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I thought a lot about learning today while sitting in my organic chemistry class, a ~60 person class, taught in a lecture hall, in which the professor writes reactions on the board, students copy them down, and then process them on our own before our exam. While I was certainly not as active in my participation in the class as I am in an this class or in an English class, both of which are far less based in particular contextual frameworks, I feel very strongly that, as students and as humans, we interact with our environments all the time. Engagement with the environment can be retermed one's simple existence in it. While the CNS involves and engages itself through the reafferent loop in which it makes adjustments to expectations, this is not to say that human interaction is as cut-and-dry a process.

I guess this gets me to a little bit of the "mind as a construction of the brain" controversy, but I would venture to claim that it is our minds, directed by the homeostatic adjustments in expectations in response to the environment, made by the nervous system, that engage with the environment, with our without active or conscious engagement. This includes the hypothetical brain-dead individual who, while not actively interacting with the environment, and living in a simple state of reafferent, homeostatic looping signals, engages with his or her environment through the affects he or she has on other people, parts of his or her pre-brain-dead environment, etc.