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The author should read up on embodied cognition. Their arguments have been discussed at length. It’s all old stuff really. Good stuff too. I don’t see how the a
by usernametaken29 5mo ago
The author should read up on embodied cognition. Their arguments have been discussed at length. It’s all old stuff really. Good stuff too. I don’t see how the article succinctly describes this or contributes otherwise
- jdiaz5513 5mo agoFully agree, and I am mildly disappointed to see nobody has brought up Maturana and Varela in this entire thread. The deeper layer is autopoiesis - the conceptual foundation authored by them that embodied/4E cognition builds on. They defined cognition as a necessary property of self-referencing, self-maintaining boundaries in an information-theoretic/topological sense, not bound to any specific physical process. This dissolves the dualism Rovelli targets in a way that pure materialist/eliminativist arguments don’t manage cleanly. Autopoiesis is fully physical (mathematically modelable, biologically grounded) but it locates consciousness in structural relationships and informational dynamics rather than a purely physical substrate. Thompson’s Mind in Life (2007) is the contemporary version, and Varela’s later work integrates phenomenology directly. I hold that it may be possible to use the toolkits of set/category/group/type theory to formalize these relationships. Would be a vastly different conversation thread here if this work was more well known.