Embodiment started out as a cute idea without much importance that has gone off the rails. It is irrelevant to the question of how our mind/cognition works.
It's obvious we need a physical environment, that we perceive it, that it influences us via our perception, etc., but there's nothing special about embodied cognition.
The fact that your quote says "Mental processes are not, or not only, computational processes." is the icing on the cake. Consider the unnecessary wording: if a process is not only computational, it is not computational in its entirety. It is totally superfluous. And the assumption that mental processes are not computational places it outside the realm of understanding and falsification.
So no, as outlandish as Wolfram is, he is under no obligation to consider embodied cognition.
"The fact that your quote says "Mental processes are not, or not only, computational processes." is the icing on the cake. Consider the unnecessary wording: if a process is not only computational, it is not computational in its entirety. It is totally superfluous. And the assumption that mental processes are not computational places it outside the realm of understanding and falsification."
Let's take this step by step.
First, how adroit or gauche the wording of the quote is doesn't have any bearing on the quality of the concept, merely the quality of the expression of the concept by the person who formulated it. This isn't bible class, it's not the word of God, it's the word of an old person who wrote that entry in the Stanford encyclopedia.
Let's then consider the wording. Yes, a process that is not entirely computational would not be computation. However, the brain clearly can do computations. We know this because we can do them. So some of the processes are computational. However, the argument is that there are processes that are not computational, which exist as a separate class of activities in the brain.
Now, we do know of some processes in mathematics that are non-computable, the one I understand (I think) quite well is the halting problem. Now, you might argue that I just don't or can't understand that, and I would have to accept that you might have a point - humiliating as that is. However, it seems to me that the journey of mathematics from Hilbert via Turing and Godel shows that some humans can understand and falsify these concepts.
But I agree, Wolfram is not under any obligations to consider embodied congition, thinking around enhanced brains only is quite reasonable.
> It's obvious we need a physical environment, that we perceive it, that it influences us via our perception, etc., but there's nothing special about embodied cognition.
It's also obvious that we have bodies interacting with the physical environment, not just the brain, and the nervous system extends throughout the body, not just the head.
> if a process is not only computational, it is not computational in its entirety. It is totally superfluous. And the assumption that mental processes are not computational places it outside the realm of understanding and falsification.
This seems like a dogmatic commitment to a computational understanding of the neuroscience and biology. It also makes an implicit claim that consciousness is computational, which is difficult to square with the subjective experience of being conscious, not to mention the abstract nature of computation. Meaning abstracted from conscious experience of the world.