Chapter 40: Bringing Things to Mind: 4Es and Material Engagement

Welcome to Last Minute Lecture.

This free chapter overview is designed to help students review and understand key concepts.

These summaries supplement not replaced the original textbook and may not be redistributed or resold.

For complete coverage, always consult the official text.

Welcome back to The Deep Dive, where we take a stack of sources, articles, and high -level research and really try to extract the most important nuggets of knowledge to give you a well -informed.

And today, we are taking on a really big one.

We really are.

We're doing a deep dive that challenges one of the oldest ideas in, well, in all of philosophy and science.

The idea that the human mind is just inside your head.

Exactly.

The idea that thinking happens exclusively between your ears.

Feels intuitive, doesn't it?

For centuries, we've pretty much operated on the assumption that objects, tools, all the stuff of material culture, it's just external resources.

Right.

Scaffolding.

Things that support thinking, for sure.

But never genuinely part of the cognitive machinery itself.

This deep dive, which is based on a really powerful chapter by Lambrose Malaforis on material engagement theory.

From the Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition.

Right.

It argues that this whole premise is fundamentally wrong.

Absolutely.

I mean, you just have to look at human life, our societies, our entire evolutionary story.

It's completely inseparable from material culture.

The stones we chipped, the fires we learned to manage.

The surfaces we manufactured.

So the mission of this deep dive is to really get our heads around the chapter's core thesis.

That we are not just embedded in a world of things.

Our cognitive and social life is profoundly mediated and often constituted by them.

We're trying to figure out what things do for the mind.

Not just as props, but as active, conspicuous elements of thought itself.

And the author gives us a framework for this.

He does.

He presents material engagement theory, or MET, as the necessary framework for making this shift.

It radically challenges traditional cognitivism.

How so?

By demanding that we treat the dynamic transactional interactions between our brains, our bodies, and the material world as mutually constitutive.

Like an unpacked MET and what it means for the 4Es embodiment, embeddedness, inaction, and extension.

The argument being that materiality isn't just a context for cognition.

It's a vital ingredient.

Okay, let's unpack this.

I think the best way to start is to start small, right where we all begin, in that immediate, everyday interaction with the material world.

Makes sense.

We are entering part one, the material ecology of mind, starting with the constitutive role of material engagement.

So when we think about human development, especially, you know, a baby exploring its world, we assume the child is learning about the world.

Right.

They touch a block, they learn it's hard, they splash in water, they learn it's fluid.

But the chapter suggests something deeper is going on.

That material engagement is equally, if not more, critical for helping us learn about, well, about ourselves.

That's the profound conceptual flip right there.

It's not just learning about the physical properties of things out there by touching and seeing them.

It's simultaneously and constitutively learning about the physical properties of our own interaction.

You're learning about the act of touching and seeing itself.

So when you engage with an object, you're discovering what the author calls the phenomenal properties of your own senses.

Exactly.

Can you break that down?

When a baby grabs a rattle?

Okay, so with the rattle, yes, they're experiencing the hardness, the sound, the texture of the rattle.

But at the exact same moment, they're also discovering the strength, the coordination, and the limits of their own hand.

And their hearing.

And their hearing, and the feedback loop between the action and the sound.

The material object acts as this sort of high definition mirror for our own sensorium.

So material engagement is this foundational process.

It's how we discover the feel and function of our senses.

And through that feedback loop, the capacities, limits, and boundaries of our own bodies.

Precisely.

And it's a fundamentally relational process.

This is how we come to recognize affordances.

You know, the possibilities for action that objects offer us.

And how we learn to enact those possibilities.

Yes, to turn possibility into reality.

This deep material engagement is actually what allows us to appreciate the varieties of consciousness.

Because our very perception of reality is sculpted by the material limits and opportunities our environment presents.

You know, that sounds like a much deeper definition of embodiment and inaction than you often hear.

I think it is.

It implies these processes aren't just driven from the inside out, but are dynamically defined by the external material world.

They're defined by the transaction.

If you really think about the four E's, this material interaction is what establishes the essential feedback loops.

Without this ongoing active material shaping, the whole system, the brain, the body, the mind, it lacks the reference points it needs to even define its own capacities.

And this leads the author to a really crucial social point.

He calls it the neglected stage of material engagement.

This is the stage that precedes, allows, scaffolds, and supports

our intersubjective development, our social interaction.

And he links it to the lost sense of we in what philosophers call we intentionality.

Right, we intentionality.

That's the term for the shared commitment to a joint action.

The feeling that we're doing this together.

Yes.

And traditionally that's seen as a purely mental problem, a social coordination problem.

How do I know you know that I know we're doing this thing together?

It gets very circular.

It does.

But the chapter argues that the shared focus on a material object or environment, a shared tool, a shared task, a visible artifact,

is what stabilizes and grounds that sense of we.

So if we're building a shelter together, it's not just that we both have an internal plan to build a shelter.

Right.

It's the material constraints of the logs, the shared grip on a rope, the visible tangible progress of the wall we're building.

That's what creates the common ground.

That's what allows our intentions to actually mesh.

Exactly.

The material object acts as a kind of third party that anchors the relationship.

It provides temporal and spatial persistence.

It stays put.

It stays put, creating a context for stable shared attention and shared action.

This shared material focus provides the foundational scaffold for us to develop intersubjectivity.

It lets us form a solid grounded sense of we that can then go on to execute really complex coordinated actions.

Okay.

So now let's zoom out.

We've gone from individual development to the long arc of human history.

Deep time.

The chapter argues that human evolution is entirely inseparable from this creative material engagement.

The story of homo sapiens is fundamentally a story of our co -evolution with matter.

That's right.

Human intelligence isn't just some brain capacity that, you know, happened to result in us making tools.

It's not an accident or a side effect.

Not at all.

The very nature of change in our species fundamentally incorporates this inactive logic of creative material engagement from the very beginning.

Our intelligence isn't just expressed through material culture.

It is absolutely defined by its relationship with it.

You mentioned a progression earlier from just understanding material properties to actively changing them.

Can you detail what that looks like on this evolutionary scale?

Sure.

So historically we first see engagement with the material properties of form.

Like early tool making.

Early tool making, yeah.

Hominins are discovering how a particular stone fractures, how mass translates into force, what shapes give you the best mechanical advantage.

This is a relatively passive discovery of the world's inherent properties.

And then there's a shift.

A dramatic shift.

We move toward influencing material behavior.

Think about the control of fire pyro technology,

or compound adhesives, or the refinement of specific kinds of ceramics.

Here we aren't just accommodating the environment.

We're actively transforming the material ontology of the world.

So human thinking over millennia can literally be seen as a craft.

A craft absorbed in the manufacture of complex surfaces.

That's a great way to put it.

Taking raw simple stuff and creating new complex surfaces that afford totally novel actions and by extension novel cognitive processes.

And this is what separates us from other animals.

Absolutely.

I mean, other animals engage their material worlds, of course.

A bird feathers a nest, a monkey cracks a nut.

But human intelligence is unique because it is entirely entangled with and reliant on material culture tools, artifacts, techniques for its very definition.

This entanglement is so deep that the separation between mind, body, and world becomes impossible.

It just dissolves.

And this brings us to a key concept from the chapter.

The gray zone of material engagement.

The gray zone.

Tell us why this conceptual space is so important for Met.

The gray zone is this conceptual space where brains, bodies, and things conflate.

They mutually constitute each other.

It's the interaction sphere where all those neat boundaries we like to draw adjust.

They blur and dissolve.

And the author argues that really complex human properties, things we usually locate inside the head or purely within society, they actually emerge from this zone.

Exactly.

Things like attachment, ownership, causality, intentionality, and even selfhood.

OK, let's take one of those.

Ownership.

If ownership emerges from the gray zone, not just from a legal contract or a purely internal belief,

how does that work?

Well, think about a family heirloom.

Why do we feel such a deep, sometimes irrational, sense of attachment or ownership over it?

The material persistence of that object, its physical stability, allows it to accumulate biographies.

It bridges generations.

It bridges generations.

The thing itself, by its persistent physical presence in a shared cultural context, is what stabilizes the cognitive concept of ownership across time and between individuals.

Or think of a physical boundary marker, a stone in a field.

It's not just a symbol of ownership.

Its physical persistence in the ground constitutes the stable social and cognitive property of owning that land for the whole community.

The property doesn't exist before the engagement.

It's produced by the interaction of the brain's capacity for recognition, the body's interaction with the marker, and the thing's persistence in space.

Introducing Metaplasticity and Metisou.

So to properly capture this central defining feature of human cognitive existence, this deep engagement of mind with the material world across time, the author introduces another concept.

Which is Metaplasticity.

Metaplasticity.

Now plasticity is a term we're pretty familiar with.

It refers to the brain's ability to change its neural structure in response to experience.

So how does Metaplasticity extend that?

It extends it massively.

Metaplasticity signals the absolute need to add a strong material culture dimension to 4E research.

It's the recognition that the plasticity and reorganization of the cognitive system, you know, the neural changes happening inside the skull, is fundamentally interdependent with and extended by the plasticity of the material world itself.

Our material culture, the objects and environments we create, are constantly demanding and facilitating new neural organizations.

That makes perfect sense.

For instance, learning to read physically transforms brain architecture.

That's neural plasticity.

But that transformation only happens because we invented writing a complex material culture.

Exactly.

Or think about the architecture of a modern city.

The invention of skyscrapers, complex subway maps,

dense regulated traffic flows.

That's all material culture.

And it demands specific, sophisticated cognitive skills.

Spatial mapping, selective attention, long -term planning.

Which in turn shape the neural development and organization in the brains of city dwellers.

Metaplasticity is the term that acknowledges this material -cognitive co -evolution.

It's the defining feature of the gray zone, but it's often neglected because, frankly, it makes cognitive research much harder.

It introduces all these external variables that functionalist models would rather ignore.

Precisely.

This expanded view brings us to the formal framework.

Material engagement theory, or MET.

MET is presented as a cross -disciplinary framework.

It acts less like a conventional theory that gives you fixed predictions and more like an expansive research program.

And its mission.

Its mission is to aggressively extend the epistemic domain of the cognitive sciences.

It basically states that to properly grasp the cognitive, we have to incorporate the material domain as a constitutive partner.

The stakes are pretty high, then.

Because MET is proposing that the traditional questions, what are things and what are minds, are actually inseparable.

They're mutually defining.

They collapse into each other.

MET focuses intensely on how materiality gets entangled with our everyday thinking.

And in doing so, it effectively dissolves those unhelpful, traditional oppositions or antinomies.

Nature versus culture, people versus things.

Exactly.

Those categories are useful for analysis, sure, but ontologically they're dynamically linked through engagement.

How important is the physical persistence of things in this whole process?

You mentioned it with the heirloom.

How do things coordinate this system across radically different scales of time?

Their physical persistence is absolutely essential for creating cognitive stability.

Things integrate and coordinate processes that operate on vastly different timescales.

You mean like?

Like neural activity, which is milliseconds.

Bodily habituation, which can be seconds or minutes.

Cultural practice, which is years or generations.

And of course evolutionary change, which is millennia.

And the material artifacts act as bridges between these scales.

They're physical scaffolds.

They construct bridges between these disparate temporal phenomena.

A specific tool -making technique, for example, might be refined over five generations.

It's cultural time.

But it's stored not just in memory, but in the persistent material form of the tools and the practice environment.

That stability allows us to accumulate knowledge and refine actions far beyond the temporal limits of any single individual's experience.

And the ME2 research program itself is organized around three complementary working hypotheses, right?

Targeting cognition, signification, and agency.

That's right.

Could you just briefly touch on what each of those focuses on so we understand the full scope of the theory?

Of course.

So first, the hypothesis of cognition.

This targets the idea that thinking is decentralized and you can't reduce it to brain processes alone.

It posits that cognitive processes are distributed across the brain, the body, and material culture in a continuous dynamic flow.

Okay, that's cognition.

What about signification?

The hypothesis of signification argues that meaning isn't derived solely from internal representations.

Instead, meaning emerges from the transactional qualities of material engagement.

So meaning is embodied and situated in shared practices, not locked away as some abstract code in the head.

Precisely.

And third, the hypothesis of agency.

This challenges the idea that agency is some isolated individual human property.

It suggests that agency is an emergent product of the material engagement process itself, the creative tension between human intention and the affordances and resistances of the material world.

And taken together, these three hypotheses provide a new unit of analysis.

A unit of analysis where the mind is truly situated within and constituted by the material world rather than just being about it.

That structural framework makes the stakes crystal clear.

If we accept this, we have to completely rethink our fundamental vocabulary for even talking about the mind.

We do.

Which leads us perfectly into part two, where we're going to tackle the philosophy of thingness head on.

Okay, so when you're looking for the philosophical bedrock of things, the chapter turns to Martin Heidegger,

specifically his famous essay Das Ding, or The Thing.

Right, and Heidegger makes this observation that while things are physically near to us, their true thingness often remains elusive.

It's sort of absent from our attention.

This is a really crucial pivot point in the argument.

It is.

Heidegger, in this particular essay, isn't primarily concerned with the tools we use in daily life.

That's what he dealt with in Being in Time with the idea of the ready -to -hand.

And he's also not talking about how technology extends our senses, which is more of a McLuhan type idea.

Exactly.

Here, Heidegger is after something much deeper, more fundamental.

The essential thinghood that defines a thing before it gets categorized by function or measurement.

And to get at this, he makes a distinction between things and objects.

He does.

He argues that a thing becomes an object when it's set against us, when it's quantified, measured, subjected to purely scientific analysis.

The object is just the outcome of our conceptual reflection.

Whereas a thing holds a deeper poetic and ontological meaning that resists that kind of reduction.

And his most famous example for articulating this elusive thingness is the simple vessel, the jug.

The jug.

He argues the material is secondary.

Yeah, the classic line.

The vessel's thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds it.

Which is so counterintuitive.

We usually define a jug by its clay, its glaze, its handle.

And Heidegger forces us to look beyond that shell to the ontological power of the vessel, its capacity to gather space and time, specifically through holding in absence.

The void that it contains and defines.

It's that emptiness that allows it to hold wine or water or air.

And this concept of gathering, the vessel bringing together the earth, the sky, mortals, and divinities in a single form that leads to the Heideggerian term thinking.

Thinking, in Heidegger's philosophical usage, expresses exactly that gathering, the tying together of all the vessel's ontological constituents.

So it's the totality of the form making processes, the materials, and all the complex relations that sustain the vessel's social, cognitive, and emotional life.

Exactly.

It captures the comprehensive relational being of the jug, showing how it's never just an isolated container, but a nexus of relationships.

That's a really powerful philosophical framework, but the chapter pretty quickly pivots away from Heidegger's generic jug to focus on a specific concrete ceramic vase.

Why is that move necessary for Mitt?

Why not just stick with Heidegger?

Because Heidegger's jug, while it's ontologically rich, is generic.

It doesn't have a specific life history or a biography.

And the author's point is that no two jugs are the same.

They instantiate different ontologies, different meanings, different processes.

I see.

So to ground material engagement theory, which is all about processes and practices, we need to focus on a particular unique artifact that has a known biography of interaction with human cognition and social life.

The specificity matters immensely.

And when we try to define the thing -ness of a specific vase, we instinctively fall back on these limited ways to describe it.

We do.

We talk about its phenomenal qualities.

It's blue and smooth.

It's function.

It holds flowers.

Its origin?

It was made in 1955.

Or its personal history.

It was a gift.

And the chapter argues these are all insufficient.

Why?

Because they keep us trapped in this observer -based descriptive mode.

They only scratch the surface of our sensuous material engagement.

These factors describe the artifact, sure, but they fail to cabinet a mode of existence that emerges from the ongoing relationship between people and that thing.

They focus on static properties, not the dynamic relationship.

Exactly.

So the author takes this concept of thinking, which is rooted in Heidegger's idea of gathering, but then diverges from that phenomenological path.

What does the author's concept of thinking focus on instead?

The author's concept of thinking shifts the emphasis toward the vitality and the agency of things in human thinking, or what he calls the cognitive life of things.

Okay, we absolutely have to clarify that phrase, the cognitive life of things, because for a lot of people listening, that's going to sound like we're attributing consciousness to a teapot.

Right, and that's a fundamental misunderstanding we need to avoid.

Linking cognitive life here to consciousness or human -like computation is not the point.

So what is it?

This cognitive life is sensory, it's effective, it's transactional, and it's inherently transformational.

It describes how the thing actively participates in, shapes, and changes the cognitive process.

It's a much broader concept than the restricted computational sense we might associate with a simple cognitive artifact like a map.

How so?

A map is often seen as just passively holding data for us to read.

Mett looks at the vase as actively shaping how the potter thinks, feels, and relates to the world during the act of its creation.

So we're moving past the idea that things only help us think by holding data or simplifying instructions.

They help us think by creating a context of physical and effective presence that actually sculpts the very process of our thinking.

Exactly.

The cognitive life of things acknowledges the ontological messiness and the ongoing dialectic of co -constitution between minds and matter.

It demands we look at the interaction as a whole, not just the isolated components.

Okay, so we've established that Mett posits that things are constitutive of the mind.

But if we go back and ask traditional mainstream cognitive science, what do things do for the mind?

We hit this paradoxical wall.

The answer is nothing that really matters.

Nothing that really matters.

That statement just encapsulates the deep -seated cognitivist vision.

It really does.

This vision holds that true thinking is confined to formal computational reasoning, acting on syntactic algorithms,

and most importantly, on internal representations.

Okay, let's stop and really unpack that core distinction that Mett is fighting against.

Cognitivism assumes we can only think about things, never with or through them.

That is the absolute crux of the issue.

The mind is sealed off inside the cranium and the external world, the things, can only gain access by means of representation.

A mental or neural proxy.

Right.

The mental actions we use to think about the world are considered fundamentally different in kind and totally isolated from the physical actions we use to touch, manipulate, or smell the material world.

But wait a minute.

A traditional cognitivist might argue, what about an abacus or a calculator?

Isn't that clearly a case of thinking with things?

Where's Mett draw the line differently from just basic tool use?

That's an excellent point and it highlights the subtlety here.

Even when a cognitivist accepts the use of an abacus, they still view the abacus as merely an external instrumental prompt.

A passive scaffold.

A passive scaffold.

The real cognitive work, the interpretation of the bead positions, the actual computational process, that's all still fundamentally assigned to the internal representational system.

The material object itself is seen as neutral, passive, and external to the cognitive system proper.

So the paradigm has what the author calls epistemic inattentional blindness.

Yes.

They treat things as effectively absent, even when they're physically present and being actively used in experiments.

So if I use a stick to reach a piece of fruit, the traditional view would see the stick as just executing an internal plan that my brain already made.

Right.

Whereas Mett would see the stick as actively structuring and maybe even generating the plan itself through that process of material interaction.

Exactly.

The stick, the fruit, your body, and your brain form a single integrated cognitive loop.

The separation is arbitrary.

It's driven by historical dogma, not by empirical necessity.

I mean, think about Phineas Gage.

The famous neuroscience case.

An iron bar goes straight through his skull, profoundly changes his mind.

But the bar was always categorized as a physical external event, not a cognitive constituent, because the dogma insists that the mind is only what happens inside.

Hashtag, tag, tag, tag, 3 .2.

The ontological gap and the tyranny of representation.

And this passive view of material culture isn't some modern mistake.

It's rooted in the historical objective of the science of mind itself.

It is.

The goal was to rigorously demarcate the mental realm from the physical realm.

To keep it pure.

To keep it pure.

For a pure science of mind to emerge in the 20th century,

material culture, the whole world of artifacts, had to be strictly excluded from the cognitive system proper.

And the simple physical fact is that things don't physically enter your head.

Which created what the chapter calls an unbridgeable ontological gap.

A gap between the internal world of mental action and the external world of physical things.

And the solution to this gap became the defining feature of cognitive science.

Mental or neural representations.

Right.

Since the actual objects couldn't get inside, substitutes representations were created and placed inside the cranium.

These internal models or proxies were supposed to bridge the gap by standing in for the real world.

Allowing the mind to do its operations without all that messy physical interference.

But the often issues a really severe warning here.

He says the analytical separation, which might be useful for methodological reasons.

Right.

For setting up an experiment.

Is often confused for an ontological one, a real one.

And that is the crucial error.

That analytical separation leads to the tyranny of representation.

What do you mean by tyranny?

If the only way the external world can matter cognitively is by being represented internally, then any phenomenon that lacks a localized internal neural representation is just assumed to have no cognitive life.

This is where the tyranny imposes an arbitrary and restrictive definition on what can even count as thinking.

It prioritizes the internal code over the complex external engagement.

It sounds like we've mistaken the map for the territory.

Or in this case, the internal representation for the external process.

Absolutely.

The internal neural representation becomes the sole focus of study.

And the real world dynamic material interaction that generated the need for that representation in the first place is just neglected.

The incredible complexity of the material world is sacrificed on the altar of localized internal functionalism.

Hashtag, tag, tag, tag, tag, tag, 3 .3.

Situating the four E's and the unsolved problem.

Now, the four E approach embodied, embedded, extended, and active was supposed to break this tyranny, wasn't it?

In theory, yes.

In theory, by moving the boundaries of the mind beyond the skin and skull, material objects should become genuine, constitutive parts of the extensive physical machinery of human thought.

Things should become us.

And in theory, that's what should have happened.

But the author's critique is that the theoretical revolution hasn't fully delivered paradigm -shifting conclusions when it comes to materiality.

Many four E proponents remain soft.

Soft?

In what way?

They fail to realize that this theoretical shift demands a new type of socio -material practice -based explanation of cognitive phenomena.

It's not enough to just create a new cognitive explanation for culture.

So we need to stop simply adding culture or materiality as an additive to our existing cognitive models.

We need to explain cognition through the practices of using and creating material culture.

Precisely.

The central unsolved problem in this soft four E approach is the failure to account for the varieties of material mediations and the temporality of these ecological assemblies.

Andy Clark's famous imperative of being there from the 90s is insufficient.

We need to translate that into being where, when, and how.

Exactly.

The complexity that's introduced by the specific ecology or biography of a material artifact, how it was made, how it's used, when it's available, that's often avoided.

It just makes it easier to slip back into a representational logic where the material artifact is just an information -holding placeholder.

And the classic illustration of this is the famous Inga and Otto thought experiment.

From Clark and Chalmers, yeah.

The one used to introduce the extended mind thesis.

Otto uses his notebook to store the information about the MoMA's location.

And this is what the author calls the notebook problem.

The notebook problem is key to the me critique.

The notebook, which serves as the crucial material vehicle for Otto's extended memory, became a mere placeholder.

It was functionally defined, it holds the address, but its substantive engagement, its specific material properties, its ecology, its biography, all of that was ignored.

It was just a black box for storing information.

And the parity principle, which is the justification for the notebook being part of the mind, argues that if an external process functions the same way an internal one does, like retrieving a memory, then it counts as cognition.

Right.

But MET offers a radical counter -reading of that.

It really does.

MET argues that Inga's internal memory process and Otto's notebook process are similar, not because they are both just functional placeholders for some internal event, but because no internal process alone would be enough for either of them to successfully reach their destination.

Ah, I see.

Human cognition, unlike, say, that of a migratory sea bird or a solitary primate, relies constitutively on material prosthesis and external support.

The material world isn't an optional add -on, it is a necessary lifelong partner.

So the notebook isn't just a simple memory extension, it is a crucial component of human cognitive becoming.

And this requires us to appreciate the anthropological significance of extension.

It absolutely does.

If extension and inaction are to have any real meaning for our species, cognitive science has to understand the specificity and the varieties of human cognitive becoming.

And the author warns that our dependence on material culture is a double -edged sword.

How so?

New technologies can stretch and enhance our minds, sure.

But it can also shrink them.

They can narrow our focus or deprive us of creative abilities by over -automating processes that we really should be actively engaging with.

So having established that the soft fouries have often stalled at the doorstep of genuine material integration, the author presents researchers with two very explicit choices moving forward.

A fork in the road.

Okay, and the first choice is the comfortable path.

Remain soft.

Avoid the messy, difficult, and highly variable mind stuff of the material world.

And the danger of that soft option is that you end up with an ahistorical, empty concept of mind.

A generic, universally applicable model that, ironically, looks remarkably similar to the cognitivist establishment who was trying to escape.

It fails to account for the actual diversity of human cognitive life, which is always situated and culturally specific.

Exactly.

And the second choice is the radical path.

The path met demands.

Go native.

Go native.

Seriously engage with things and follow the stuff of mind in the wild, embracing all the complexity and variability that material culture introduces.

And going native means abandoning that comfortable methodological separation.

It does.

But the reward is immense.

You genuinely discover the meaning of extensiveness in human life.

You provide a new ontological basis for rethinking the mark of the cognitive and the limits of functionalism.

It's the only way, really, to offer a truly locationally uncommitted account of the cognitive.

If cognition can happen anywhere, you have to be willing to study it everywhere.

That's the idea.

But the price is making cognitive science much, much harder and more interesting.

It is.

You have to deal with specific cultural practices, temporal dynamics, the messy biographies of artifacts, rather than nice, clean, controlled, abstract variables.

The challenge is explaining the role of things in specific, detailed terms.

It demands a sophisticated understanding of embodied cultural practices that transform raw material ingredients into complex cognitive processes across vastly different contexts and timescales.

And this requires M .T.'s radical perspective that cognitive processes necessarily cut across those brain -body world divisions.

That's the only way it works.

No.

To navigate this complex landscape of embodied cultural practices, we have to rely on M .T.'s new conceptual vocabulary.

Yes.

Particularly the repurposed neologism thinking, which is defined as the process of thinking incorporating things.

This term allows us to articulate a much more nuanced understanding of our relationality to matter.

Thinking is key because it forces us to make a distinction between three crucial aspects of intentionality.

The property of our minds being directed toward an object.

Right.

And we're most familiar with the first one.

Which is?

Aboutness.

Exactly.

Aboutness is highly studied because it's associated with representational content.

I am conscious of the vase.

But the two aspects that are central to material engagement,

withness and throughness, are profoundly little understood.

Okay, break that down.

Aboutness, we get that.

But withness and throughness, what's the difference there?

So withness and throughness relate to the non -representational performative aspects of embodied intentionality.

What you might call intention in action.

Withness captures the relational state.

I am with the material in a shared activity or ecology.

Throughness captures the dynamic process through the material, allowing the material itself to guide and shape the unfolding action.

So they capture the actual doing, the transaction, the transformation, that representation just skips right over.

They do.

So if we're not dealing with internal representation here, how are things primarily presented to us in the process of thinking?

Thinking blends fundamentally with feeling and effect.

Feeling and effect.

Yes, it is primarily through feeling and effect, through the weight, the texture, the resistance, the heat,

that things are presented to us via material engagement.

This is radically different from representation, where things are represented in us by way of some mental substitution.

Effect is a direct transaction.

Representation is a proxy war fought inside the skull.

That's a great way to put it.

Effective and felt qualities, as experienced in material engagement, are seen as direct constituents of the cognitive process.

So if thinking is thinking, then the analytical focus has to shift dramatically.

It has to.

It shifts away from isolated objects or specific tools and focuses instead on varieties of material assemblages and ecologies.

The true analytical value of thinking isn't in classifying separate entities, brains, bodies, things, but in bringing them back together to understand how they mutually constitute each other's ontological specificity over the course of their shared life history.

So it's a conceptual solvent for those classical antinomies.

Nature, culture, mind, matter.

Right.

It dissolves them.

Okay.

To make this abstract relationality concrete, the chapter returns to the intensive process of making that clay vase.

It emphasizes that acts of making are fundamentally both mental and physical blending intelligences and agencies, human and non -human.

The resulting vase is described as a mind trap.

And this specific situator process of a potter at the wheel allows us to introduce another key concept,

the hyla -noetic field.

Okay, that sounds pretty dense.

Can we break that down?

For sure.

It's a precise term, but the idea is straightforward.

It combines the Greek hyal, which means matter or raw material, and noetic, meaning pertaining to the mind or intellect.

So the matter -mind field.

Essentially, yes.

It's the field where the material properties of the clay are recognized as being just as cognitively important as the neural properties of the potter's brain.

Whoa, hold on.

The plasticity of the clay matters as much as the plasticity of the neural networks.

That's a huge claim.

It is a huge claim.

And it means the environment isn't just an arena for action, but a constituent of the action itself.

It necessitates a decentralized view of causation.

Let's contrast the two explanations then.

How would the old view explain it?

The cognitivist view would describe the vase as the product of internal mental instructions and plans, which are then executed by the body.

It's a unidirectional flow from brain to matter.

The potter conceives, the body executes, the clay conforms.

And what does Mett offer instead?

Mett argues for a decentralized transactional logic.

The vase used the potter's muscles and skills to bring about its final form, just as much as the potter used the clay's affordances.

So the making of the vase is a process of inactive discovery.

It's not merely the execution of a preformed plan.

The potter begins with an idea, sure, but the clay's resistance, its moisture level, the speed of the wheel.

They constantly introduce new possibilities and constraints, forcing improvisation and continuous adjustment.

So the experiential core, the point where the brain, body, clay, and the spinning wheel all conflate, is what Mett focuses on.

This is captured by the phrase, the feeling of and for clay.

The feeling of and for clay is a transactive ensemble.

It describes the total immersive experience, and it includes two parallel, contradictory, yet collaborative processes.

Okay, what are they?

First, there is the experience of absorption in and submission to the material, letting the clay dictate its possibilities, sensing its limits.

And that's second.

Second, there's the parallel act of exploration, the continuous improvisation, and the imposition of form.

This transaction requires the potter to rely on highly developed tacit knowledge, a kind of kinesthetic memory stored in the hands and muscles that responds instantaneously to material feedback.

This immersive experience sounds like it breaks down the insistence on the ontological purity of the first -person perspective.

If I'm absorbed in the material, the I is no longer an autonomous agent acting upon an inert world.

Absolutely.

The traditional notion of autonomous subjectivity just dissolves.

What we see instead is a flow of energies in what a philosopher like Whitehead would call an event of decentered becoming.

This process ontology exemplifies the constitutive intertwining of mind and matter, where energies are transformed into agencies.

The clay is resisting, it's giving, it's flowing, is an active partner in the creation of the final form.

That dramatically redefines agency then.

It does.

Agency is not a permanent isolated property of the human agent, but the emergent product of material engagement.

It's a creative tension of flow and form, of mind and matter.

The classical mistake is seeing the clay as inanimate and passive.

Exactly.

In the hyalinoidic field, the clay is actually a psychoactive path of self -identification and a dynamic source of the potter's agency.

No aspect of the potter's creative intelligence can be accurately delimited before or outside that act of making.

The finished vase embodies a cognitive process that was literally distributed across the human nervous system and the material qualities of the earth.

This is truly radical embodiment.

It's expanding the bodily basis way beyond the organismic boundaries of the skin.

It is.

The potter's body is a situated body that embodies a unique developmental life history shaped by these specific kinesthetic experiences.

And it confirms the emit thesis.

The mind is not just in the head.

The mind is in the action, in the thing, and in the entire field of decentralized transactional engagement.

And that realization is what the soft 40s often shy away from.

They prefer to keep the mind safely tethered to the organism or just allowing for some external scaffolding.

Mate forces the issue of co -constitution.

Okay, so let's try to pull all these threads together by revisiting the core conflict one last time.

Mainstream cognitive science insists that things only matter if they can be vehicles for external representation of something that originated internally.

The function matters, but the matter doesn't.

This functionalist view insists that material objects must be executing the orders of a central executive.

Mint decisively counters this by asserting that things have a full -blown cognitive life of their own, especially when we adopt the long -time scales of process archaeology, observing how they shape human interaction and development over generations.

The danger inherent in that old cognitivist viewpoint is what the chapter calls the representational fallacy.

Can you help us understand this category mistake using the computer desktop icon example?

Okay, yeah.

So think about the trash can icon on your computer desktop.

Right.

It's a visible functional representation designed to simplify a cognitive task deleting a file.

The icon is real and it's useful.

It makes the computer user interface intuitive by mimicking a real -world action of throwing something away.

The fallacy then is confusing that useful high -level interface with the underlying reality of the system.

Exactly.

The fallacy is committed when we are misled into thinking that those visible properties of the icon, its shape, its position, the little animation when you drag something to it, can somehow explain the actual complex low -level processes responsible for the task.

You mean the underlying code, the hardware operations, the physics of data storage and erasure?

Right.

To mistake the icon for the operation is a category mistake.

And the author argues that using representation in computational cognitive science often suffers from this exact fallacy.

Mistaking the simplified internal interface, the representation for the complex distributed dynamic cognitive process itself, which is the material engagement.

So representation is the symptom or the interface, not the cause or the fundamental mechanism.

What is the met alternative to this passive language of representation?

The met alternative demands we replace the passive localized language of representations with the active relational language of material engagement.

So instead of neural representations, which are localized and assumed to be these complete internal copies.

Met proposes we think of neural activations,

activations by which the brain and the body engage the world.

And crucially, material engagement is always partial, it's transactive, it's incomplete, and it's inherently in between the brain, body, and world.

The cognitive process is the engagement itself, not some internal substitute for it.

Final contribution and thought for the learner.

This has been a really profound shift in perspective.

I mean, we all agree that what a mind does is thinking, but the productive debate that met forces is fundamentally changing what we even allow to count as thinking.

And that debate is so vital because it achieves two things.

First, it avoids essentialism about location.

Thinking isn't fixed, it's mobile.

And second, it views thinking not as some set pre -specified internal entity, but as a dynamic process that is fundamentally open to change and transformation across cultural and evolutionary time.

So what would you say is the final sweeping contribution of material engagement theory?

I think the met contribution is that it successfully helps us transition from thinking about cognition as a contained internal system, to understanding thinking as thinking.

It shifts our attention away from isolated, fixed categories like brains or objects, to the sphere of fluid interactions and relational transactions between people and things.

It insists that we study the rich and often neglected realm of material engagement as the very foundation of human intelligence.

That reframes every single interaction we have with our built environment, our tools, our artifacts.

It means the world around us isn't just where we apply our intelligence.

The place and the mechanism by which we grow our intelligence.

Indeed.

It means the boundary of the self and the limits of the mind are constantly flowing into and out of the material culture we create and rely upon.

Which brings us to a provocative thought for you to consider as you wrap up this deep dive.

If we fully accept that thinking is thinking, how does this change the way you define creativity?

Not just in making physical objects like the vase, but an abstract thought that relies on external structure.

Think specifically about writing an essay where the physical act of marking up a text, organizing notes on a whiteboard, or drawing physical concept maps actively structures the abstract argument you are building.

Are you merely thinking about the essay and using those tools as passive supports, or are you actively thinking the essay, allowing the material flow of the paper and the markers to constitute the emergence of the final abstract argument?

Hashtag, tag, outro.

That is a compelling question to leave you with a true mind bender that extends beyond the lab and into your everyday life.

To quickly recap our deep dive into material engagement theory, it argues that material things actively constitute the human mind, moving way past the limitations of internal representation.

We established the need for metoplasticity, recognizing the necessary material culture dimension in the four E's, and we define thinking as thinking, incorporating things, focusing on the transactional aspects of withness and throughness.

We used the compelling example of the potter and the clay to demonstrate decentralized agency emerging within the hyalinoidic field, showing that the material, the clay, is an active vital source of the potter's agency.

And finally, we provided a necessary correction to cognitive science by identifying and explaining the representational fallacy.

We hope this deep dive has given you a truly expanded and decentralized view of your own cognitive landscape, one that acknowledges the vitality of the world around you.

We'll catch you next time for another session of the deep dive and thank you for joining us for this presentation from the last minute lecture team.