For decades, mainstream cognitive science and much of modern psychiatry have approached the mind through a mechanistic framework. Mental activity is often described as information processing, and the brain is likened to a computer that stores and manipulates internal representations. This model has shaped how researchers understand cognition and, by extension, how mental health is studied and treated.
In a recent article, Daniel D. Hutto, a professor of philosophical psychology at the University of Wollongong, challenges these assumptions. He argues that this dominant model rests on conceptual foundations that remain largely unexamined and that an alternative, more dynamic, and relational account of cognition is both viable and necessary. His framework, the Radical Enactive/Embodied account of Cognition (REC), offers a philosophical and scientific departure from content-based and computational theories of mind.
“REC’s primary targets have been the deep-seated commitments to representationalism and computationalism by cognitivists—which bear all the hallmarks of such ‘musty thinking’,” he writes.
This issue has real implications for mental health research and care. If we continue to imagine the brain as a machine and the mind as software, we will keep developing treatments and theories that reduce suffering to broken code. Hutto’s alternative invites us to think of mental life as embodied, socially embedded, and deeply contextual.
You've landed on a MIA journalism article that is funded by MIA supporters. To read the full article, sign up as a MIA Supporter. All active donors get full access to all MIA content, and free passes to all Mad in America events.
Current MIA supporters can log in below.(If you can't afford to support MIA in this way, email us at [email protected] and we will provide you with access to all donor-supported content.)
Hutto is wrong, but not wrong to challenge the current model. It’s wrong, too.
Report comment
I have some lists (in one doc.) of relevant literature that suggests or implies or can be used to argue that Hutto is, in the main, correct. I don’t have his work on “enactivism” here because I compiled this before I read it. Please see: https://www.academia.edu/126448154/Philosophy_of_mind_books_etc
Report comment
Wow, dude, this guy sure does use complex language to make things obscure! A good scientific model simplifies our understanding of things or makes sense with the data we know. I still don’t know what he’s saying after reading the whole article, and I’m pretty darned smart. Why’s he have to make things so complex? Why not just show why the brain is NOT a computer (this has been done many times) and start from there?
Report comment
Steve – you may find my article ‘Radical enactivism: A guide for the perplexed’ simpler to read and is available here https://doi.org/10.1037/teo0000225 or via academia https://www.academia.edu/245547/Enactivism_Why_be_Radical
It sticks close to Hutto but in 12 year old language. I would be interested in why Larry Cox claims that Hutto is wrong – if he can also say it in 12 year old language.
Report comment
The first link appears to be broken.
The second includes this paragraph, among others: “According to the
originally formulation, enactivism is committed to the idea that mentality is something that
emerges from the autopoetic, self-organizing and self-creating, activities of organisms. The
activities in question are themselves thought of as essentially embedded and embodied
interactions between organisms and their environments, interactions that occur and are
themselves shaped in new ways over time. ”
“Autopoetic?” Really? Hardly what I’d call 12-year-old language!
Besides, I’m quite capable of understanding very high level language. I don’t think it’s a lack of language skills that’s stopping me from understanding this – I think it’s simply a very complex theory that doesn’t meet my basic criteria for scientific models (making the world simpler to understand rather than more complicated). If someone can’t explain something to me, it’s generally not because I’m not smart enough to understand it – it’s usually because it doesn’t fully make sense!
Report comment
I totally agree with you, Steve. It’s not that one does not have the required language skills – many academics simply seem to think that if their article is written in an overly complicated and obscure language, it will seem “more scientific”. And they also tend to assume that only academics from their field are going to read their articles.
Moreover, one can cleverly hide a lack of anything important to say behind academic verbosity.
Report comment
Sorry Steve – I should have said a 12 year old capable of using google. You seem to be stuck with ‘autopoeisis’. It is simply an idea that means ‘self-producing’. When I went to school I was taught that the basic characteristics of life are respiration, reproduction, nutrition, excretion, growth. movement, and sensitivity. Since then a couple of Chilean biologists came out with ‘autopoeisis’ – that a living thing knows how to produce itself – and that is a far more succinct way of saying what a living thing is. A living thing knows how to harvest food and make it into itself. So that means “knowing” (or cognition) goes to the heart of every living thing, which set off some philosophers to describe what kind of a mind has an amoeba for example. It resides in the body’s organisation, which is to say it is embodied. Jung once said a Navajo told him Westerners are crazy because they think the mind is in the head, when “everyone” knows it’s centred in the heart.
Academic journals are generally read mainly by academics – who don’t write to obscure what they are saying (although it appears that way to anyone not immersed in the subject) – but to save time and not treat their main audience to the implication that they are idiots by spelling out everything to them. That gives me the opportunity to come along and write out in simpler form what some are saying. Dan Hutto is, in my books, a bit of a genius, in that he is at the cutting edge of describing what a mind is. Which I think is necessary if we are ever to get out of the “abominable mess” (the title of another paper of mine) that mental health is in.
Report comment
I hear what you are saying. It would probably have been more productive to start with what the “computer mind” model entails and why it doesn’t work, so the purpose of the new explanation can be made clear. Otherwise, it’s hard to understand the purpose of the new model!
Report comment
Productive for who Steve? There are lots more Hutto papers that start with the computer model – Just in this instance Joe Huang did not choose one of those.
Report comment
Well, the title of the article is “The Brain Isn’t a Computer.” I kinda thought we’d start off with demonstrating that premise.
Report comment
Nick, I am myself a former academic and I do think that many academics deliberately use an obscure language, often without having anything important to say.
One can definitely write in a way which is not obscure without “spelling out everything” to one’s readers as if they were ignorant. Erving Goffman is an excellent example of a scholar who did not use an obscure language in his works. The idea that academics have to write in a way which other people find very difficult – or even impossible – to understand is a widespread myth.
Report comment
Goffman is a great example of writing a strong model that is easily grasped and applied.
Report comment
Nick, I love the way Martha Nussbaum – definitely an academic herself – writes about academic obscurity:
“…obscurity creates an aura of importance. It also serves another related purpose. It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding.” https://newrepublic.com/article/150687/professor-parody
Report comment
I admit I am operating on a very scant description of Hutto’s ideas.
But they seem to concentrate to this-life context and don’t acknowledge the existence of Spirit.
The important leap that must be made to understand the human situation, or any part of life, is to acknowledge the existence of Spirit. Spirit is the “prime mover unmoved” of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. It is the only logical answer to the circular reasoning of causation when only physical effects are considered as parts in the system. There must be – and by observation IS – an initial or basic causal element. And that we call Spirit (or the spiritual being). Understanding of the human mind and human behavior begins with Spirit. Any other model is incomplete.
Report comment
I tend to agree. Whatever “spirit” is (and I don’t think anyone really knows this for sure), it is clear from observation that there is an entity which is EVALUATING and DECIDING and EXECUTING the actions of the organism/being. Most of what is “wrong” with the “mentally ill” in my view originates in this mysterious entity, which is after all the agent deciding what is and isn’t important and what should and should not be done. Some might postulate that this “spirit” arises from the body in some way, though I’ve never heard a convincing explanation of how that would occur. But it certainly is clear that this entity is not something arising from the wrong brain chemicals being out of balance! And it’s not a computer – much more in common with a programmer than a computer!
Report comment
The simplest definition for Spirit is “prime cause.” And the simplest definition for spiritual being is “a point of causation.” There are wordier definitions, but this is basically all there is to it, and all we really need to know about it.
Report comment
I think that sums it up. We don’t have to know where it comes from, but we do need to acknowledge that in a human being, SOMEONE is making and acting out and evaluating the survival decisions of the organism. Sure, there are primitive survival mechanisms like instincts and reflexes, but it seems obvious in humans that these impulses can be overridden at the discretion of the “agent” who seems to be running the show!
Report comment
“spirit” in the St Thomas/Arisotlean sense is just what Hutto is alluding to – see my comment above regarding Jung and the Navajo Indian.
Report comment
Well, the article certainly didn’t lead me to this conclusion. Maybe most people are reluctant to speak about it in the simple and direct terms that it really deserves. I do not find your comment regarding Jung. He was always reluctant to acknowledge the existence of Spirit, apparently for professional reasons.
Report comment
Sorry Larry – it was Pueblo Indians, not Navajo as I incorrectly said. Its in Jung’s ‘Collected Works’, Volume 18 The Tavistock Lectures (1935) Lecture 1, paragraph 16. “The Pueblo Indians told me that all Americans are crazy…” (When I found this I was pursuing Eric Graham Howe at the time and his interactions with Jung – Howe comes close to the St Thomas/Aristotlean sense of “spirit”)
You will find that Hutto’s other works will lead you to a similar conclusion. The one that Joe Huang has chosen doesn’t do that particulary well
Report comment
The model of the mind as a computer is no longer a theoretical matter, but a matter of production for a new world order climaxing the mechanistic march of modern industry. Quite simply, humans are to be made into machines, transhuman/posthuman biodigital beings, cyborgs, along with all living beings in a synthetic universe of nanotechnology, Speaking on behalf of this agenda, World Economic Forum’s Yuval Harari proudly proclaims age-old belief of humans having a mysteriuous soul is over, and that we are nothing more than hackable animals. The primary purpose of the current ruling class regime under Trump is to roll out the digital public infrastructure (e.g., Stargate), including us in the internet of bodies under AI algocracy.
Report comment
This is unfortunately such a frequent problem, Steve – so many academics use a needlessly obscure and overly complicated jargon. I have just looked at the article on delusions mentioned on MIA https://hrcak.srce.hr/331212 and I suspect that it will be intimidating for people without a background in academic philosophy.
Report comment