The problem is that we continue to have two things, the brain (part of the material world) and the mind (part of another, nonmaterial and hence in some sense metaphysical realm). In other words, the computer metaphor doesn't exorcise the old "ghost in the machine" idea of souls chained to mortal flesh; it just uses different words to say the same thing.

This split of material world vs. spiritual world is emblematic of the Modern age. Many people have described it as the root of the modern sense of alienation. And it's not explanatory; as long as you have an unbridgeable gulf separating body and mind, you can't account for mind through any amount of description of physical processes. This is a problem.

The Cornell researchers found that the brain continuously shifts between states rather than having internal "variables" that contain discrete "values" that are updated as the result of calculation processes. According to researcher Michael Spivey, "In thinking of cognition as working as a biological organism does... you do not have to be in one state or another like a computer, but can have values in between -- you can be partially in one state and another, and then eventually gravitate to a unique interpretation, as in finally recognizing a spoken word." The brain is not composed of modules that pass the results of calculations back and forth; there are no "results," just continual modulation.

This notion becomes interesting when you combine it with the Extended Mind metaphor proposed by Clark and Chalmers. They contend that the brain offloads its processing into the external environment whenever convenient. It's not actually possible to separate such offloaded calculations from calculations done inside the brain (see the paper). The mind is not separate from the body (or environment) in some Cartesian sense; it is part of both.

You might still be able to prop up the old dualistic interpretation of mind by claiming that in Clark and Chalmer's examples, the brain is "sending out a query" to the environment, then waiting for a response and integrating that response internally to reach a conclusion. If that were the case, then the brain could still be acting as a computer, albeit one with numerous interfaces to the outside world. Mind would still be a disembodied thing created by the processes of the brain.

But consider the Cornell researchers' conclusions. Brain processing is continuous, not discrete. There is no query/response process going on, at least not in the sense that digital computers do it. When the brain uses the environment as part of the thinking process, this research implies, it will do so by coupling into that environment, not by doing read/write-type operations. In that case, the mind cannot be viewed as "software" running on the brain's neural circuits, because the environment is part of the processor and no discrete states are involved.

So, this view of the mind overcomes the Cartesian split. It's not Modern, nor classical... it's something new, a vision of an embodied mind. In order to wrap your head around it (pun intended) you've got to discard the idea that the material and the mental are separate realms. This is extremely difficult to do. But this notion cuts to the heart of who (and what) we think we are, and has implications not just for culture but for religion and law as well.

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