Mainstream psychology treats the brain like a computer that processes sensory input and produces motor output, separating it from the body and environment. This view overlooks the deep connections between organisms and their surroundings, leading to a misunderstanding of both human and nonhuman cognition. The author argues for an embodied, enactive, and mutualistic perspective that asks better questions about how animals know their worlds, avoiding the anthropocentric biases of the cognitivist approach.
Rachlin's teleological behaviorism eliminates the first-person ontology of conscious experience by identifying mental states with extended patterns of behavior, thereby maintaining the materialist ontology of science. An alternate view, informed by brain-based and externalist philosophies of mind, also maintains the materialist ontology of science but without eliminating the phenomenology of consciousness. This view implies that to be judged human, machines must not only exhibit complicated temporally structured patterns of behavior but also have first-person conscious experience. Although confirming machine sentience is likely problematic, extended contact with a machine that results in a person interacting with it as if it were conscious could reasonably lead to the conclusion that for all intents and purposes it is.