Long ago, idealist philosophy taught about the Subject, which actively constructs the world of objects, as a product of its own externalizing action. Can this activist view be integrated into the context of modern neuroscience?

Neuroconstructivism (Mareschal et al. Reference Mareschal, Johnson, Sirois, Spratling, Thomas and Westermann2007a) is an example demonstrating that the we cannot simply take the features previously belonging to the mind and reattribute them to the brain, leaving the rest unchanged. The authors' brave attempt to integrate different approaches is laudable. However, the intended synthesis came at the price of making the fundamental concepts so vague and fuzzy that they can be filled by any deliberate content. Let us follow the tragic fate of three of these concepts.

Representation is the central concept. “Cognitive development is about how representations emerge” (p. 89). But what is representation? If there is anything common in the plethora of definitions of this polysemous word, it is that a representation presumes three things: one that is represented; one that represents; and one to which (dative case) it is represented. For Catholics, for example, the Pope represents Jesus during the temporary absence of the latter; note that if there are no Catholics, the representational function of the Pope would not have any sense. An ambassador represents his state in a foreign state. My attorney can represent me in the court.

But to whom, or for whom, do mental representations represent the world? To the spectators in the theater in my head? Mostly, representations are described with the adjective “internal,” obviously meaning that they are contained within something. (See Järvilehto Reference Järvilehto2001 for the usage of inner/outer relationships.) What might this container be? Sometimes it appears to be the brain (e.g., pp. 71, 147), sometimes the mind (p. 16); representations can exist “in the brain, body, and environment” (p. 100). Finally, a representation is “any component … if it can have an independent effect on behavior” (p. 100), a definition which is practically identical to the assertion radically rejected by the authors, that there is no representation (Thelen & Smith, Reference Thelen and Smith1994). In a symptomatic footnote, the authors confess that they “… remain agnostic as to where exactly mental representations lie … between brain states and world states” (p. 28). This is in complete agreement with the classical idealistic dichotomy between subject and object (here: the brain and the world).

If we say that “stimuli do become represented by individual neurons” (p. 112), we simply mean that these neurons fire with a much higher rate to some stimuli than to others. What does the term represent add to this fact? If a drop of water does not leave a trace on a mineral, but a drop of an acid does, then, does the mineral represent the acid?

In their notion of partial representations, the authors take a big step toward the concept of representations as “functional systems” (Anokhin Reference Anokhin, Dartau, Epp and Kirilcuk1974), as anticipatory interactions between the organism and its environment (Bickhard Reference Bickhard2005), but they were probably afraid of their own courage and thus stopped halfway. The term partial is misleading because it insinuates the possibility of something like full representation. Is it a representation of an object in all its details including all features of all its elementary particles, even those not yet discovered? The authors' answer is very simple: “the most accurate and complete representation … will be provided by the raw sensory data” (p. 112). Therefore, to get the most complete representation of stars, we should not attend lectures in astronomy but merely record all retinal cell activity while we are looking at the sky. This idea is a logical consequence of the authors' general view of cognition as constraint, as filtering and processing of information rather than obtaining it. Within this view, indeed, cognition can only impoverish raw data.

Constructivism

This is the notion that gives its name to the whole approach. If constructivism is minimally defined as a credit for proactive features of behavior, then I am a constructivist too. But the proactivity rightly emphasized by the authors is not construction, because the cognitive organization is actively extracted from the world, rather than being imposed by the subject (Newspeak: brain). Likewise, activity is not just the ability to filter out the irrelevant and facilitate the processing of relevant information. The organism does not filter information but picks it up according to its needs and tasks, as “a datum for a certain hypothesis will not only sensitize and bias an intelligence officer toward the incidental flow of information which is indicative of the same hypothesis, but will … also lead the officer to seek such information.” (Navon Reference Navon1981, p. 5)

The two main mechanisms of the constructivism, cooperation and competition, simply describe positive and negative effects, respectively, of any element A on an element B. They are not principles found out in an empirical study of development (as the presence of right angles is not an empirical feature of squares), but just consequences of our use of words “element,” “effect,” and so on.

A legitimate way to describe a hard-to-define approach is to use definitions of its rejected alternatives. Thus neuroconstructivism rejects “… that cognition unfolds according to some predestined blueprint encoded in the genes” (p. 87), that the child is “a passive organism imprinting on environmental events over which it has no effect” (p. 96), “the same way that a sponge would soak up water” (p. 214), that perception is “… a purely serial, feedforward sequence of processing stages” (p. 109). Does somebody believe in such things? What is the value of a triumph over this army of straw men?

Embodiment

It is true that “talk of embodiment … has become increasingly frequent in mainstream psychology” (p. 74). Unfortunately, however, the ideas usually become mainstream talk when they lose their essence. The authors define embodiment as a constraint. My cognitive activity takes into account the fact that I have only two arms. “… an agent is embedded within a body that serves to constrain the agent's interactions with the environment” (p. 49); “each brain region develops within the context of other parts of the brain” “just as the brain is situated within a body” (p. 59)

This conception of embrainment and embodiment would readily be embraced even by spiritualists. Of course, in the conditions of a finite human life, the agency of the immortal soul is constrained by the peculiar constitution of the earthly body. The authors miss the fact that embodiment is not just placing “the agent” (fig-leaf for “the subject”) into a human body, and the latter into a cultural environment, as their Fig, 4.1e (p. 72) suggests. The very existence, emergence, and development of “the agent” is impossible without this body and this environment; they are not constraints but sources and causal factors, condiciones sine quibus non a human. Conceiving of embodiment as just a constraint is like conceiving of Christianity as regular attendance of Sunday services.

As Jordan (Reference Jordan2000) formulated it, living systems do not possess knowledge; they are knowledge (see also Maturana & Varela Reference Maturana and Varela1980). We need not be prisoners of the wrong opposition: either passivity or constructivism. Cognition is not constructed by the brain using blocks of representations as a wall is constructed by masons using blocks of concrete. Cognition is a high-level energetic nonequilibrium within an organism/environment system, whose one component (the organism) must perform continuous anticipatory control of its behavior to maintain its stability. The brain plays a key role in this control, but it is not a creator of cognition, any more than the “mind” of old authors. Though it is true that the enormous complexity of the working brain can fascinate us, as the enormous power of the sun fascinated earlier people, future generations will smile at our modern cerebral cult like we now smile at the solar cult of our forefathers.