Embodiment is meaningless without adequate neural dynamics

Abstract

Traditionally, cognition has been considered as a ``mental processes'' only domain. Recently, however, there is a growing conscensus that cognition should be ``embodied'', i.e. it emerges from physical interaction with the world through a body with given perceptual and motoric abilities. Terms like ``emergence'', ``enaction'', ``grounding'', and ``situatedness'' are often used, but little attention is being paid to actually understanding the neural dynamics correlates of an emergence of cognition. Nor is hardly being investigated how the structure of the body-environment coupling is perceived and manipulated by our brain. It is as if talking about neural dynamics would somehow throw us backwards to the old cognitivist approach. In this paper we present a balanced view, in which we try to keep things in their respective place.