Chapter 18: Building a Stronger Concept of Embodiment

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Okay, let's unpack this.

Today we are tackling a critical chapter from the Oxford Handbook of 4EE Cognition.

And it really gets to one of the most fundamental questions driving, philosophy and neuroscience right now.

Absolutely.

The question is, how essential is the physical non -neural body?

I mean your actual breathing, moving, sensing self to the very processes we call the mind.

Our mission today is to do a deep dive into this really complex debate over embodied cognition.

And specifically we're going to focus on the most conservative but maybe the most comprehensive attempt to define it.

And then we're going to examine why that definition ultimately falls a bit short.

This is really a deep dive into definitions.

And for decades, I mean traditional cognitive science viewed the brain as this detached computational black box.

Right, the body was just hardware, an input -output device.

Exactly.

But since at least the 1990s, things started to change.

You had these seminal works like Forella, Thompson and Rauch's The Embodied Mind and Rodney Brooks' idea of intelligence without representation.

And that's when the movement of embodied cognition or E .C.

really started reframing our whole understanding of mind, brain, perception and action.

It did, but the lineage, as the analysis points out, goes much deeper than the 90s.

Oh, much deeper.

We're talking philosophical roots stretching all the way back to figures like Maurice Merleau -Ponty.

His 1945 work on phenomenology placed the acting, perceiving body right at the center of

long before modern neuroscience even had the tools to investigate it.

And you also see these threads of American pragmatism and, of course, James Gibson's ecological psychology.

That's right.

And what's happening now is that all of these ideas are kind of coalescing into what we call the 4E frameworks.

That's embodied, extended and active and embedded.

Which all really emphasize this pragmatic, action -oriented perspective.

A key goal for many of these, let's call them radical 4E thinkers, is to minimize reliance or sometimes get rid of entirely the whole notion of mental representation.

Shifting the explanatory ground away from that orthodox cognitivism.

Exactly.

But this brings us to the first major hurdle that the source material really tackles head on, the problem of dissensus.

Ah yes, the disagreement.

Lauren Shapiro, who's a leading critic in this area, he worries that the whole field of E .C.

lacks a consensus on what its domain is or its core concepts or even whether it's genuinely an improvement over the older ways of thinking.

He's essentially judging it by the standards of a hard science, you know, like chemistry or physics, where you expect everyone to agree on the fundamentals.

And the analysis we're looking at argues that Shapiro's worry is, well, maybe misplaced or at least misdirected.

Right.

E .C.

shouldn't be viewed as a hard, unified science in the way chemistry is.

It's better understood as a massive, multifaceted research program within cognitive science.

Or maybe a kind of philosophical framework that ties all that research together.

And cognitive science itself is inherently interdisciplinary.

I mean, you've got A .I., philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics.

When you mix all those fields together, theoretical debate, this so -called dissensus, isn't a sign of failure.

No, it's the natural condition.

It's how the field moves forward.

There's a wonderful irony there too, which the critique really highlights.

What's that?

Shapiro's concern is that E .C.

doesn't agree on the fundamental concepts of cognitive science.

The very concepts he holds up as sacred things like information, representations, and algorithms are the precise targets that E .C.

is trying to challenge or even tear down.

So you can't judge a theoretical revolution by the old regime's rulebook.

Exactly.

And beyond that, the analysis points out that cognitive science already includes chemistry, you know, through hormones and neurotransmitters.

It includes biology, both inside and outside the nervous system.

So if your foundational discipline is already this complex and messy, expecting theoretical purity from a new framework that's challenging its core assumptions is, well, it's just unrealistic.

The A .M.

isn't theoretical unification just yet.

It's conceptual clarification.

And that conceptual clarification brings us to the central tension of this whole discussion.

This is the great dividing line that lets us structure the rest of our deep dive.

The distinction between strong and weak embodiment.

This is the crucial fork in the road, theoretically speaking.

It is.

Both sides agree on one thing.

The body is important,

but they disagree profoundly on how it's important.

Okay, so let's start with the radical side.

Strong embodiment.

Strong embodiment, which is endorsed by an activist's and ecological approaches, posits that the non -neural body itself and its interaction with the environment plays a constitutive and significant explanatory role in cognition.

Constitutive, meaning it's literally part of the machinery of thought.

Yes.

The body isn't just a container for the brain.

It's part of the mental machinery itself.

Okay, that's the radical side.

And then we have the conservative position, which is our main focus today.

Weak embodiment.

This view concedes that the body is important, but only indirectly.

It gives the significant explanatory role not to the physical body out there in the world, but to neural representations that are body -formatted.

Or B -formatted.

And these are located where?

Entirely within the brain.

So the weak embodied theorists, like Alvin Goldman, whose model we're about to dig into, they keep the word embodied, but the actual body is kind of sidelined.

It is.

The concept is often summarized as the body and the brain.

The action remains firmly inside the skull, and it sticks very closely to these internalist and representationalist principles.

Which is why it's often seen as the most conservative attempt to sort of

integrate EC ideas into classical cognitivism without really upsetting the apple cart.

That's a great way to put it.

So our mission then is to take the most developed account of this conservative view, Alvin Goldman's, and really subject it to intense scrutiny.

We want to see if this body and the brain is enough to justify the embodied label.

Or if it really is, as the critique suggests, but a hair's breadth away from the classical approach it claims to be reforming.

Alright, let's jump straight into that, section two.

Weak embodiment, the body and the brain.

So Goldman presents his model as a unifying and comprehensive account of EC.

He sees it as especially useful for areas like social cognition, but he thinks it's applicable to cognition across the board.

And what really defines his approach is this incredibly strong internalist stance.

Yes.

His central thesis is crystal clear.

Actual peripheral bodies,

our arms, our legs, our guts, they play a marginal, maybe even a trivial role.

All the heavy lifting is done by these B -formatted processes internal to the brain.

He's very emphatic on this.

The brain is the seat of most, if not all, mental events.

This internalism is, I mean, it's highly restrictive.

Goldman explicitly excludes things like our anatomical features or sensor rotor contingencies.

Which are just the ways our perception is shaped by how we can move.

Right.

And he also excludes environmental couplings.

None of these are seen as directly relevant to the core mechanisms of cognition.

Which immediately makes you think of that classic philosophical challenge, right?

The brain in a vat.

The brain in a vat.

And Lauren Shapiro, in his critique of EC, actually suggested that since Goldman's B -formatted processes are purely internal and in a sense disembodied, they could just as well exist in a well -equipped vat.

The physical body doesn't actually need to be present for the B -formatted mechanism to run.

And that's the crucial point.

If the mechanism is purely internal, why are we calling it embodied?

You could, in theory, build a neural network that has the structure of a B -formatted representation without ever having a physical limb attached to it.

That's the core challenge.

It is.

However,

Goldman offers a very careful qualification to try and avoid this complete detachment.

What's the qualification?

He concedes that while the B -formatted mechanisms are internal, the contents of those representations probably depend on what they causally interact with.

Okay, let's pause and unpack that.

So the mechanism is internal, but the content depends on causal interaction.

Is he essentially saying the physical body is just an extremely efficient delivery truck for data?

That's a pretty good analogy.

And if that's the case, how does that really save the theory from the vat critique?

Seems like it only saves it in a very narrow sense.

Right.

An ordinary embodied brain state, one that's been shaped by real interactions with arms and legs and gravity, will have different content than some fictional and vatted brain state that only gets simulated input.

So the body is better than a vat because it reliably delivers the right kind of information proprioception interoception that sculpts the content of the representation.

But the key takeaway for weak EC remains the same.

The cognitive work, the actual computation and reuse of that information, is central and internal.

The physical body has done its job once it delivered the data.

It's no longer part of the ongoing cognitive process.

Not in a constitutive way.

Okay.

Now that we understand the internalist stance, we need to define the star of the show.

What exactly are B -formatted representations?

They're defined primarily by two things, their format or code and their content.

Classically, mental codes were thought to be like language propositional.

Correct.

But B -formats are specifically non -propositional mental codes.

And their content, this is critical, must represent states of the subject's own body, indeed represent them from an internal perspective.

So it's information about the self, coded in a non -linguistic way.

And the analysis breaks these down, based on Jesse Prince's work, into two main types.

That's right.

You have those that represent the state of the body, like our internal sense of where limbs are or movement, and then you have those that affect the body, like motor commands that are about to be executed.

And the early focus of weak EC, especially in social cognition,

was all about mirror neurons.

It was, but the scope quickly expanded to include somatosensory, affective, and most importantly,

interoceptive representations.

Interoception.

That's our perception of sensations from inside the body.

Right, exactly.

Things like pain, temperature, thirst, hunger, or even that feeling of a racing heart.

All of these are associated with the body's internal physiological conditions.

And here's the crucial technical detail that keeps the whole theory so strongly internalist.

This is key.

This information only becomes B -formatted when it is represented centrally.

So it might originate in the periphery, a pain receptor in your toe, say, but it only counts as embodied cognition once it activates the somatosensory cortex, or the motor cortex, or the interoceptive cortex.

All of which are inside the brain.

So extraoceptive information like pure vision or touch that's focused on the external world that involves non -B -formatted representations.

It's all about the code's location and its specific focus on the body's internal state.

And that leads to a scope problem.

How so?

Well, if B -formatting is restricted only to these body -specific operations, the theory of embodied cognition stays very small.

It would only explain how we monitor our own hunger or how we execute a motor command.

Not a very grand theory of cognition.

Not at all.

So to solve this, Goldman introduced the second and really revolutionary part of his theory, borrowing heavily from Michael Anderson.

The massive redeployment hypothesis, or as is more commonly known, neural reuse.

And this is where weak EC dramatically expands its reach and where it gets, you know, really interesting.

OK, tell us about neural reuse.

It's an evolutionary mechanism.

Anderson suggests that neural circuits that were originally established for one use can be reused or accepted for other purposes, all while keeping their original function.

Accepted.

Can you break that term down for us?

Sure.

So adaptation means a trait evolved specifically for its current use, like a bird's beak that's perfectly shaped for cracking a certain kind of nut.

Got it.

Acceptation is when a trait evolved for one purpose but was then co -opted for a completely different function.

The classic example is feathers.

Right.

They may have originally evolved for keeping warm, for thermal regulation.

And only later were they accepted for flight, a new use for an old tool.

So the classic example of mirror neurons fits this perfectly.

It does.

They probably started as motor control neurons for planning your own actions.

But evolutionarily, they were accepted to serve social cognition, becoming active when we see others act.

And by adopting this hypothesis, Goldman just drastically expands the scope of weak EC.

Massively.

Any cognitive task that employs a B -formatted representation, whether that code is being used for its original bodily purpose or a new, exacted purpose, is now considered a form of embodied cognition.

So suddenly, B -formats aren't just about moving your arm.

They're foundational to abstract thought.

They're everywhere.

So let's look at the evidence for this reuse principle in action, starting with higher order cognition, specifically language grounding.

This is Friedemann Pulvermuller's work.

Right.

Pulvermuller's studies were groundbreaking.

They showed that when you comprehend language, it isn't a purely abstract task happening in some isolated language module in the brain.

It's grounded in our action systems.

Precisely.

When a subject hears an action verb related to the mouth, like lick, what happens?

The tongue motor area in their brain activates.

And if they hear a leg related verb, like kick.

The foot motor area activates.

So the interpretation under weak EC is that the brain is reusing these low -level B -formatted motor representations to actually assign meaning to abstract words.

This immediately provides a mechanism for how abstract thought, which seems so non -bodily, could have embodied roots.

And it ties directly into other big theories, like Laurence Barcellou's work on perceptual symbol systems, where concepts are basically simulations grounded in sensory experience.

And also Lakoff and Johnson's theories of metaphor, where they argue we structure abstract ideas using physical spatial metaphors.

My spirits rose.

Our relationship is on solid ground.

Exactly.

Concepts like memory or counting or even social hierarchies can now be argued to be instances of EC if they activate motor areas originally designed for low -level tasks.

So counting might activate motor areas related to the hands.

Suggesting we're reusing our neural resources for manual dexterity to organize abstract numerical concepts, it's a powerful idea.

And this reuse even extends into perception itself.

Now Goldman initially said that vision was non -B -formatted.

He did, but he uses Dennis Proffitt's work to show how B -formats can modulate it.

This is that fascinating phenomenon where our bodily state, our fitness, our fatigue, our anticipation of effort actually changes our perceptual estimations.

The famous example.

A hill looks steeper when you are tired or when you're wearing a heavy backpack.

So Goldman's interpretation of this is that the brain is monitoring these internal B -formatted states like fatigue and integrating that data with internal motor simulations, which are also B -formatted, to inform your perceptual judgments.

The brain is running a quick internal simulation.

Given my current B -formatted fatigue level, trying to climb that hill would require X amount of energy.

And then the perception of the hill slope is adjusted based on this internal simulated action perspective.

The hill literally looks harder to climb because your brain is factoring in the current limits of your body, which are all represented internally.

It's a kind of internal feedback loop.

It is.

Now the analysis does note that the crucial mechanistic details are a bit sparse here.

But Goldman's point is that this process exemplifies neural reuse.

Yes.

These B -formatted representations designed for internal body monitoring are being redeployed for a fundamentally cognitive task like perceptual judgment.

It gives weak EC tremendous explanatory power by expanding its domain across the entire cognitive spectrum.

Which brings us to section three.

A checkup for weak embodiment.

So Goldman has built what seems to be a pretty airtight system based on B -formats and the reuse hypothesis.

It's compelling.

And we've established that the model is consistent with certain neuroscientific studies and even Vittorio Gouais, a huge figure in EC, has aligned his concept of embodied simulation with this kind of representational B -formatted approach.

So the issue is not the data itself.

No.

The issue is the interpretation.

The exact same scientific data say the activation of mirror neurons or the motor cortex when you hear the word kick is also used by radical EC approaches, like inactivism.

To support a completely different idea.

A completely different conclusion that the body itself, coupled dynamically to the environment, plays a constitutive non -representational role.

This is the absolute crux of the conflict and Al Smith and Viamond capture it perfectly.

They ask.

Yeah.

Does positing these internal body representations, these B -formats, does that fundamentally undermine the explanatory role of the non -neural body?

Just as, you know, positing internal representations of the world undermines the explanatory role of the environment for some thinkers.

And from the perspective of this critique, the answer is a resounding yes.

Yes.

Goldman's model is strongly internalist.

It explicitly excludes the body and environment from the cognitive mechanism.

And while he claims to be a true departure from classical cognitivism, because sensoromotor processes are central.

The critique holds that weak EC is, and this is a great phrase, but a hair's breadth away

from the classical neurocentric view.

It keeps the foundational representationalism and internalism that radical EC is trying so hard to escape.

I have to ask them, if cognition is exclusively realized in neural hardware, even if that hardware is dedicated to body representations and the physical body itself is trivialized, doesn't the whole theory just collapse back into simple neurocentrism?

That's the challenge.

Isn't the embodied label just clever marketing at that point?

That is the central charge leveled against it.

The moment you define the body's role as merely providing input for an internal code, you make the physical body disposable, which is exactly what the strong EC proponents reject.

And the analysis goes further.

It raises a technical objection about Goldman's use of the reuse hypothesis itself, the very engine of his theory.

This is a subtle, but absolutely vital philosophical distinction.

Okay, lay it out for us.

As we discussed, Anderson defined neural reuse or exaptation as an evolutionary concept.

It explains how B formats came about across a phylogenetic timescale over millions of years.

It explains the history of the neural circuit.

Right, it doesn't explain the actual deployment or what we call a token activation in an individual cognitive event happening right now.

But Goldman, he uses the term reuse to describe those token events.

He does.

He'll say something like reusing B codes to execute a fundamentally non bodily cognitive task.

So he's mixing up evolutionary history with immediate functional activation.

He is.

And while this could just be a terminological disagreement, the source suggests that the original evolutionary concept of reuse actually undermines his purely internalist weak EC.

Wait, how?

How does the history of evolution contradict the internalist stance?

Because the evolutionary possibility of reuse is entirely dependent on the physical body.

Brain evolution didn't happen in vitro or in a vat.

Right.

The current architecture of our brain and the very possibility of the B formats Goldman relies on is the direct result of having evolved with our specific human body.

So things like our upright posture, the restructuring of our jaw and throat for speech, the specialized nature of our hands, these morphological features which Goldman tends to dismiss as trivial.

Are actually critical evolutionary factors.

They were the original context for the neural circuits that later got accepted.

The body built the brain that houses the B representations.

So to understand why the B formats even exist, we have to consider the physical body and environmental context that weak EC tries to rule out of the cognitive mechanism.

It's an architectural dependency.

You can't just dismiss the foundation of the house just because the roof is working fine.

And this evolutionary constraint is then paralleled in our developmental constraints.

Exactly.

The critique highlights the indispensable role of the physical, social and cultural environment following Dahin's concept of neuronal recycling.

Let's go back to Goldman's favorite example,

Pulver Miller's language grounding.

The activation of specific motor areas for verbs like kick or pick relies entirely on the language being spoken.

If you were raised in a culture that spoke a different language, or if you were a sign language user, those somatic maps would be radically different.

Because the linguistic and cultural practices are different.

So the cognitive event, even if it is represented internally,

is inextricably tied to culture.

This shows that the environment isn't just an evolutionary factor from millions of years ago.

It's a necessary contextual factor for development and for token cognition right now.

And the critique drives this home using Nomen's work on simulation.

Nomen argues that these motor simulations related to word processing are incredibly context specific.

Give us an example.

Think about the command, Bill Grask the Needle.

The mental simulation of grasping there is vastly different from Bill Grask to the barbell.

It's not just about size, it's about skill, it's about context.

Exactly.

The simulation depends heavily on the individual's personal history with those items.

Their skill level is Bill, a novice seamstress, or an expert fast moving surgeon.

It depends on their cultural knowledge of the object itself.

What is a needle?

Is it a sewing needle, a hypodermic needle, a compass needle?

Or a geological feature, a rock formation.

These objects are cultural artifacts that you just can't explain in a purely internalist, B -formatted framework.

The motor simulation is tailored not just by the internal code, but by this complex interplay of the task, the object, and the agent's history and skill.

This suggests we're dealing with something much bigger.

The critique calls it metaplasticity.

It's a powerful concept.

It means that the plastic change, the learning, isn't just restricted to the neurons.

It involves the simultaneous change in the neurons, in the bodily structure, through skill acquisition or exercise, and in the cultural practices that constrain how we use those structures.

So if any consideration of reuse, whether it's evolutionary, developmental, or applied to specific cognitive tokens, constantly forces us to look at the non -neural body and the cultural environment.

Then the purely internalist position of weak embodiment becomes philosophically unsustainable.

The very mechanism it champions is contingent on the exact factors it seeks to dismiss.

This inevitable pushback brings us to section four, body building.

These are the robust arguments for a stronger form of embodiment.

And the initial argument is simple, but really profound.

The brain operates the way it does because it co -evolved with the body, meaning the body acts as the ultimate constraint, the foundational architecture.

The critique uses a powerful thought experiment here.

It does.

It asks you to imagine if the human body had evolved differently.

Say we were six -limbed or entirely aquatic.

Our sensory systems, our motor systems, our entire cognitive apparatus would be fundamentally different.

We might be more attuned to pressure waves or subtle chemical gradients in water rather than to upright visual navigation on land.

And consequently, what we even define as rationality itself would probably shift.

This really keeps the reuse hypothesis, which Goldman relies on, in the right framework.

The body places these immutable constraints on how those systems get reused.

For instance, if our perceptual motor systems were originally designed for action primarily within our immediate reach for locomotion and for grabbing nearby objects, then that primacy of action carries through to how those systems are later co -opted for abstract tasks like language or social interaction.

And we see this very clearly with mirror neurons again.

We do.

Strong EC approaches emphasize that mirror neuron activation actually distinguishes between actions performed in what's called peripersonal space.

Which is the space immediately reachable by your body.

Versus extra personal space, which is outside your reach.

So what does that distinction show us?

It demonstrates that the neural system isn't just running some sanitized B -format code.

It's fundamentally attuned to what the physical non -neural body affords in that immediate environment.

The body's physical limits are built right into the perception mechanism itself.

So to discount that actual physical body, its shape, its capabilities, its limits, and just replace it with a neat, internal sanitized representation is, as the source argues, an oversimplified cartoon of cognition.

The brain is not working in isolation.

And stronger EC really shines when it moves beyond these representational mechanisms entirely.

And focuses on the role of the non -neural body and the environment in individual instances of cognition that are non -representational.

Exactly.

The body regulates the brain just as much as the brain regulates the body.

This is where we get into homeostatic regulation, which operates via material chemical influences rather than symbolic coded representations.

Parts of the brain, like the hypothalamus, function on homeostatic principles that are often non -representational.

This regulation happens via mutual chemical material interactions between the endocrine system, the autonomic system, and the nervous system.

This is pure biological processing.

It's not computation over representations.

It's chemistry.

And the example of hypoglycemia low blood glucose makes this exceptionally clear.

Low blood sugar is a chemical condition of the body.

It's not a neural representation of that state.

Right, and this chemical state materially affects brain function.

It impairs your attention, your judgment, your emotional regulation.

Your perception is modulated, not because the brain generates a B -formatted idea of hunger.

But because the entire physical system is materially and chemically affected by the actual shortage of fuel.

We're talking about real material influences.

So embodiment isn't just about anatomy or sensorimotor maps.

It's about the body's effective and biological life.

The hormonal fluctuations, the neurotransmitter levels, the subtle regulation of heart function and respiration, all of which shape cognitive function materially, not representationally.

And this brings us to what might be the most powerful piece of empirical evidence cited in the critique against the explanatory power of weak embodiment.

The judicial bias study by Danziger and colleagues in 2011.

This study is just incredible.

It shows that these material biological states can literally distort the highest levels of human reasoning.

It's startling research because it deals with high stakes moral and legal decisions, specifically whether to grant parole to prisoners.

And the methodology was simple.

They just tracked hundreds of rulings made by judges throughout the day.

And the findings showed that favorable rulings, the chance of a prisoner being released or given a lighter sentence,

dropped dramatically over the course of each session.

Give us the specifics on the numbers because they are staggering.

Okay.

At the beginning of the day, or immediately after a food break, the judge's favorable rulings stood at roughly 65%.

Okay, a decent chance.

But as the morning or afternoon session progressed and the judges got hungrier, the favorable ruling rate plummeted to nearly zero.

Zero.

Near zero.

The decisions became disproportionately conservative and punitive.

And then as soon as the judges took a break and ate lunch, the favorable ruling rate immediately jumped right back up to 65%.

That is just, it's unbelievable.

It suggests that the quality of abstract legal decision -making, a core cognitive task, is inextricably tethered to the physical non -representational state of being hungry.

Your judicial future could literally depend on the judge's blood sugar level.

And this poses an enormous, perhaps insurmountable challenge to Goldman's weak EC model.

It really does.

Even if we're generous and we accept that a B representation of hunger exists, stored neatly somewhere in the brain.

The functional question remains,

how is that B representation of hunger reused or redeployed as a B representation for harsher legal sentences?

There's no sensible functional mapping there.

Goldman's model requires that the reuse principle explains how an ancient motor or introspective code is co -opted for a fundamentally non -bodily cognitive task.

But what part of the internal motor simulation for empty stomach can be co -opted to functionally represent this prisoner is a high risk or I must deny parole?

It violates the core logic of the reuse hypothesis.

To adequately understand that judge's cognitive event, the legal ruling, you have to consider these non -representational autonomic processes.

You have to consider the social and institutional environments, the judge's self -perception of justice, the pressure of the court, the normative practices of law.

And that forces us into a complex, irreducible brain -body environment coupling.

It simply cannot be reduced to these neat, sanitized B -formatted representations running purely inside the skull.

The system is just fundamentally too messy.

It's too complexly interconnected with material and social reality to be distilled down to a set of specialized neural codes.

Cognition isn't just computation.

It's a biological drama playing out under cultural constraints.

A perfect summary.

Which brings us to our conclusion.

Section V, dynamic participation versus internal representation.

The critique establishes that there are really substantive fundamental theoretical differences between weak EC's internal B -formatted view and these stronger, more radical theories.

Theories that demand we include the full dynamic body in its relationship with its physical, social and cultural environments.

And this brings back the irreducibility challenge.

It is intellectually very difficult, maybe impossible to successfully combine these two views.

You can't hybridize them.

You can't.

You simply cannot mesh the extra neural roles of peripheral, autonomic, ecological and cultural factors with the exclusive internalist focus of B representations.

The existence and influence of these external and material factors just fundamentally undermine the exclusive, explanatory role that weak EC wants to assign to V representations.

So the radical EC theories force the profound re -thing of the brain's function.

How so?

They suggest that the entire system, brain, body and environment, is tuned by evolution and by personal and cultural experiences to respond dynamically to the world.

Rather than dedicating all its resources to building detailed internal copies or models of it.

The emphasis shifts from representing the world to participating in it.

Exactly.

And this means engaging in what the text calls messy adjustments and readjustments.

That sounds like real life.

It does.

And these include internal processes like homeostasis, that material chemical regulation we discussed, but also external actions that appropriate and accommodate the world and adaptation within cultural normative practices like language or law.

So this perspective suggests that the brain, the body, the internal systems and the physical and social environment, all of these components together play roles in cognition that are irreducible to the neat sanitized picture of weak embodied cognition.

The body is constitutive.

It's fundamental to the architecture of thought and experience, not just a data source for the brain.

The ultimate lesson then from this detailed critique is that if we're aiming for a truly robust theory of the mind, we have to account for the actual messy, hungry, tired and culturally situated physical body.

Not just a neural echo or an internal model of it housed safely inside the brain.

We have to embrace the material reality of being a complex living organism.

So what does this all mean for you, the learner today?

We spent the last bit of time exploring the full spectrum of embodied cognition, focusing on this highly influential, but fundamentally conservative model of weak embodiment.

And showing why a stronger, more radical approach, one that embraces the constitutive role of the non -neural body and the cultural environment is probably necessary to understand what cognition truly is.

Think back to that judge study.

Favorable rulings plummeted because of hunger, a material biological state.

So if your gut, quite literally, can influence your most abstract, high stakes, moral and legal decisions, decisions we like to assume are purely rational and internal, how often are you truly thinking outside your body?

Is every high level thought tethered to these material, non -representational states that the brain is only monitoring rather than causing?

That's the profound question that strong embodiment asks all of us to confront.

It's a question that fundamentally changes how we view ourselves as these rational, disembodied thinkers.

It sounds like cognition is far more complex and much more dependent on the lunch menu than any purely internalist model could ever account for.

Indeed.

Thank you for joining us for this deep dive.

We hope this has provided a clearer, more thorough understanding of the debate between weak and strong embodiment.

And thank you from the last minute lecture team for tuning in.