In line with much neuroscientific work today, Dewey describes how life is about constantly striving for greater adaptation and for a balance of energies. He beautifully elaborates:
Life itself consists of phases in which the organism falls out of step with the march of surrounding things and then recovers unison with it—either through effort or by some happy chance. And, in a growing life, the recovery is never mere return to a prior state, for it is enriched by the state of disparity and resistance through which it has successfully passed. If the gap between organism and environment is too wide, the creature dies. If its activity is not enhanced by the temporary alienation, it merely subsists. Life grows when a temporary falling out is a transition to a more extensive balance of the energies of the organism with those of the conditions under which it lives. (Dewey 1934, p. 535).
This view resonates with Wild Systems theory, as suggested by Jordan & Day (this collection), which explains an organism not as a computational input–output system but as an open energy-transforming system that must absorb, transform, and use energy to sustain itself. This does not forestall computation, of course, but it describes the computational process in a different context.
The description of this context can be developed further to challenge correspondence theories: correspondence theories suggest that we understand cognition when we understand how humans represent the external world internally, and when we understand how they process this representation. The focus on a potentially disembodied input–output machine that passively receives information about an observer-independent reality and that has an isolated computational system processing representations cannot tell us how the internal relates to the external—the notorious problem of traditional cognitivism—or how the internal can be enacted in real-world situations that are often vague and constantly changing. As Andy Clark explicates:
Real embodied intelligence […] is fundamentally a means of engaging with the world—of using active strategies that leave much of the information out in the world, and cannily using iterated, real-time sequences of body-world interactions to solve problems in a robust and flexible way. The image here is of two coupled complex systems (the agent and the environment) whose joint activity solves the problem. In such cases, it may make little sense to speak of one system’s representing the other. (Clark 1997, p. 98)
Cognition and experience arise from ongoing interaction with an unstable, changing environment. The entanglement of the brain, the rest of the body, and its particular environment—which includes other organisms—is essential for experience and reason. This is not the trivial claim that the brain cannot exist without a body; even though the bodily context is often neglected in research studying brain processes.[2] The message is that reason, cognition, mind arise from this very entanglement. How the body relates to the environment structures experiences; there is an immediate coupling between perception and action. Cognition is not a transcendent aspect detached from “matter” (the brain and the rest of the body in particular) but is constantly shaped, fostered, and constrained by the environment and the body’s peculiarities.
Anthropologist Timothy Ingold consequently questions whether it makes sense:
to attribute that quality of the operation of a cognitive device […] which is somehow inside the animal and which, from its privileged site, processes the data of perception and pulls the strings of action. Indeed it makes no more sense to speak of cognition as the functioning of such a device than it does to speak of locomotion as the product of an internal motor mechanism analogous to the engine of a car. Like locomotion, cognition is the accomplishment of the whole animal, it is not accomplished by a mechanism interior to the animal and for which it serves as a vehicle. (Ingold 1993, p. 431)
It is thus the interaction of the different systems that is the most fascinating research topic in cognitive science—a topic that requires a holistic approach. Such reasoning that considers circular causalities can be traced back to earlier thinkers such as Bateson 1973, Kelso 1995, Maturana & Varela 1980, Thompson 2010, Varela 1996 or von Uexküll 1940. This idea of circular causality as a property of living, self-organizing systems refers to the connection of perception and movement that underlies the ongoing co-constitution of organism and environment. There is continuous top-down-bottom-up interaction that captures the interrelations between several levels in a hierarchy. The general underlying idea is that individual small-scale parts enable the existence of order parameters that in turn determine the behavior of the individual parts. Thomas Fuchs (2012) refers to physicist Hermann Haken’s 2004’s work on synergetics, the science of self-organization, to further illustrate the mutually-constraining relation between the microscopic and macroscopic elements of a complex system. Dynamic system modeling in various fields relies on multi-level causal processes in which higher-order processes are mutually entrained with lower-order processes, without one taking precedence over the other (Engel et al. 2001; Freeman 1995; Lewis 2005; Thelen & Smith 1994).
While a purely cognitivist approach that fosters “The Myth of the Inner; The Myth of the Hidden; and The Myth of the Single” (Torrance 2009, p. 112) is still fairly mainstream, in recent years we have seen a growing interest on the part of cognitive scientists and neuroscientists in particular in the relevance of the complex interplay of brain, body, and world. Today, this interplay is finally considered in the empirical study of cognition, which resonates in the growing body of work in cognitive science.[3] The importance of embodiment is widely appreciated in cognitive science today. There is a large body of evidence from the neurosciences on how an ongoing organism–environment interaction is essential for cognition (Beauchamp & Martin 2007; Brooks 1991; Chiel & Beer 1997; Engel et al. 2001, 2013). While we still see attempts to describe what has been termed the “‘filing cabinet’ view of mind: the image of the mind as a storehouse of passive language-like symbols waiting to be retrieved and manipulated by a kind of neural central processing unit” (Clark 1997, p. 67)—there is growing consensus that cognition can best be studied and understood in dynamic, interactionist terms, as bound to bodily organisms that are confronted with particular problems in specific environments.
Dewey once again can serve as an inspiring reference point:
To see the organism in nature, the nervous system in the organism, the brain in the nervous system, the cortex in the brain is the answer to the problems which haunt philosophy. And when thus seen they will be seen to be in, not as marbles are in a box but as events are in a history, in a moving, growing never finished process. (Dewey 1991, p. 224)
With this focus on the context and the ongoing interaction of the organism and its surroundings, one can avoid assumptions of ontological separations. Going one step further and elaborating on the moral dimensions that Dewey expresses, neo-pragmatist Robert Brandom, in his account of intentionality, explicates the very idea of pragmatism in a way that links it to the enactivist approach to cognition: “[a] founding idea of pragmatism is that the most fundamental kind of intentionality (in the sense of directedness towards objects) is the practical involvement with objects exhibited by a sentient creature dealing skillfully with its world” (Brandom 2008, p. 178). This skillful engagement with the world is crucial for challenging prevailing paradigms surrounding correspondence theories.
The respective holistic approach envisioned by Dewey that he powerfully elaborates with his conception of continuity (Dewey 1934), and which is furthered by some neo-pragmatists, is reinforced by research in the neurosciences that questions the understanding of cognition as a centralized mirroring process that uses perceptual input to generate the appropriate behavioral output. Brains are studied and described as embodied, situated, and embedded.[4]