit pragmatist views on neuroscientific research. Philip Kitcher (2012) offers a wide and detailed demonstration of the importance of pragmatism for philosophy.
[4]
For reasons of space, I cannot discuss the rich debate around the concepts of embodiment, embeddedness, and enactivism let alone their relation to the extended mind hypothesis (for parts of the discussion see: Adams & Aizawa 2008; Clark 1997, 2001; Clark & Chalmers 1998; Rupert 2009; Shapiro 2011; Sprevak 2009; Thompson 2010; Varela et al. 1991; Ward & Stapleton 2012; Wheeler 2011). These approaches vastly differ regarding their views on representations and their general approach to cognition and action. However, each of them can offer a way of moving beyond the traditional mind-body dichotomy. Specifically, enactivism focuses on the precise coupling of brain, body, and environment and might therefore be particularly promising for action-oriented approaches.
[5]

The implied essentialisation of biology as a constant of human being, and of culture as its variable and interactive compliment, is not just clumsily imprecise. It is the single major stumbling block that up to now has prevented us from moving towards an understanding of our human selves, and of our place in the living world, that does not endlessly recycle the polarities, paradoxes and prejudices of western thought (Ingold 2004, p. 217).

[6]
Predictive coding is a framework for understanding the reduction of redundancy and efficient coding in the nervous system. It is suggested that highly redundant natural signals are processed by removing the predictable components of the input, thereby transmitting only what is not predictable. Hierarchical predictive coding can explain response selectivities in networks (Clark 2001; Hohwy et al. 2008, Friston et al. 2010; Friston & Stephan 2007; Rao & Ballard 1999). Inspired by neural network processing, deep learning methods in machine learning aim to produce learning of features at multiple levels of abstraction, thus allowing learning of complex functions (e.g., Arel et al. 2010; Bengio 2009; Hinton et al. 2006).