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What we call 'cognition' only exists within a warm bath of background context, culture, local setting, ongoing bodily activity and the structure in the environment, including the various technologies available. /1
Once we define computational models of a certain cognitive capacity, these models cover / represent both any intrinsic human capacity (the type of contributing factors we usually associate with the workings of the brain) *and* the contribution of the warm bath. /2
The problem is that context, setting, current bodily action and 'the environment' are ill-defined open categories. Things can move in and out of these factors, and it may even depend on the observer's decision whether things are in or out. /3
Many scientists seem inclined to try and map cognitive models onto brain processes *only*. This is perhaps not because they have reason to believe it is necessarily true that what cognitive models are modeling should be caused by brain processes ... /4
...it may simply be because the world outside the brain - even if we have reason to believe it actively contributes to the process we call cognition - is wild, open-ended, a bit scary, and for the most part inaccessible to the common empirical methods of science.
