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  1. Examining the Continuity between Life and Mind: Is There a Continuity between Autopoietic Intentionality and Representationality?Wanja Wiese & Karl J. Friston - 2021 - Philosophies 6 (1):18.
    A weak version of the life-mind continuity thesis entails that every living system also has a basic mind (with a non-representational form of intentionality). The strong version entails that the same concepts that are sufficient to explain basic minds (with non-representational states) are also central to understanding non-basic minds (with representational states). We argue that recent work on the free energy principle supports the following claims with respect to the life-mind continuity thesis: (i) there is a strong continuity between life (...)
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  • Cybernetics for the 21st Century Vol.1 Epistemological Reconstruction.Yuk Hui (ed.) - 2024 - Hong Kong: Hanart Press.
    Cybernetics for the 21st Century Vol.1 is dedicated to the epistemological reconstruction of cybernetics, consisting of a series of historical and critical reflections on the subject – which according to Martin Heidegger marked the completion of Western metaphysics. In this anthology, historians, philosophers, sociologists and media studies scholars explore the history of cybernetics from Leibniz to artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as the development of twentieth-century cybernetics in various geographical regions in the world, from the USA to the (...)
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  • A Promethean Philosophy of External Technologies, Empiricism, & the Concept: Second-Order Cybernetics, Deep Learning, and Predictive Processing.Ekin Erkan - 2020 - Media Theory 4 (1):87-146.
    Beginning with a survey of the shortcoming of theories of organology/media-as-externalization of mind/body—a philosophical-anthropological tradition that stretches from Plato through Ernst Kapp and finds its contemporary proponent in Bernard Stiegler—I propose that the phenomenological treatment of media as an outpouching and extension of mind qua intentionality is not sufficient to counter the ̳black-box‘ mystification of today‘s deep learning‘s algorithms. Focusing on a close study of Simondon‘s On the Existence of Technical Objectsand Individuation, I argue that the process-philosophical work of Gilbert (...)
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  • Coupling to Variant Information: an Ecological Account of Comparative Mental Imagery Generation.Matthew Sims - 2019 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (4):899-916.
    Action-based theories of cognition place primary emphasis upon the role that agent-environment coupling plays in the emergence of psychological states. Prima facie, mental imagery seems to present a problem for some of these theories because it is understood to be stimulus-absent and thus thought to be decoupled from the environment. However, mental imagery is much more multifaceted than this “naïve” view suggests. Focusing on a particular kind of imagery, comparative mental imagery generation, this paper demonstrates that although such imagery is (...)
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  • First principles in the life sciences: the free-energy principle, organicism, and mechanism.Matteo Colombo & Cory Wright - 2021 - Synthese 198 (14):3463–3488.
    The free-energy principle states that all systems that minimize their free energy resist a tendency to physical disintegration. Originally proposed to account for perception, learning, and action, the free-energy principle has been applied to the evolution, development, morphology, anatomy and function of the brain, and has been called a postulate, an unfalsifiable principle, a natural law, and an imperative. While it might afford a theoretical foundation for understanding the relationship between environment, life, and mind, its epistemic status is unclear. Also (...)
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  • Predictive minds and small-scale models: Kenneth Craik’s contribution to cognitive science.Daniel Williams - 2018 - Philosophical Explorations 21 (2):245-263.
    I identify three lessons from Kenneth Craik’s landmark book “The Nature of Explanation” for contemporary debates surrounding the existence, extent, and nature of mental representation: first, an account of mental representations as neural structures that function analogously to public models; second, an appreciation of prediction as the central component of intelligence in demand of such models; and third, a metaphor for understanding the brain as an engineer, not a scientist. I then relate these insights to discussions surrounding the representational status (...)
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  • ‘The Action of the Brain’. Machine Models and Adaptive Functions in Turing and Ashby.Hajo Greif - 2017 - In Vincent C. Müller (ed.), Philosophy and theory of artificial intelligence 2017. Berlin: Springer. pp. 24-35.
    Given the personal acquaintance between Alan M. Turing and W. Ross Ashby and the partial proximity of their research fields, a comparative view of Turing’s and Ashby’s work on modelling “the action of the brain” (letter from Turing to Ashby, 1946) will help to shed light on the seemingly strict symbolic/embodied dichotomy: While it is clear that Turing was committed to formal, computational and Ashby to material, analogue methods of modelling, there is no straightforward mapping of these approaches onto symbol-based (...)
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  • Diachronic Metaphysical Building Relations: Towards the Metaphysics of Extended Cognition.Michael David Kirchhoff - 2013 - Dissertation, Macquarie University
    In the thesis I offer an analysis of the metaphysical underpinnings of the extended cognition thesis via an examination of standard views of metaphysical building (or, dependence) relations. -/- In summary form, the extended cognition thesis is a view put forth in naturalistic philosophy of mind stating that the physical basis of cognitive processes and cognitive processing may, in the right circumstances, be distributed across neural, bodily, and environmental vehicles. As such, the extended cognition thesis breaks substantially with the still (...)
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  • Experiential fantasies, prediction, and enactive minds.Michael David Kirchhoff - 2015 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 22 (3-4):68-92.
    A recent surge of work on prediction-driven processing models--based on Bayesian inference and representation-heavy models--suggests that the material basis of conscious experience is inferentially secluded and neurocentrically brain bound. This paper develops an alternative account based on the free energy principle. It is argued that the free energy principle provides the right basic tools for understanding the anticipatory dynamics of the brain within a larger brain-body-environment dynamic, viewing the material basis of some conscious experiences as extensive--relational and thoroughly world-involving.
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  • Philosophical foundations of the Death and Anti-Death discussion.Jeremy Horne - 2017 - Death And Anti-Death Set of Anthologies 15:72.
    Perhaps there has been no greater opportunity than in this “VOLUME FIFTEEN of our Death And Anti-Death set of anthologies” to write about how might think about life and how to avoid death. There are two reasons to discuss “life”, the first being enhancing our understanding of who we are and why we may be here in the Universe. The second is more practical: how humans meet the physical challenges brought about by the way they have interacted with their environment. (...)
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  • Active Inference and the Primacy of the ‘I Can’.Jelle Bruineberg - 2017 - Philosophy and Predictive Processing.
    This paper deals with the question of agency and intentionality in the context of the free-energy principle. The free-energy principle is a system-theoretic framework for understanding living self-organizing systems and how they relate to their environments. I will first sketch the main philosophical positions in the literature: a rationalist Helmholtzian interpretation (Hohwy 2013; Clark 2013), a cybernetic interpretation (Seth 2015b) and the enactive affordance-based interpretation (Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014; Bruineberg et al. 2016) and will then show how agency and intentionality (...)
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  • Enactive autonomy in computational systems.Mario Villalobos & Joe Dewhurst - 2018 - Synthese 195 (5):1891-1908.
    In this paper we will demonstrate that a computational system can meet the criteria for autonomy laid down by classical enactivism. The two criteria that we will focus on are operational closure and structural determinism, and we will show that both can be applied to a basic example of a physically instantiated Turing machine. We will also address the question of precariousness, and briefly suggest that a precarious Turing machine could be designed. Our aim in this paper is to challenge (...)
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  • Herbert Spencer's Epigenetic Epistemology.C. U. M. Smith - 1983 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 14 (1):1.
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  • The perceptron: A probabilistic model for information storage and organization in the brain.F. Rosenblatt - 1958 - Psychological Review 65 (6):386-408.
    If we are eventually to understand the capability of higher organisms for perceptual recognition, generalization, recall, and thinking, we must first have answers to three fundamental questions: 1. How is information about the physical world sensed, or detected, by the biological system? 2. In what form is information stored, or remembered? 3. How does information contained in storage, or in memory, influence recognition and behavior? The first of these questions is in the.
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  • Toward a Model of Functional Brain Processes I: Central Nervous System Functional Micro-architecture.Mark H. Bickhard - 2015 - Axiomathes 25 (3):217-238.
    Standard semantic information processing models—information in; information processed; information out —lend themselves to standard models of the functioning of the brain in terms, e.g., of threshold-switch neurons connected via classical synapses. That is, in terms of sophisticated descendants of McCulloch and Pitts models. I argue that both the cognition and the brain sides of this framework are incorrect: cognition and thought are not constituted as forms of semantic information processing, and the brain does not function in terms of passive input (...)
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  • From the Separateness of Space to the Ideality of Sensation. Thoughts on the Possibilities of Actualizing Hegel's Philosophy of Nature.Dieter Wandschneider - 2000 - Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 41 (1-2):86-103.
    The Cartesian concept of nature, which has determined modern thinking until the present time, has become obsolete. It shall be shown that Hegel's objective-idealistic conception of nature discloses, in comparison to that of Descartes, new perspectives for the comprehension of nature and that this, in turn, results in possibilities of actualizing Hegel's philosophy of nature. If the argumentation concerning philosophy of nature is intended to catch up with the concrete Being-of-nature and to meet it in its concretion, then this is (...)
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  • Chaos can be overplayed.René Thom - 1987 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10 (2):182-183.
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  • How brains make chaos in order to make sense of the world.Christine A. Skarda & Walter J. Freeman - 1987 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10 (2):161-173.
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  • Chaos, symbols, and connectionism.John A. Barnden - 1987 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10 (2):174-175.
    The paper is a commentary on the target article by Christine A. Skarda & Walter J. Freeman, “How brains make chaos in order to make sense of the world”, in the same issue of the journal, pp.161–195. -/- I confine my comments largely to some philosophical claims that Skarda & Freeman make and to the relationship of their model to connectionism. Some of the comments hinge on what symbols are and how they might sit in neural systems.
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  • Making the connections.Jay G. Rueckl - 1988 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1):50-51.
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  • Smolensky, semantics, and the sensorimotor system.George Lakoff - 1988 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1):39-40.
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  • Connections among connections.R. J. Nelson - 1988 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1):45-46.
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  • Dynamic systems and the “subsymbolic level”.Walter J. Freeman - 1988 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1):33-34.
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  • A defense of monolithic sociobiology and genetic mysticism.George C. Williams - 1981 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (2):257-257.
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  • Selection by consequences.B. F. Skinner - 1984 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7 (4):477-481.
    Human behavior is the joint product of (i) contingencies of survival responsible for natural selection, and (ii) contingencies of reinforcement responsible for the repertoires of individuals, including (iii) the special contingencies maintained by an evolved social environment. Selection by consequences is a causal mode found only in living things, or in machines made by living things. It was first recognized in natural selection: Reproduction, a first consequence, led to the evolution of cells, organs, and organisms reproducing themselves under increasingly diverse (...)
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  • Underestimating the importance of the implementational level.Michael Van Kleeck - 1987 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10 (3):497-498.
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  • Connectionism and implementation.Paul Smolensky - 1987 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10 (3):492-493.
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  • (1 other version)Connectionist Natural Language Processing: The State of the Art.Morten H. Christiansen & Nick Chater - 1999 - Cognitive Science 23 (4):417-437.
    This Special Issue on Connectionist Models of Human Language Processing provides an opportunity for an appraisal both of specific connectionist models and of the status and utility of connectionist models of language in general. This introduction provides the background for the papers in the Special Issue. The development of connectionist models of language is traced, from their intellectual origins, to the state of current research. Key themes that arise throughout different areas of connectionist psycholinguistics are highlighted, and recent developments in (...)
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  • A conceptual construction of complexity levels theory in spacetime categorical ontology: Non-Abelian algebraic topology, many-valued logics and dynamic systems. [REVIEW]R. Brown, J. F. Glazebrook & I. C. Baianu - 2007 - Axiomathes 17 (3-4):409-493.
    A novel conceptual framework is introduced for the Complexity Levels Theory in a Categorical Ontology of Space and Time. This conceptual and formal construction is intended for ontological studies of Emergent Biosystems, Super-complex Dynamics, Evolution and Human Consciousness. A claim is defended concerning the universal representation of an item’s essence in categorical terms. As an essential example, relational structures of living organisms are well represented by applying the important categorical concept of natural transformations to biomolecular reactions and relational structures that (...)
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  • In defense of some "cartesian" assumption concerning the brain and its operation.Rick Grush - 2003 - Biology and Philosophy 18 (1):53-92.
    I argue against a growing radical trend in current theoretical cognitive science that moves from the premises of embedded cognition, embodied cognition, dynamical systems theory and/or situated robotics to conclusions either to the effect that the mind is not in the brain or that cognition does not require representation, or both. I unearth the considerations at the foundation of this view: Haugeland's bandwidth-component argument to the effect that the brain is not a component in cognitive activity, and arguments inspired by (...)
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  • On the proper treatment of connectionism.Paul Smolensky - 1988 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1):1-23.
    A set of hypotheses is formulated for a connectionist approach to cognitive modeling. These hypotheses are shown to be incompatible with the hypotheses underlying traditional cognitive models. The connectionist models considered are massively parallel numerical computational systems that are a kind of continuous dynamical system. The numerical variables in the system correspond semantically to fine-grained features below the level of the concepts consciously used to describe the task domain. The level of analysis is intermediate between those of symbolic cognitive models (...)
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  • The Relational Turn in Understanding Personhood: Psychological, Theological, and Computational Perspectives.Fraser Watts & Marius Dorobantu - 2023 - Zygon 58 (4):1029-1044.
    From the middle of the twentieth‐century onwards, there has been a growing emphasis on the importance of relationality in what it means to be human, which we call a “relational turn.” This is found in various domains, including philosophical psychology, psychoanalysis, and theological anthropology. Many have seen a close connection between relationality and personhood. In the second half of the article, we consider the implications of this trend for artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. So far, AI has largely neglected relational (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Philosophy of Nature of Kant, Schelling and Hegel.Dieter Wandschneider - 2010 - In Dean Moyar (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth Century Philosophy. New York: Routledge. pp. 64—‘l03.
    The present investigation brings into view the philosophy of nature of German Idealism, a philosophical movement which emerged around the beginning of the nineteenth century. German Idealism appro- priated certain motivations of the Kantian philosophy and developed them further in a "speculative" manner (Engelhardt 1972, 1976, 2002). This powerful philosophical movement, associated above all with the names of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel - and moreover having nothing whatsoever to do with the "subjective idealism" of George Berkeley - was replaced by (...)
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  • Cognition, Computing and Dynamic Systems.Mario Villalobos & Joe Dewhurst - 2016 - Límite. Revista Interdisciplinaria de Filosofía y Psicología 1.
    Traditionally, computational theory (CT) and dynamical systems theory (DST) have presented themselves as opposed and incompatible paradigms in cognitive science. There have been some efforts to reconcile these paradigms, mainly, by assimilating DST to CT at the expenses of its anti-representationalist commitments. In this paper, building on Piccinini’s mechanistic account of computation and the notion of functional closure, we explore an alternative conciliatory strategy. We try to assimilate CT to DST by dropping its representationalist commitments, and by inviting CT to (...)
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  • The Apparent (Ur-)Intentionality of Living Beings and the Game of Content.Katerina Abramova & Mario Villalobos - 2015 - Philosophia 43 (3):651-668.
    Hutto and Satne, Philosophia propose to redefine the problem of naturalizing semantic content as searching for the origin of content instead of attempting to reduce it to some natural phenomenon. The search is to proceed within the framework of Relaxed Naturalism and under the banner of teleosemiotics which places Ur-intentionality at the source of content. We support the proposed redefinition of the problem but object to the proposed solution. In particular, we call for adherence to Strict Naturalism and replace teleosemiotics (...)
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  • (1 other version)Connectionist Natural Language Processing: The State of the Art.M. H. Christiansen, N. Chater & M. S. Seidenberg - 1999 - Cognitive Science 23 (4):417-437.
    This Special Issue on Connectionist Models of Human Language Processing provides an opportunity for an appraisal both of specific connectionist models and of the status and utility of connectionist models of language in general. This introduction provides the background for the papers in the Special Issue. The development of connectionist models of language is traced, from their intellectual origins, to the state of current research. Key themes that arise throughout different areas of connectionist psycholinguistics are highlighted, and recent developments in (...)
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  • Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde.Evan Selinger (ed.) - 2006 - State University of New York Press.
    Critically engages the work of the philosopher Don Ihde.
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  • “Intelligence” as description and as explanation.P. A. Russell - 1990 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (1):86-86.
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  • Of cockroaches as kings.Robert J. Sternberg - 1990 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (1):91-91.
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  • Rapid eye movements and the cerebellum.John Antrobus - 1986 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9 (3):400-401.
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  • Chaos in brains: Fad or insight?Donald H. Perkel - 1987 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10 (2):180-181.
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  • A two-dimensional array of models of cognitive function.Gardner C. Quarton - 1988 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1):48-48.
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  • The Body of a New Machine: Situating the Organism between Telegraphs and Computers.Evelyn Fox Keller - 1994 - Perspectives on Science 2 (3):302-323.
    Genes and messages have a long association in biology, dating back at least to Weismann. But, through most of this history, even with the dramatic concreteness that molecular biology lent to this association, the image dominating most thinking about messages was drawn from the nineteenth-century technology of the telegraph. In the mid-twentieth century, a new technology, the computer, arrived to displace the telegraph. With that displacement, the meanings of many terms—of “message,” “information,” “organization,” indeed, “organism” —have, over the past few (...)
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  • Predictive processing as a systematic basis for identifying the neural correlates of consciousness.Jakob Hohwy & Anil Seth - 2020 - Philosophy and the Mind Sciences 1 (II).
    The search for the neural correlates of consciousness is in need of a systematic, principled foundation that can endow putative neural correlates with greater predictive and explanatory value. Here, we propose the predictive processing framework for brain function as a promising candidate for providing this systematic foundation. The proposal is motivated by that framework’s ability to address three general challenges to identifying the neural correlates of consciousness, and to satisfy two constraints common to many theories of consciousness. Implementing the search (...)
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  • Species of realization and the free energy principle.Michael David Kirchhoff - 2015 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (4):706-723.
    This paper examines, for the first time, the relationship between realization relations and the free energy principle in cognitive neuroscience. I argue, firstly, that the free energy principle has ramifications for the wide versus narrow realization distinction: if the free energy principle is correct, then organismic realizers are insufficient for realizing free energy minimization. I argue, secondly, that the free energy principle has implications for synchronic realization relations, because free energy minimization is realized in dynamical agent-environment couplings embedded at multiple (...)
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  • Evolution's Arrow: the direction of evolution and the future of humanity.John E. Stewart - 2000 - Canberra: The Chapman Press.
    Evolution's Arrow argues that evolution is directional and progressive, and that this has major consequences for humanity. Without resort to teleology, the book demonstrates that evolution moves in the direction of producing cooperative organisations of greater scale and evolvability - evolution has organised molecular processes into cells, cells into organisms, and organisms into societies. The book founds this position on a new theory of the evolution of cooperation. It shows that self-interest at the level of the genes does not prevent (...)
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  • From symbols to icons: the return of resemblance in the cognitive neuroscience revolution.Daniel Williams & Lincoln Colling - 2018 - Synthese 195 (5):1941-1967.
    We argue that one important aspect of the “cognitive neuroscience revolution” identified by Boone and Piccinini :1509–1534. doi: 10.1007/s11229-015-0783-4, 2015) is a dramatic shift away from thinking of cognitive representations as arbitrary symbols towards thinking of them as icons that replicate structural characteristics of their targets. We argue that this shift has been driven both “from below” and “from above”—that is, from a greater appreciation of what mechanistic explanation of information-processing systems involves, and from a greater appreciation of the problems (...)
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  • Computation vs. information processing: why their difference matters to cognitive science.Gualtiero Piccinini & Andrea Scarantino - 2010 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 (3):237-246.
    Since the cognitive revolution, it has become commonplace that cognition involves both computation and information processing. Is this one claim or two? Is computation the same as information processing? The two terms are often used interchangeably, but this usage masks important differences. In this paper, we distinguish information processing from computation and examine some of their mutual relations, shedding light on the role each can play in a theory of cognition. We recommend that theorists of cognition be explicit and careful (...)
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  • The origin of consciousness and beyond.Andrea E. Cavanna - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5.
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