Mind/Body Problems? Turn to Beer

Beer’s rich and rigorous attempt at dismantling old and deeply entrenched prejudices in cognitive science through the painstaking analysis of an evolved agent is more than welcome—especially so after a decade or more of not-quite-delivered promises from the dynamical systems approach to cognition. We are broadly in sympathy with the perspective Beer espouses, but we want to invite the author to take one more step and join us in seeing his work as leading to consequences that are even more radical than those reached in his paper. A central part of Beer’s paper is his rejection of representationalism; that is, he rejects the idea that cognition consists of the manipulation of symbolic internal representations. It is important to note that representationalism is just one aspect of a bigger and older idea, namely internalism, the belief that cognition is something that goes on inside the head. Our thesis in brief is that Beer might as well go all the way and reject internalism in all its guises. Beer seems to take for granted the following dilemma: either higher-level, agent-based explanations (those that use concepts such as cognition, knowledge, meaning, etc.) should be reducible to explanations in terms of internal, representational mechanisms, or such higher level descriptions can be dispensed with in favour of dynamical explanations of the coupled brain-body-environment system. Clearly Beer makes a compelling case for the