alt Hacker NewsThe 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
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
Fully 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.