Embodied Cognition

The debate between embodied cognition and representationalism is not merely academic. It shapes research programs in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. If cognition is essentially embodied, then purely symbolic AI — the classical paradigm — is structurally limited. And if AI systems are not embodied in the relevant sense, then the alignment problem takes a different form: we are not aligning a mind with human values but constructing a disembodied optimization process that may lack the conceptual resources to represent those values at all.