According to Brian Smith (University of Toronto), “some systems (such as cognitive systems) are only intelligible in terms of things that don’t make an immediate causal difference in those systems” (quoted in Millhouse et al., 2022).
For example, we understand the activity of a computer’s binary adder circuit in terms of binary addition. In this case, the circuit itself is not influenced by the meaning we assign to the state of its adder registers; the underlying physical process for the circuit’s behavior is not sensitive to these meanings.
An ongoing debate in Embodied cognition is about the extent to which mental representations and other internal cognitive mechanisms depend on external content. However, the circuit example implies that this debate may not be useful for understanding cognitive processes at all.