Alignment with 4E Cognition

The Convergence of Dependent Arising and 4E Cognitive Science

In contemporary cognitive science, 4E Cognition—which views mind as Embodied, Embedded, Enacted, and Extended—represents a major paradigm shift away from classical computationalism. The traditional Cartesian view treated cognition as disembodied symbol manipulation occurring inside an isolated brain, mirroring an objective outer world. 4E theories challenge this by showing that cognitive processes are fundamentally distributed across brain, body, and environment.

However, while 4E cognitive science offers compelling empirical evidence against Cartesian dualism, it frequently struggles with its own foundational metaphysics. Without a thorough non-foundational account, 4E theories risk falling back into subtle forms of physicalism or property dualism.

This analysis does not supply 4E cognitive science with a new foundation; it removes the hidden foundations that 4E still tends to carry. By showing that intrinsic nature cannot be coherently posited and that entities are designated in dependence on conditions, this analysis shows that nothing in 4E principles requires a substrate, and that their deepest insights are what one would expect once no substrate is assumed.

Mapping the 4Es onto Relational Co-Arising

Cognition is embodied. It is not a program running on organic hardware; mental capacities, moods and concepts are identified in dependence on the body's sensory and motor organization, and that organization is in turn identified through them. Neither body nor mind can be isolated as the standalone base of the other. Cognition is embedded. It never happens in a vacuum, and the environment is not a backdrop through which an isolated creature moves; it is designated together with the creature whose environment it is—the burrow with the rabbit, the kitchen with the cook.

Cognition is enacted. It is not the passive receipt of data but the bringing forth of a world in action: what the organism does shapes what it meets, and what it meets shapes what it can do. And cognition is extended. It runs out past skull and skin into tools, writing, language and institutions. Since boundaries are designated for a purpose rather than found as walls in nature, the skull is not the mind's given perimeter; where the line is drawn is a designation, neither arbitrary nor found.

Otto's Notebook

Andy Clark and David Chalmers made the extended mind famous with a simple case. Inga hears of an exhibition, recalls that the museum is on 53rd Street, and goes. Otto, who has Alzheimer's disease, hears of the same exhibition, consults the notebook he always carries, reads that the museum is on 53rd Street, and goes. If the information in Inga's memory counts as part of her mind, they argued, the information in Otto's notebook, playing the same role, should count as part of his ('The Extended Mind', 1998).

The argument shows that the line at the skull is drawn for a purpose, reliably and correctably, and is not found when sought. But it can be read in a way that keeps the old picture and simply enlarges it: the mind is still a container, only a larger one, with the notebook inside its walls. The substrateless reading does not move the wall outwards; it does not find a wall. Otto, notebook, street and museum are designated together within the framework of a life in which the notebook is consulted and trusted. Where the mind ends is a question answered within that framework, for its purposes, and it has no answer outside one.

A Lived Example: A Conversation

Think of a good conversation with a friend. A thought half-formed in one person is finished by the other; a joke lands because of something said an hour ago; each of you says things you did not know you thought until the other asked. Where is the thinking happening? Not only in your head, for without the friend these thoughts would not have come. Not only in theirs, for the same is true from their side. Not in the air between you, as if the conversation were a third thing with its own mind.

The conversation is a cognitive event designated in dependence on two people, a shared language, a history, a table and a pot of tea, and found neither in any of them nor in their sum. It is embodied in the voices and faces, embedded in the room, enacted in the turn-taking and extended into the words themselves, which neither speaker invented. And it is entirely real: plans are made in it, minds are changed, and sometimes a life turns on it. No central executive presides over it. Nor does it need one.

Cognition Without a Central Executive

A major hurdle in classical philosophy of mind is the homunculus fallacy: the assumption that for a cognitive system to exhibit order, purpose, and integration, there must exist a central controller, homunculus, or 'inner self' directing traffic from the inside.

No such commander is needed. A flock of starlings turns as one across the evening sky, and no bird is leading; each responds to its nearest neighbours, and the pattern of the whole is designated on their coordinated movement. Cognitive coherence is like this. It is designated in dependence on the interplay of brain, body, surroundings and culture, with no commander behind it—and the interplay, too, is designated, not a hidden engine.

Removing the central executive does not degrade cognitive function; rather, it allows flexibility, adaptability and high-level reasoning to be understood without generating an infinite regress of inner observers.

Agency and Efficacy in an Enactive World

Rejecting a central homunculus or isolated self raises a critical question: does agency remain real once no substrate is found?

Under substantialism, agency is assumed to require an uncaused cause—an independent subject possessing intrinsic willpower operating outside the causal web. When no such independent subject can be found, substantialist thought collapses into hard determinism or fatalism, claiming agency is a complete illusion.

Neither conclusion follows. Conventionally, agency is fully efficacious: decisions and intentions carry real weight and have predictable consequences. And agency is not isolated: an act is not an unconditioned impulse from nowhere, but arises in dependence on past habit, present situation, bodily state and reflection. Choose to reach for the glass of water rather than the coffee, and the choosing is yours, and it works; look for a chooser apart from the reasons, the thirst and the hand, and none is found.

Far from making action meaningless, emptiness fits with effective action: an agent with an unchangeable essence could do nothing at all (MMK 24.14).

Doing Without a Doer

Buddhaghosa's classic summary of the teaching on no-self reads almost like a description of enactive agency: there is suffering, but no one who suffers; there is doing, but no doer; there is extinction, but no one extinguished; there is a path, but no one who goes on it (Visuddhimagga XVI.90). Action is not denied. Only the separate agent standing behind it is.

Nāgārjuna goes further. Buddhaghosa's formula could be read as keeping the doing while removing the doer, as if action were the real event and the agent merely a label for it. Nāgārjuna refuses that asymmetry. The agent is designated in dependence on the action, and the action in dependence on the agent; no other way of establishing either is seen (MMK 8.12). Neither doer nor doing is the ground of the other. The rider and the riding, the speaker and the speaking, are designated together—which is why both can be fully real conventionally, and why neither is found when sought.

Nor does this leave anyone without responsibility. Responsibility attaches to the conventional person, the mere I of Chapter 9; it does not require an unconditioned will outside the causal order.

The Embodied Mind and Groundlessness

The convergence between enactive cognitive science and Madhyamaka is not a coincidence. In The Embodied Mind (1991), Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch drew directly on Nāgārjuna, arguing that cognition is the enaction of a world by a living being and that neither the world nor the mind provides a fixed foundation. Their name for this was groundlessness—and they presented it not as a crisis but as an opening.

Enactivism has since developed in directions that sometimes reintroduce a ground. In some versions the self-producing organism—the autopoietic system that maintains its own boundary—becomes the new bedrock from which mind and world are generated. The organism, its boundary and its world are designated together; the organism is not prior to the world it enacts, nor the world prior to the organism. Read in this way, enactivism is not a new foundation for cognitive science but a demonstration, within it, of what the Madhyamaka analysis shows in general: that nothing in the account stands on its own.

A Lived Example: Riding a Bicycle

Think of riding a bicycle. Where is the knowledge of how to balance? It is not stored as a set of instructions in the head; few riders could state it. It is not in the bicycle, nor in the road. It appears only in the riding—in the continuous adjustment of weight, handlebar and speed to the slope and the wind. Take away any one of these and the skill has nowhere to be.

Yet the skill is entirely real. It can be learned, lost, regained and improved, and it carries a rider safely through traffic. It is a vivid instance of what this chapter has argued: a cognitive capacity that is embodied, embedded, enacted and extended at once, designated in dependence on rider, machine and world together, and found in none of them alone.