AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

One curious thing: "embedded cognition" sounds similar to "embodied cognition" and the two terms are often linked (see 4E cognition). But they are not quite the same thing, and in this essay the body makes no appearance whatsoever. In fact they seem to lead in opposite directions; embeddedness seems to generate complexity; while embodiment suggests models of cognition that are actually simpler.

Barely understand this but I think I like the "adaptation of the past to the present" through moter schemas, that sounds almost sane (that is, implementable). See enactivism

Rec Terry Deacon Incomplete Nature, energy, repair, parasitic systems. Turing/von Neuman separated energy from information which was a bad idea. (This is another version of embodiment arguments I think, although Dennett might not buy that)

Situated Action had some impact, leading to the newer subfields of 4E cognition but obviously did not completely succeed in its effort to revolutionize AI, because the kind of stuff here is exactly what it was trying to get rid of. From its standpoint, this is just adding layers of epicycles to something that already was collapsing under the weight of its own complexity and unworkability.

Something is missing from [Heidegger]'s life and from his work. Iris Murdoch thought the missing thing was goodness, and therefore that his philosophy lacked an ethical centre or /heart/...One could call this missing element 'humanity' in several senses. Heigegger set hiself against the philosophy of humanism, and he h9imself was rarely humane in his behavior....The result, despite heidegger's mythologising of home, is a philosophy that feels uninhabitable. (p320) Comparing with Sartre, who was monstrous in more than a few ways but very human, a full character. Huh, Sartre at the end of the life say "I have not changed profoundly, and I have always remained an anarchist" (I guess the hardline Stalinism was an abberation). He was a true atheist or tried to be, compared to Heideggers mysticism. * Nod to Dreyfus as applying Heidegger to modern tech, "Everything, above all ourselves, becaues a resource, precisely as H warned" (p324). Cites The Machine Stops! "the imponderable bloom". Also nod to Merleau-Ponty as originator of embodiment

I wish there was a good history of this split (I've heard that it was partly motivated by personality and/or generational conflict; Wiener was not popular with the AI guys). It's interesting how much of the history that I lived through was trying to reintegrate cybernetic ideas back into AI (embodiment and the triumph of continuous mathematics in the ML/machine learning systems).

This sounds to me like it shares some agenda with the Heideggerian AI and other embodiment theorists. Which is weird, because I think of that stuff as very non-magical, on the contrary, it's very down to earth, physical, naturalistic, and pragmatic, or at least is oriented towards that sort of thing. I guess both are ways to get away from the square Technic mode of thinking, but very different ways.

book by David Sudnow, about music and improvisation and embodiment, with roots in phenomenology and Ethnomethodology.

As a concept, it has a resonance with embodiment , which also attempts to repair a split in the cosmos.S

The key dichotomy in Bergson is is what he calls intuitive knowledge vs analytical knowledge, and it seems to be exactly the same thing referred to as embodiment these days.

Note this has at least a family resemblance to situated action, embodiment, etc.

4E cognition

30 Oct 2021 - 25 Oct 2025

embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended! These are somewhat different but related alternatives to the classical (rationalist) models of cognition.

My impression is that this was an academically hot topic around 2010, now there exists The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition, https://amzn.to/3nQXA5y Which indicates to me that it's probably now somewhat stale.