The first properties we thought about had to do with anatomical features of the brain.

According to Friston's way of thinking, which he calls active inference, the brain is not the body's helmsman or puppeteer, but its dreamer. Brain and body are bound up in a mutual project to predict the world successfully. Sometimes the brain does the work, sometimes the body.

Halpin (2011) draws on Heideggerian phenomenology and on Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s (1980, 1987) biology of cognition to reformulate the so-called four Es in the artificial intelligence field—cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended.

These observations refute the myth that consciousness simply arises from neurons doing their thing. Here are billions of cerebellar cells doing what comes naturally to them, firing action potentials and releasing little squirts of neurotransmitter, yet without any feelings. What matters is not the constitution of brain tissue but the way it is wire

The mind is generally associated with feelings, sentience, and consciousness of self, while the brain is a dissectible biological tissue. But learning about the brain, which is part of a larger system called the nervous system, can teach us about the mind and thus about our nature.