One thing I'd like is to see someone clarify the distinctions they make between cognition, mind and consciousness.
— jamalrob

These words are mostly what throws us off the scent of what is really going on. Yet, there is a reason for these words in our language and it does us good to try and translate the words into what is happening in the brain. Making a distinction is where you will waste your time.

Embodied cognition, or extended, or en-worlded cognition, as treated in this paper is almost naive. It's far more pervasive and extensive than using notebooks. The qualitative aspect of consciousness discussed by Chalmers and the like is the part most extended in the world. When you look at some scene there is a dynamical coupling between your body and what's outside it's putative boundaries. Your primary sensory cortices are strongly linked to whatever is going on in the world. Beyond that this information is processed along channels that the world had over time 'carved' in the networks of your brain, on the harder stone of what the world carved by it's work on the evolution of your genome.

The quality comes from the sum of all of this. Not just some cognitive or functional aspect appearing after 'processing' at the front of your brain. The whole dynamic is what you experience. There is no unconscious part unless you want to consider things in the visual scene that are hidden from view.

Cognition too is a reactive system across time that is shaped by the world and world/organism history of the world. We humans though are remarkable in what we can do with extended metaphors and internals markers for metaphor and we are so remarkable that we have confused ourselves horribly about what we are.

When you see and think about this visual scene your mind is in the scene, equally if not more so, than it is inside of your skull. Draw a lopsided infinity symbol, with the small loop around your brain, and the large loop around body and world and you have a handy diagram. One could argue though that the body/brain part of the system is somehow hotter and denser as living organisms are. What's 'out there' is condensed and reacted to 'in here' to generate that rich poetic and creative sense of being human. One could also, more pertinently, argue that the brain side of the loop accumulates history in a remarkable symbolism of substance and potential.

We are most amazing gobs of creature goo and hopefully we aren't the only ones that would see it that way.

Does this forum really 'exist'? We'll just have to see about that.