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.
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