Chapter 5: Going Radical

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Welcome back to the Deep Dive, where we take the densest concepts in philosophy and cognitive science, strip them down, and find the essential insights.

And today we are strapping in for a truly radical shift in how we think about the mind itself.

That's right.

We're summarizing the foundational arguments from Daniel D.

Hutto and Eric Mayen's chapter, Going Radical, Minds Without Content.

And this isn't a call for just a minor revision.

This is a focused argument for throwing out the entire rulebook of traditional cognitive science.

And that rulebook has certainly been under assault recently.

We've talked a lot about the Etern over the last couple of decades.

You know, growing academic focus on embodied and active, extended,

embedded, and ecological approaches to understanding cognition.

Right.

And the big takeaway from that Etern is that the brain isn't just a solo computer.

The body, the world, our interactions, they're all fundamentally part of the cognitive equation.

And this Etern has created a huge philosophical split.

A massive one.

On one side, you have the These are influential thinkers like Andy Clark or Alvin Goldman.

And they say, yes, these E -factors are vital, but they only require, you know, modest tweaks or some limited revisions to the current framework.

So for them, the basic idea that the mind represents and computes, that's still mostly intact.

Exactly.

It's more or less business as usual, just with some extensions.

But Hutto and Mayen are firmly in the And that's our mission today.

They argue that really accepting these E -factors demands a complete paradigm shift.

The revolution, really, in how we fundamentally define what thinking and intelligence even are.

So this deep dive is dedicated to understanding their case for a radically inactive and embodied account of cognition, or REC.

Right.

And this approach, REC, it offers a revolutionary alternative to classic cognitivism.

Not because it's just a It does something very different.

It manages to strategically sidestep one of the deepest,

most intractable theoretical mysteries in the whole traditional framework.

And that mystery, which seems to haunt every corner of naturalistic philosophy of mind, is what they call the hard problem of content.

Exactly.

And we're going to unpack what content is, why it's so incredibly hard to explain in natural terms, and how REC manages to just walk away from it entirely.

Okay, let's get into it.

Before we can embrace the radical new view, we have to know what we're trying to replace.

That's the first step.

We have to understand what classic cognitivism really is.

When Hutto and Mayen talk about it, they're targeting the whole system of assumptions that's dominated the field since, what, the cognitive revolution of the 1950s.

And you said there are two core axioms to that system.

Two core axioms, yes.

The central, almost unquestioned foundation is that the mind represents and computes.

Representationalism and computationalism.

Those are the twin pillars.

They define the default view.

And they have really deep historical roots too.

I mean, you can go back to philosophers like Descartes, who thought of the materials of thinking as representations.

And Hobbes, right.

Wasn't he the one who said thinking is a kind of computation?

He was.

Hobbes first clearly articulated that notion that thinking involves operations or computations performed on those representations.

So it's really the metaphor that the mind is a hardware processor running software over some kind of data structures.

That's the perfect metaphor.

And classic cognitivism makes some very specific, very constraining assumptions about where and how this computation happens, which Hutto and Mayen summarize as the eye conception.

The eye conception.

Okay, let's break that down.

So the eye conception of the mind is basically the standard operating format, and it's committed to three pretty rigid principles.

The first one is individualism.

Individualism as in cognition happens only inside the individual organism.

That's it.

There's a hard line between the self and the world.

Okay, what's second?

Second, we have intellectualism.

This holds that the mind primarily involves reasoning and the systematic manipulation of representations.

So thinking is basically operating on symbols or structures that stand in for things in the world.

It's a very abstract, logic based view of thought.

It is.

And third, you have the that really determines the location.

Internalism.

Which would mean the actual cognitive processes are restricted to the brain, right?

There are computations happening over internal mental contents.

Exactly.

The mind is locked inside the skull, performing calculations, totally isolated from the environment, except for, you know, input and output transducers.

That seems like a very tidy, very systematic model.

I can see why it's so intuitive.

But the source points out that this eye conception, it really starts to struggle when you confront it with the reality of fast real time activity.

It struggles mightily.

The big critique here is that the eye conception just can't model the fluid and plastic nature of cognition that we see in everyday expert behavior.

We're not talking about simple stuff.

We're talking about genuine high level skills.

Right.

Think of a master chess player making a brilliant move in two seconds, or a professional driver navigating dense, unpredictable traffic, or even a climber making a dynamically updated assessment of a rock face.

OK, so if you try to model that using the eye conception, what's the problem?

What happens?

You run smack into the problem of clunkiness, trying to explain these fast paced on the fly skilled performances using classic reasoning.

So manipulating symbols in your head, processing inputs, doing a calculation, then initiating an output.

It's just deemed far too slow, too rigid, and way too abstractly formatted.

It's like trying to run a brand new high definition video game on an old dusty calculator.

Perfect analogy.

The processing time that would be required for all that internal symbol manipulation would just exceed the available time for real time interaction with the world.

So it can't keep up?

It can't.

That style of internal processing simply can't account for the dynamically updated continuous character of real time intelligent activity.

It's just too clunky.

And the field has recognized this for decades, which is why people started looking for, you know, non clunky ways to characterize how intelligent activity is so contextually sensitive and dynamically embodied.

Without having to assume there's this heavy internalized set of propositions that you have to reason over before you can even act.

Exactly.

And that right there is the initial crack in the eye conceptions foundation.

So if the eye conception is too slow and clunky for skilled performance, Hutto and Mayan propose this radical alternative, REC, the radically inactive and embodied account of cognition.

It demands a root and branch revision.

It really does.

So the first question has to be the most fundamental one.

What does REC say cognition actually is?

Well, REC fundamentally rejects that core representational axiom.

It rejects the idea that cognition is some kind of hidden internal driver, a brain based puppeteer that causes our movement.

This is not the cause behind the action.

It's not.

Instead, like sensorimotor and activism, REC views cognition as something that organisms do.

It is an embodied activity that is out in the open.

It's identified with nothing less than these bouts of extensive embodied activity that take the form of successful organism environment couplings.

Wait, I need to stop you there.

If the intelligence is the action,

if the process of moving and interacting with the world is the cognitive process, doesn't that make the brain almost irrelevant?

It seems like a massive deflation of the traditional role we give to neural activity.

That's a critical question and it's a common first reaction.

It's a deflation of the brain's representative role, absolutely, but not its structural role.

And this is where REC introduces a really crucial philosophical distinction, focusing on process versus state.

Process versus state.

Traditional cognitivism focuses on internal content -bearing states and how they interact.

Think of them like static data points.

REC, on the other hand, frames cognition in terms of unfolding world -related processes.

That distinction changes the entire explanatory landscape.

If you view the mind as a static internal state, the question you ask is, what is the content of that state?

But if you view it as a process, you ask something totally different.

You ask totally different questions.

You ask, how is this process sustained?

Why did this particular coupling unfold this way?

What's responsible for its progression over time?

A process is something that goes on through time.

It has a dynamic reach.

It can change as it does so.

By shifting the focus to these unfolding, dynamically loopy processes that are responsive to environmental variables,

REC opens up entirely new avenues of explanation that just don't require internal representation.

And since these processes are out in the open, as you said, that brings the body and the environment back into the explanatory loop.

This must be where the equal partner principle comes in.

Absolutely.

This is the mechanism REC uses to explain intelligent activity.

It advocates for the equal partner principle, appeals to neural factors, bodily factors, and environmental factors, all stand on the same footing in explaining cognition.

So it's not just what's in the brain?

No.

This directly contrasts with the conservative views that restrict the truly cognitive factors only to neural factors.

For REC, the structure of the environment can be just as cognitive as the firing pattern of a neuron.

Okay.

This is feeling a little abstract.

Let's ground this with the example Hutto and Mayan use, the constraints -led approach to skill acquisition.

This is a perfect REC -friendly model of learning.

It draws heavily on Gibson's ecological psychology and also on dynamical systems theory.

And Gibson's core idea was that perception is about getting a grip on the world, not representing it internally.

It's about understanding what the world affords you.

Precisely.

So the constraints -led approach uses the non -linearly coupled organism environment system as its basic unit of analysis.

So the unit of analysis isn't the brain in a vat.

It's the player on the field, the ball, the boundaries, the force of gravity, all interacting as one dynamic system.

Exactly.

And the key here is that training doesn't involve teaching the athlete a set of internal rules or abstract propositions.

Instead, training focuses on selectively modifying the constraints.

Constraints being the restrictive factors that shape how the system behaves.

Yes.

And you modify these to encourage the self -organizing emergence of skills.

Can you give me a real -world example of modifying a constraint in training?

Sure.

Let's say you're teaching a beginner baseball player how to hit.

Instead of giving them abstract instructions like, wait for the curve ball to break exactly three inches, you modify the constraints.

You might reduce the size of the bat.

That's a bodily constraint.

You could increase the distance between the bases, an environmental constraint.

Or you could force them to only hit the ball after one bounce.

That's a task constraint.

I see.

So by changing those constraints,

the whole dynamical system, that player -environment coupling, is forced to reconfigure its behavioral response to successfully complete the task.

And the skill, the ability to successfully interact, it just emerges spontaneously.

It's acquired through these context -sensitive, active engagements with the world.

It leads the organism to get a grip on the patterns that matter for the interactions that matter.

And the crucial point here must be that this whole process involved the organism in actively evolving its capacities.

Yes, by adjusting and attuning to the world over time.

And this adjustment, these structural changes, they aren't restricted just to the brain.

Right.

These adaptive changes can be neural, like changing synaptic weights, but they can also be bodily, like changing musculature or physical responsiveness.

And critically, they can be environmental.

Environmental, how so?

You can arrange objects or create artifacts like tools, rituals, practices that constrain future interactions.

Think about a mechanic laying out a specific set of tools on a workbench before starting a job.

That environmental structure simplifies and guides the cognitive activity that follows.

That truly makes the environment an equal partner in the process.

But I have to ask, if these structural changes are happening inside the organism, new synaptic weights, new wiring, how does REC keep its philosophical austerity?

How does it not just become another form of internalism?

This is the crucial line they draw.

REC absolutely acknowledges these structural changes inside the organism, but, and this is the key, it steers clear of casting them in information processing and representational terms.

So they're just physical changes?

They are physical structural changes that alter responsiveness, but they are not encoded information being stored, retrieved, or computed on.

For REC, the mind is contentless, it's just embodied know -how.

Wow.

Okay, to really appreciate the audacity of that claim, that the mind is contentless know -how, we have to confront the traditional bastion of representationalism, which is memory.

Exactly.

The whole field of memory research has always been saturated with metaphors like storage, retrieval, and memory traces.

It's almost impossible to even talk about memory without using a computer metaphor.

Which is precisely the point Hutto and Mayen tackle.

They do it by examining Eric Kandel's Nobel Prize -winning work on elementary learning and memory.

The work he did on simple animal models, like the sea slug Aplasia.

That's the one.

Kandel's work was all about finding the basic physical principles of learning.

Okay, so what were the physiological lessons from that research that REC can actually agree with?

What part is acceptable?

Two major lessons.

Key lesson one.

Memory capacity isn't due to some intrinsic property of individual neurons.

It's all about the pattern of functional interconnections between those cells and how those patterns are affected by learning.

So it's about the network, not the nodes.

Exactly.

And key lesson two.

Learning results from changes in the strength of synaptic connections.

Experience, through things like sensitization or habituation, alters the strength and effectiveness of these pre -existing chemical connections.

Those sound like objective, naturalistic facts about neurobiology.

So where does REC diverge from the mainstream interpretation of Kandel's findings?

It diverges in the framing, the interpretation.

Kandel himself, and many researchers who followed him, sought to synthesize this biology with a mentalistic psychology of memory storage.

So they take the physical change and immediately translate it, using those metaphors we talked about.

Memory traces, encoded information that gets stored and retrieved.

Right.

And the problem, as the philosopher Philippe de Brigard points out, is that the word storing is just deeply misleading.

Why misleading?

De Brigard's analysis is vital here.

What actually happens during the so -called encoding phase is simply the strengthening of neural connections because they're activated together.

A memory trace isn't a data file sitting on a hard drive.

Is what, then?

It's a dispositional property that these neural regions acquire.

It's a tendency or a capacity to reactivate in the same pattern when it's triggered by the right cue.

Okay, so if I learn to ride a bike, the memory isn't a set of instructions stored somewhere.

It's the physical disposition of my nervous system and muscles to successfully coordinate when they're confronted with the environment of a bike in a road.

Precisely.

And REC accepts this neural analysis entirely, but critically, it rejects the commitment to information being encoded and processed.

For REC, explaining the dispositional basis of this capacity, the structural changes in the brain, does not require you to posit any stored mental contents.

The brain is just rewiring itself.

They argue the brain does everything without thinking about anything at all.

It relies purely on input -output wiring and rewiring mechanisms.

If that's true, if we can tell a complete, gapless story of learning and basic memory purely in terms of physical, structural changes caused by experience, that really pulls the rug out from under the classic information processing field.

That's the REC challenge to cognitiveism.

It raises this question of explanatory superfluity.

Does the traditional, contentful gloss, the whole story about senses supplying information, encoding it, processing it, integrating it, does that add anything of real explanatory value to the simple, radical reductionist account that Kandla's biology gives us?

And if the reductionist account, the one focused only on synaptic weight changes, is sufficient to explain the observable behavior?

Then the content story is explanatorily superfluous.

It's an unnecessary theoretical layer.

But if the cognitivist insists that the content story does add value, then the burden of proof is on them.

Exactly.

They have to articulate precisely what additional contribution those contentful representations make, and crucially, how that additional explanation works.

And that articulation, as we're about to see, is where the entire framework just runs into a brick wall.

This feels like the moment of truth.

If the traditional story needs content, then the cognitivist has to be able to explain what content is in a way that respects natural science.

This is it.

Let's dive into the hard problem of content, or the HPC.

Where does this deep theoretical problem actually come from?

It originates from the most scientifically respectable notion of information that we have for any kind of naturalistic explanation, and that is information as covariance.

Okay, let's define that clearly, because this feels like the pivot of the entire argument.

It absolutely is.

Information as covariance is the objective physical notion of information.

A state of affairs, let's call it A, carries information about another state.

B, if A lawfully covaries with B to some specified degree, like smoke and fire.

The classic example.

Smoke is objectively correlated with fire, they covary.

Tree rings covary with the age of the tree.

This notion is objective, it's ubiquitous, it's physical, and it has impeccable naturalistic credentials.

It doesn't require a mind or any meaning to exist, it's just a fact about the world.

Okay, so covariance is a physical fact about the universe.

Now, this is where the cognitivist hits the dilemma.

They're facing two deeply uncomfortable choices, what Hutto and Mayen call the two horns of the HPC.

Right, let's take horn one.

What if cognitivists try to rely only on this pure objective information as covariance to explain encoding and processing?

The difficulty, as Hutto and Mayen point out, must be that just because two things covary doesn't mean one of them has content about the other.

That's it, exactly.

If the correlation between a neuron firing and the presence of a red stimulus is just a lawful covariance, a physical fact, how can that physical relation be literally extracted and encoded inside a mind to become a meaningful message or mental content?

There's a missing step.

A huge missing step.

The system has no respectable scientific account of how raw non -contentful covariance becomes a message that says, this object is red.

So I can explain the physical mechanism.

The neuron fires if and only if red is present.

That's the covariance.

But I can't explain the philosophical leap.

How that same neuron firing becomes the subjective truth conditional mental representation of red.

The system needs some kind of code to bridge that gap.

And this is where the lack of mental codes becomes a serious, serious issue.

The Cognitivist story often relies on these quasi -communicative terms, signaling codes, messages.

But when you actually look for the mechanism, the Rosetta Stone, that translates non -contentful covariance into contentful messages, it just isn't there.

It's a placeholder.

It's an empty placeholder.

Goldman, a Cognitivist himself, admitted that there is no generally accepted treatment of what it is to be a mental code.

That's devastating.

You need the content to make the computation intelligible, but you can't get the content from the only scientifically respectable kind of information you have, which is covariance.

That's the problem in a nutshell.

We lack a naturalistically illuminating account of that leap from raw physical correlation to a message with truth conditional content that can then be manipulated in thought.

All right, so if horn one relying only on covariance fails,

then Cognitivists are pushed to horn two.

Right, they have to find an alternative notion of information that has sound naturalistic credentials and can do the additional explanatory work required to form mental content.

And the problem there is?

The problem here is straightforward and frankly remains decades after the cognitive revolution.

As things currently stand, it is totally unclear which, if any, candidate notion of information possesses the right characteristics to play this critical content supplying role.

So the search for this magical content carrying information has been the holy grail of naturalize in the hind and it's still elusive.

Completely elusive.

So the challenge isn't just that the storage metaphor is flawed.

It's that every metaphor that treats information as a commodity or a contentful message or some abstract entity generates these equally deep scientific mysteries about its origin and mechanism.

And those mysteries have to either be explained by providing the missing mechanism, which hasn't happened yet.

Or they have to be explained away, which is precisely what REC proposes to do.

Given the depth and frankly the persistence of the HPC, it's amazing that the cognitivist framework still dominates.

To understand that resistance to REC, Hutto and Mayan use a really fascinating analogy from the history of physics.

The less can be more analogy.

Yeah, it's great.

It really captures the psychological reason for this philosophical stubbornness.

It does.

Conceptual revolutions often start when we step back and reassess what even needs explaining in the first place what our explinanda are.

Think back to Aristotelian physics.

Right.

For Aristotle, rest was the natural state of anybody.

Precisely.

And if rest is natural, then the initiation and crucially the continuation of motion required special active explanations.

These are the explanations involving the medium pushing the object along or some internal impetus.

Yeah.

And they were clunky and theoretically problematic.

But they seemed necessary because the starting assumption that rest is natural was just wrong.

And then it took a major hard -won conceptual shift to classical physics, thanks to Galileo and Newton, who posited that unaccelerated linear motion is the natural state.

And once that conceptual shift happened, all those clunky Aristotelian explanations for why a moving object keeps moving suddenly became hollow and unnecessary.

The problem wasn't solved.

It was dissolved.

So Hodo and Mayaman are arguing that this is the cognitive parallel.

Cognitivists, like the early physicists, overlook deep theoretical problems like the HPC because they believe that their type of explanation representation is the only kind that can meet what they see as the special explanatory needs of cognition.

Don't they REC simply can't do the heavy lifting that's required?

Right.

And what is that heavy lifting?

What is the master intuition that they believe representation is required to solve?

The master intuition is that cognizers manage to concretely represent abstract properties.

That's the core claim that non -representational accounts like REC are accused of underestimating.

They argue that you need something far more than just contentless structural changes that were selected for by an interaction history.

The persistent intuition is that to handle abstraction, you need a unifying content.

A content derived from all these diverse experiences and carried by some kind of discrete representational vehicle to modulate behavior.

Yes, the assumption is that abstract properties have to be derived from diverse perceptual inputs and then somehow recoded into simple usable objects inside the head.

Clark and Toribio articulated this classic argument.

Representations are needed to explain how we think about states of affairs that are unified at some rather abstract level, but whose physical correlates have little in common.

Let's make that concrete.

Think about the abstract concept of danger.

OK.

A growling dog, a high cliff edge, a speeding car, a hostile stare.

These all have radically different physical correlates.

There's very little they share physically.

So to think about them all under the unified heading of danger seems to require that all those distinct inputs are somehow assimilated to a common interstate or process whose content corresponds to that abstract property.

That one inner item then controls the output behavior that's appropriate for danger.

Let's use the specific example they highlight to really drive this intuition home.

Mathen's example of the dog.

A great case.

Imagine a dog learns to expect food at precisely 5 p .m.

every day.

OK.

This single learned association is abstract.

It is 5 p .m.

And it controls multiple highly context dependent behaviors.

The dog might sit patiently by the bowl or whine loudly near the cupboard or maybe it bothers its owner with a specific look depending on the current context.

And Mathen's argument is that it's just impossible for the dog's entire organism to be rewired in some impossibly complex, disorganized way that could account for all these different context specific behaviors.

That's the argument.

It requires a discrete representation, a unifying mental item whose content is 5 p .m.

time that acts as the single mediator controlling all those disparate behaviors.

The intuition here is really powerful.

How can you unify an abstract property like a time of day across all these various disparate inputs and contexts without having an abstract content vehicle inside the mind?

Yes.

The cognitivist sees the representational solution as the only way to avoid massive complexity and disorganization in the organism's wiring.

But this is where the entire system just collapses back in on itself, isn't it?

The proposed solution just generates the original problem all over again.

This is the fatal flaw recurrence.

The attempt to posit these unifying, unitary representations as the concrete mediators of perception and behavior immediately runs you right back into the HPC.

Because now you have to explain how that abstract property 5 p .m.

gets distilled from all those concrete environmental interactions into a discrete concrete representational vehicle.

And there is no naturalistically illuminating way to explain that leap without assuming some unexplained step, the very step the HPC tells us we can't account for.

So the required solution, the abstract internal representation, is what generates the intractable problem, the HPC, in the first place.

That's the bind.

And that is why the radical move, following thinkers like Hubert Dreyfus, is to just abandon the traditional view that learning from specific cases requires abstracting and interiorizing contents at all.

If basic cognition is just embodied know -how, then the dog's behavior is explained by a new set of environmental and bodily constraints on its behavior, not by an abstract inner representation of time.

This truly underscores why Hutto and Mayan claim that REC is a conceptual revolution.

It's not just a tweak, it's a wholesale replacement of the entire system.

It really has all the hallmarks of a revolution because it presses for the replacement of a whole system of concepts.

It demands that we switch to an entirely new conceptual tree rather than just arguing over a difficult flinch on the old cognitivist tree.

And the key revolutionary move is this detachment,

just doing away with content as a defining feature of basic cognition.

Right.

By going radical, REC undermines the very foundation of representational cognitive science.

It requires the abandonment of informational processing for basic perception and action.

And this is why critics like Aizawa correctly observe that REC proponents do not so much solve traditional problems as merely walk away from them.

And REC advocates would say, yes, exactly.

REC dissolves these framework -dependent problems, like how information is acquired, stored, and processed by rejecting the background assumptions that generated those problems in the first place.

So rejecting the eye conception and the representational axiom.

Right.

But the REC proponents are quick to point out that they aren't just denying the phenomena.

They're not saying learning and memory don't exist.

They are simply reconceiving them.

And that's a key distinction.

It is.

RECers target the very same phenomena as cognitivists perceiving, remembering, learning, but they significantly reconceive the nature of those phenomena.

The fundamental job description of the mind shifts dramatically.

So instead of the job being accurately representing an environment.

The job becomes continuously engaging that environment with a body so as to stabilize appropriate coordinated patterns of behavior.

And if you accept that new job description,

the question of how contents are naturalized just goes away for basic cognition.

It goes away because contents are no longer needed for the explanation.

So the argument for REC is fundamentally motivated by this strategic avoidance.

It provides a clean, naturalistic diagnosis of the deep theoretical difficulties that traditionalists cannot overcome, the HPC.

And then it offers an immediate escape route.

And this addresses that common critique leveled against REC proponents, the one that says they offer no argument.

Hadow and Mayan acknowledge that while some RECers may just offer observations, the ultimate and most potent argument against cognitivism is the hard problem of content itself.

It forces the cognitivist to incur a massive theoretical debt.

So the challenge is, is it rational to continue to pursue an approach that cannot provide a naturalistic theory of its most foundational mechanism content without running into what seem to be fatal problems?

That's the core challenge REC poses.

Since REC's primary motivation is the failure of cognitivism to solve the HPC, we really need to understand exactly how cognitivists try to handle this crisis.

We do, because all explanatory naturalists have to bridge that gap between non -contentful foundations like covariance and a theory of mental content using only naturalistic resources.

And historically, this project has not gone well.

It has withered.

Naturalizing intentionality, that project of explaining what content is in purely physical terms, it was assumed to be solvable back in the 80s and 90s.

Today, that research program has largely petered out.

The philosopher Uriah Kriegel describes it as bearing the hallmarks of a degenerating research program that's running into fatal obstacles.

It really is.

But let's start with the most popular claimed solution.

There are some who claim the HPC was solved long ago by appealing to teleosemantics.

How does that work?

So teleosemantics, which is associated with Dreske and Millikan, is the major counter move.

It argues that the solution involves combining that covariance information with the concept of teleological function.

The biological purpose of a system, based on its evolutionary history.

Right.

So the idea is that an internal state doesn't just cover you with, say, a fly.

It functions or ought to function to represent a fly because that was the biological purpose it was selected for by natural selection.

And that evolutionary purpose is supposed to supply the missing normativity.

The system can now be right or wrong.

That's the core claim.

But Hutto and Mayen provide a potent critique of this.

They say teleological function fails.

It fails because the normativity that's supplied by biological function falls short of what is required for truth conditional content.

Why does it fall short?

Why can't evolution provide the necessary kind of normativity?

This is the intentionality problem, spelled with an S, and it's a crucial insight.

Natural selection cares only about one thing.

Reproductive success.

It doesn't care about truth or veridicality.

OK, give me an example.

Think about a frog whose visual system is perfectly tuned to catch small black moving dots, which is its prey.

The system is successfully functioning biologically.

But imagine a few of those black dots are actually little lead pellets dropped by a curious experimenter, and the frog snaps them up.

The frog is still successful at hunting, right?

Its biological function is being executed perfectly, but its internal state is false or erroneous.

It is not tracking food.

I see.

So the system is functioning successfully in terms of survival, but it is representationally erred.

Exactly.

This reveals a fundamental root mismatch between representational error and failure of biological function.

Teleosomatics can't account for the fine -grained, truth -conditional nature of content that distinguishes a true mental representation from a mere successful biological interaction.

The system is robust, but it can't explain the philosophical difference between successful hunting and truly knowing what one is hunting.

So since teleosomatics fails to supply the right kind of normativity for truth -conditional content, cognitivists have to look for alternatives.

What's the first desperate counter move?

Alternative one, anti -realism or fictionalism.

This is basically a pragmatic retreat.

Okay.

This position holds that representations, as theoretical posits, don't necessarily have to be metaphysically true or actually exist to be legitimate epistemological or methodological tools.

So the argument is,

even if the HPC is never solved,

representation talk helps us understand things, so let's just keep it.

It's like a scientist saying, this model works to predict results, so I'll use it even if I don't believe in the underlying mechanism.

It's highly pragmatic, but it comes at a severe philosophical price.

Which is?

Fictionalism breaks the link between truth, existence and explanation.

The most serious difficulty is that anti -realist explanations generally cannot be causal in character.

Because only real existing things can be causes in the world.

Right.

So citing a non -existent entity like contentful mental representations as the cause of behavior is philosophically problematic.

Fictionalists have to explain what kind of non -causal explanatory value their fictions actually yield, and that account is often pretty vague.

So if we insist on realism, that content must exist if it explains anything, what's the next position?

Alternative two, optimistic realism or mysteriousism.

Optimistic realists will admit the HPC is real, but they bet on a future solution.

They operate on the assumption that content exists and explains their successes now, betting that future developments in neurobiology or philosophy will eventually fill that gap.

They're essentially claiming that all these arguments about naturalizing content are irrelevant at this stage.

They think the correct architecture of the mind will eventually be found, and the naturalizing strategy will just follow.

And that is what Hutto and Myron call incurring massive debts against the future.

It is.

Until the HPC is solved, the metaphysics of content are not proven.

Therefore, the claimed explanatory power of the cognitivist account is metaphorically in hoc.

It's mortgaged against a future theory that may never materialize.

You can't justify the claim that contentful properties explain successes if you can't prove those properties actually exist or operate as claimed.

Not without taking on a huge theoretical loan.

And the second part of that alternative, the truly resigned position, is metaphysical mysteriousism.

Right.

Mysteriousism just takes it on faith that content is natural and plays an explanatory role, even if we are forever debarred from understanding how it plays that role.

Which is a tough pill to swallow for a scientist.

The trouble is, if we can never understand the mechanism of content, it's very difficult to rationally motivate confidence that it's doing the explanatory work in the first place.

You're asking science to accept a crucial complex mechanism based purely on faith.

So we have a failed mechanism with heliosomatics, failed causation with fictionalism, and this massive theoretical debt with optimistic realism and mysteriousism.

That leaves one final scorched earth option for the cognitivist.

Alternative three, content eliminativism.

This involves just flatly denying all intentionality.

This, of course, avoids the HPC entirely.

It does, but Hutto and Mayen argue it just trades one mystery for another.

It's too austere.

A theory based entirely on contentless computations can't really explain how organisms relate to and connect with the specific worldly offerings of their environments.

Nor can it fully account for the e -factor influences like embeddedness.

And even most computationalists who are skeptical about content still adopt a more subtle position.

They do.

They'll concede that computations must still be sensitive to semantic properties, that they have to track some kind of meaning or reference.

And that sensitivity, that need for semantic properties to make a difference to the system's computation just brings you right back to the HPC again.

You're right back where you started.

In short, the cognitivist cannot escape the HPC without either incurring massive debt,

breaking the link between existence and causation, or adopting a position so austere it fails to explain the very things the e -turn has shown are vital.

And this failure is the ultimate argument for going radical.

It is.

The case for REC is now clear.

It is a revolutionary package deal and it's motivated by the strategic avoidance of these deep theoretical difficulties, the hard problem of content, that their representational framework just cannot naturalistically overcome.

So REC promotes this revolutionary shift, rejecting the inconception of mind and the twin pillars of representationalism and computationalism.

And importantly,

it is not nihilistic eliminativism.

It questions the need to posit content for basic cognition, but it recommends a positive replacement, a contentless notion of intentionality, often linked to teleosemiotics, that deals with how systems relate to the world without requiring abstract mental content.

So it retains what's valuable from the traditional approach, the need to explain complex behavior by rectifying it within this new embodied framework.

Exactly.

The job of basic cognition is not about interiorizing abstract content, it's about stabilizing behavior patterns through continuous embodied engagement with the world.

And the sources emphasize that the choice between REC and cognitivism is not just a matter of different tools for different phenomena.

No, it's a deep disagreement about the fundamental nature of the mind.

REC is a different kind of animal altogether, even from the moderate E approaches that still try to cling to representations.

It sounds like REC is essentially telling the cognitive scientist,

stop trying to solve the problem of content, because the problem itself is an artifact of your outdated conceptual framework.

That's the core message.

By moving to an embodied process view, the problem just evaporates.

That is the ultimate radical claim.

If your traditional framework generates

intractable unsolvable problems, like the hard problem of content, then maybe the most rational scientific strategy is to dissolve the problem entirely by adopting a truly revolutionary perspective on what the mind fundamentally is.

And continuing to incur theoretical debt for a solution that has eluded the field for decades is, according to Hutto and Mayen, irrational.

It's a bet against the house, and the house has been winning for a long time.

A truly fascinating and audacious conclusion.

Thank you for walking us through this radical rethinking of cognition and the central importance of the hard problem of content.

It was a pleasure to dive deep into what the mind is, or perhaps what it is not.

That was our deep dive into going radical.

We hope you feel a little more informed and maybe a little less convinced that your brain is just a dusty old computer.

Until next time.