In earlier papers I described the conscious electromagnetic information (CEMI) field theory, which claimed that the substrate of consciousness is the brain’s electromagnetic (EM) field. I here further explore this theory by examining the properties and dynamics of the information underlying meaning in consciousness. I argue that meaning suffers from a binding problem, analogous to the binding problem described for visual perception, and describe how the gestalt (holistic) properties of meaning give rise to this binding problem. To clarify the role (...) of information in conscious meaning, I differentiate between extrinsic information that is symbolic and arbitrary, and intrinsic information, which preserves structural aspects of the represented object and thereby maintains some gestalt properties of the represented object. I contrast the requirement for a decoding process to extract meaning from extrinsic information, whereas meaning is intrinsic to the structure of the gestalt intrinsic information and does not require decoding. I thereby argue that to avoid the necessity of a decoding homunculus, conscious meaning must be encoded intrinsically — as gestalt information — in the brain. Moreover, I identify fields as the only plausible substrate for encoding gestalt intrinsic information and argue that the binding problem of meaning can only be solved by grounding meaning in this field-based gestalt information. I examine possible substrates for gestalt information in the brain and conclude that the only plausible substrate is the CEMI field. (shrink)

We first want to express our thanks to the commentators for their close and critical readings of The Phenomenological Mind. We would like to treat their comments and challenging questions as a productive opportunity to clarify and to make our positions more precise. Before we address the specific points raised by our colleagues, we do want to say that the intersection between phenomenology and the cognitive sciences is a rich one, and growing richer as collaboration and research continues. Our book (...) was meant to be an introduction to this area rather than a complete map of ongoing research. For that reason we were not able to cover every interesting issue, many of which are raised in the set of commentaries. (shrink)

Attempts to ‘naturalize’ phenomenology challenge both traditional phenomenology and traditional approaches to cognitive science. They challenge Edmund Husserl’s rejection of naturalism and his attempt to establish phenomenology as a foundational transcendental discipline, and they challenge efforts to explain cognition through mainstream science. While appearing to be a retreat from the bold claims made for phenomenology, it is really its triumph. Naturalized phenomenology is spearheading a successful challenge to the heritage of Cartesian dualism. This converges with the reaction against Cartesian thought (...) within science itself. Descartes divided the universe between res cogitans, thinking substances, and res extensa, the mechanical world. The latter won with Newton and we have, in most of objective science since, literally lost our mind, hence our humanity. Despite Darwin, biologists remain children of Newton, and dream of a grand theory that is epistemologically complete and would allow lawful entailment of the evolution of the biosphere. This dream is no longer tenable. We now have to recognize that science and scientists are within and part of the world we are striving to comprehend, as proponents of endophysics have argued, and that physics, biology and mathematics have to be reconceived accordingly. Interpreting quantum mechanics from this perspective is shown to both illuminate conscious experience and reveal new paths for its further development. In biology we must now justify the use of the word “function”. As we shall see, we cannot prestate the ever new biological functions that arise and constitute the very phase space of evolution. Hence, we cannot mathematize the detailed becoming of the biosphere, nor write differential equations for functional variables we do not know ahead of time, nor integrate those equations, so no laws “entail” evolution. The dream of a grand theory fails. In place of entailing laws, a post-entailing law explanatory framework is proposed in which Actuals arise in evolution that constitute new boundary conditions that are enabling constraints that create new, typically unprestatable, Adjacent Possible opportunities for further evolution, in which new Actuals arise, in a persistent becoming. Evolution flows into a typically unprestatable succession of Adjacent Possibles. Given the concept of function, the concept of functional closure of an organism making a living in its world, becomes central. Implications for patterns in evolution include historical reconstruction, and statistical laws such as the distribution of extinction events, or species per genus, and the use of formal cause, not efficient cause, laws. (shrink)

We are engineers, and our view of consciousness is shaped by an engineering ambition: we would like to build a conscious machine. We begin by acknowledging that we may be a little disadvantaged, in that consciousness studies do not form part of the engineering curriculum, and so we may be starting from a position of considerable ignorance as regards the study of consciousness itself. In practice, however, this may not set us back very far; almost a decade ago, Crick wrote: (...) 'Everyone has a rough idea of what is meant by consciousness. It is better to avoid a precise definition of consciousness because of the dangers of premature definition. Until the problem is understood much better, any attempt at a formal definition is likely to be either misleading or overly restrictive, or both'. This seems to be as true now as it was then, although the identification of different aspects of consciousness by Block has certainly brought a degree of clarification. On the other hand, there is little doubt that consciousness does seem to be something to do with the operation of a sophisticated control system, and we can claim more familiarity with control systems than can most philosophers, so perhaps we can make up some ground there. (shrink)

Hermeneutics is usually defined as the theory and practice of interpretation. As a discipline it involves a long and complex history, starting with concerns about the proper interpretation of literary, sacred, and legal texts. In the twentieth century, hermeneutics broadens to include the idea that humans are, in Charles Taylor’s phrase, ‘self-interpreting animals’ (Taylor, 1985). In contrast to the narrowly prescriptive questions of textual interpretation, philosophical hermeneutics, as developed by thinkers like Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, raises questions about the conditions (...) of possibility for human understanding — not how we should interpret or understand something, but what interpretation and understanding are and how they work. For the nineteenth-century philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, the hermeneutical disciplines were very different from the disciplines of science, including the newly emerging science of psychology. In contrast to psychology, which, in part, attempts to explain the natural behaviour of human animals in causal terms, Dilthey (1926) thinks of the hermeneutical disciplines as attempting to under- stand the behaviour of human persons in terms of their experience and inner motivation. Inner life is not composed of a series of mechanistic starts and stops, but is woven together into a continuity (Zusammenhang) that has a structure, by.. (shrink)

This dissertation is on infinite regress arguments in philosophy. Its main goals are to explain what such arguments from many distinct philosophical debates have in common, and to provide guidelines for using and evaluating them. Two theories are reviewed: the Paradox Theory and the Failure Theory. According to the Paradox Theory, infinite regress arguments can be used to refute an existentially or universally quantified statement (e.g. to refute the statement that at least one discussion is settled, or the statement that (...) discussions are settled only if there is an agreed-upon criterion to settle them). According to the Failure Theory, infinite regress arguments can be used to demonstrate that a certain solution fails to solve an existentially or universally quantified problem (e.g. to demonstrate that a certain solution fails to settle all discussions, or that it fails to settle even one discussion). In the literature, the Paradox Theory is fairly well-developed, and this dissertation provides the Failure Theory with the same tools. (shrink)

Causal representation in shamanic consciousness is compared with causal representation in ordinary waking consciousness. Causal representation in shamanic experience and in ordinary waking experience can engage strategies involving attribution of intentionality , heuristics , and magical thinking . Such strategies have consequences involving social biases , locus of control, authorship of actions, and supernaturalizing of social life. Similarities of causal representation in shamanic experience and in ordinary waking experience have implications for theories of mind and theories of causal representation, and (...) these implications involve use of metaphor and analogy, modular processing of social information, use of behavioural criteria for mental states, differences between physical causality and social causality, property transmission in causal representation, and whether causal representation involves general or state-specific processes. Principles of causal representation in shamanic consciousness appear consistent with principles of causal representation in ordinary waking consciousness. (shrink)

Current scientific research on consciousness aims to understand how consciousness arises from the workings of the brain and body, as well as the relations between conscious experience and cognitive processing. Clearly, to make progress in these areas, researchers cannot avoid a range of conceptual issues about the nature and structure of consciousness, such as the following: What is the relation between intentionality and consciousness? What is the relation between self-awareness and consciousness? What is the temporal structure of conscious experience? What (...) is it like to imagine or visualize something, and how is this type of experience different from perception? How is bodily experience related to self-consciousness? Such issues have been addressed in detail in the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, inaugurated by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and developed by numerous other philosophers throughout the 20th century. This chapter provides an introduction to this tradition and its way of approaching issues about consciousness. We first discuss some features of phenomenological methodology and then present some of the most important, influential, and enduring phenomenological proposals about various aspects of consciousness. These aspects include intentionality, self-awareness and the first-person perspective, time-consciousness, embodiment, and intersubjectivity. We also highlight a few ways of linking phenomenology and cognitive. (shrink)

This paper argues that self-consciousness and moral agency depend crucially on both embodied and social aspects of human existence, and that the capacity for practical wisdom, phronesis, is central to moral personhood. The nature of practical wisdom is elucidated by drawing on rival analyses of expertise. Although ethical expertise and practical wisdom differ importantly, they are alike in that we can acquire them only in interaction with other persons and through habituation. The analysis of moral agency and practical wisdom is (...) framed by Dennett's proposal that moral personhood requires satisfaction of six conditions, including self-consciousness. (shrink)

The development of AAC technologies is of critical importance to the many people who are unable to speak intelligibly due to a communication disorder, and to their many everyday interlocutors. Advances in digital technologies have revolutionized AAC, leading to devices that can “speak for” such individuals as aptly as it is illustrated in the case of the world famous physicist, Stephen Hawking. However, given their dependence on prefabricated language, current AAC devices are very limited in their ability to mediate everyday (...) interactions. We argue here that the limits of AAC are firstly theoretical — grounded in prosthetic models that imagine AAC devices as replacements for damaged body parts and in transmission models of language production as communication. In contrast, our multidisciplinary team aims to design pseudo-intelligent mediators of communication by blending strengths of human mediators with features of current AAC technologies. To inform the design process, we report here our initial situated studies focusing on the distributed nature of everyday communicative activities conducted with potential AAC/PIM users. Our analysis focuses on the discursive alignments of these participants and their interlocutors, attending especially to the various ways their personal aides function as human mediators. Specifically, we focus on mapping the communicative activity around each of these differently-abled individuals as they navigated a university campus. We profile the everyday interactional patterns within functional systems and across settings, and present close discourse analysis of one interaction to highlight the diverse roles personal aides adopted in mediating communication. Finally, we argue that attending to differently “abled” bodies as they move through everyday communicative environments pushes CHAT to more fully theorize physicality, individual mobilities, and the roles of bodies in the laminated assemblage of functional systems. (shrink)

The nature and status of psychological laws are a long-standing controversy. I will argue that part of the controversy stems from the distinctive nature of an important subset of those laws, which I’ll call “supple laws.” An emergent-model strategy taken by the new interdisciplinary field of artificial life provides a strikingly successful understanding of analogously supple laws in biology. So, after reviewing the failures of the two evident strategies for understanding supple psychological laws, I’ll turn for inspiration to emergent-models explanations (...) of supple laws in biology. I’ll conclude by inferring what an emergent model of supple laws in psychology should be like. (shrink)

My doctoral project is a study of epistemological and ethical issues in Evidence-Based Medicine, a movement in medicine which emphasizes the use of randomized controlled trials. Much of the research on EBM suggests that, for a large part of the movement's history, EBM considered expertise, mechanisms, and values to be forces contrary to its goals and has sought to remove them, both from medical research and from the clinical encounter. I argue, however, that expertise, mechanisms and values have important epistemological (...) and ethical roles to play and can be incorporated into the current EBM movement. (shrink)

My comments will focus on the issue of what, according to Gallagher and Zahavi (2008, hereafter G&Z; all references will be to this book unless otherwise noted), the phenomenological approach can contribute to the cognitive sciences (including cognitive neuroscience), one of their major themes. Toward the end of the paper, I will say something about a second major theme of theirs, the relationship of phenomenology to philosophy of mind. Conventional wisdom within cognitive science has it is that phenomenology is hostile (...) to the scientific study of human cognition. Hubert Dreyfus, a self-declared phenomenologist, writes works with titles such as What computers can’t do (1972) and What computers still can’t do (1992), both of which urge that the attempt to understand the mind as a computational information-processor, at any rate, is doomed to failure. Since the computational, information-processing model is the only remotely worked-out scientific model of cognition that we have, it is not too surprising that phenomenology and cognitive science have generally been viewed as being at loggerheads. (shrink)

Though Noë is concerned to emphasize that perceptual experiences are not per se internal representations, he does not really say why, and he is fairly quiet about what he takes intentionality and representation themselves to be. Drawing on a subsequent paper (Noë (forthcoming)), I bring out and criticize his in fact radically negative view of those fundamental mental capacities.

Fifty years of effort in artificial intelligence (AI) and the formalization of legal reasoning have produced both successes and failures. Considerable success in organizing and displaying evidence and its interrelationships has been accompanied by failure to achieve the original ambition of AI as applied to law: fully automated legal decision-making. The obstacles to formalizing legal reasoning have proved to be the same ones that make the formalization of commonsense reasoning so difficult, and are most evident where legal reasoning has to (...) meld with the vast web of ordinary human knowledge of the world. Underlying many of the problems is the mismatch between the discreteness of symbol manipulation and the continuous nature of imprecise natural language, of degrees of similarity and analogy, and of probabilities. (shrink)