From the article:
Abstract
Over the last decades, philosophers and cognitive scientists have argued that the brain
constitutes only one of several contributing factors to cognition, the other factors being
the body and the world. This position we refer to as Embodied Embedded Cognition
(EEC). The main purpose of this paper is to consider what EEC implies for the task
interpretation of the control system. We argue that the traditional view of the control
system as involved in planning and decision making based on beliefs about the world
runs into the problem of computational intractability. EEC views the control system as
relying heavily on the naturally evolved fit between organism and environment. A ‘lazy’
control structure could be ‘ignorantly successful’ in a ‘user friendly’ world, by
facilitating the transitory creation of a flexible and integrated set of behavioral layers that
are constitutive of ongoing behavior. We close by discussing the types of questions this
could imply for empirical research in cognitive neuroscience and robotics.