The dominant scientific and philosophical view of the mind – according to which, put starkly, cognition is computation – is refuted herein, via specification and defense of the following new argument: Computation is reversible; cognition isn't; ergo, cognition isn't computation. After presenting a sustained dialectic arising from this defense, we conclude with a brief preview of the view we would put in place of the cognition-is-computation doctrine.

Dreams provide a compelling problem for sensorimotor enactivists like Alva Noë: they seem to replicate our perceptual experiences without sensorimotor interaction with distal sensory stimuli. Noë has responded by saying that dreams actually fail to replicate perceptual experiences in virtue of their lack of detail and stability. Noë's opponents have replied by pointing out that some dreams are richly detailed and stable, and that instability and a lack of detail in dreams can anyway be explained in terms of the underlying (...) neural activity. In this paper, I develop how the sensorimotor enactivist should respond: dreams fail to replicate perceptual experiences because they are exhausted by what shows up at a given moment in phenomenal consciousness, while perceptual experiences go beyond this to include everything accessible via sensorimotor exploration. This difference permeates all levels of experience, so that dreams can't even replicate perceptual experiences of simple shapes and colors. Further, unlike detail and stability, there are not obvious neural explanations of this phenomenal difference. (shrink)

Two extremely detailed accounts of temporal experience can be found in the work of C. D. Broad. These accounts have been subject to considerable criticism. I argue that, when we look more carefully at Broad’s work, we find that much of this criticism fails to find its target. I show that the objection that ultimately proves troubling for Broad stems from his commitment to two principles: i) the Thin-PSA, and ii) the ‘Overlap’ claim. I use this result to demonstrate that (...) we can learn two extremely important lessons from Broad’s work on temporal experience. -/- The first lesson is that there is a structural problem facing any account that commits to these two principles. This is significant given that a number of recent accounts of temporal experience are so committed. The second lesson is that the problem facing these accounts stems only from commitment to the Thin-PSA and ‘Overlap’, rather than to commitment to a particular conception of how experiences are to be individuated. This, I argue, gives us reason to reject Tye’s recent claim that the problems facing accounts of temporal experience can be dissolved simply by making stipulations about how experiences are to be individuated. (shrink)

This paper offers an account of what it is for a physical system to be a computing mechanism—a system that performs computations. A computing mechanism is a mechanism whose function is to generate output strings from input strings and (possibly) internal states, in accordance with a general rule that applies to all relevant strings and depends on the input strings and (possibly) internal states for its application. This account is motivated by reasons endogenous to the philosophy of computing, namely, doing (...) justice to the practices of computer scientists and computability theorists. It is also an application of recent literature on mechanisms, because it assimilates computational explanation to mechanistic explanation. The account can be used to individuate computing mechanisms and the functions they compute and to taxonomize computing mechanisms based on their computing power. (shrink)

This study examines how institutional logics interplay in a cross-sector social partnership that manages refugee integration in a rural district in Germany. In an inductive 15-month case study that drew on interviews and observations, we observe the dynamic materialization of institutional logics in day-to-day practices and an increasing contradiction and even rivalry between community- and market-based institutional logics over time. As a result, we delineate a model explaining the interplay of institutional logics along two dimensions: the dominance of one salient (...) logic and whether conflicts arise among logics. Our analysis also addresses the unifying properties of community as an institutional logic, especially in the context of urgency conditions. In addition, we show the influence of exogenous events and their media coverage on the interplay and conflicts of institutional logics. By unfolding the complexity of refugee integration—one of the global grand challenges of the present—we deepen the current understanding of the specific challenges addressed by cross-sector social partnerships. (shrink)

Journal Name: Philologus Issue: Ahead of print.

In his novel Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust argues that conventional descriptions of the phenomenology of consciousness are incomplete because they focus too much on the highly-salient sensory information that dominates each moment of awareness and ignore the network of associations that lies in the background. In this paper, I explicate Proust’s theory of conscious experience and show how it leads him directly to a theory of aesthetic perception. Proust’s division of awareness into two components roughly corresponds to William (...) James’ division of the stream of thought into a “nucleus” and “fringe.” Proust argues that the function of art is to evoke the underlying associative network indirectly in the mind of the observer by using carefully chosen sensory surfaces to control the stream of thought. I propose a possible neural basis for this Proustian/Jamesian phenomenology, and argue that the general principles of Proustian aesthetics can be applied to all forms of art. I conclude that a scientific theory of art should follow in a straightforward manner from a scientific theory of consciousness. (shrink)

Intelligence services are currently focusing on the fight against terrorism, leaving relatively little resources to monitor other security threats. For this reason, they often ignore external information activities that do not pose immediate threats to their government's interests. Extremely few external services operate globally. Almost all other services focus on immediate neighbors or regions. These services usually depend on relationships with these global services for information on areas beyond their immediate neighborhoods, and often sell their regional expertise for what they (...) need globally. A feature of both internal and external services is that they behave like a caste. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.25847.68006. (shrink)

Many who suffer from eating disorders claim that they see themselves as “fat”. Despite decades of research into the phenomenon, behavioural evidence has failed to confirm that eating disorders involve visual misperception of own-body size. I illustrate the importance of this phenomenon for our understanding of perceptual processing, outline the challenges involved in experimentally confirming it, and provide solutions to those challenges.

This is a copy of my DPhil thesis, the abstract for which is as follows: The first third of this thesis argues for a B-theoretic conception of time according to which all times exist equally and the present is in no way privileged. I distinguish "ontological" A-theories from "non-ontological" ones, arguing that the latter are experientially unmotivated and barely coherent. With regard to the former, I focus mainly on presentism. After some remarks on how to formulate this (and eternalism) non-trivially, (...) I review the non-relativistic case against presentism. I then consider the impact of Special Relativity on the debate, and attempt to deepen this impact by supplying a modal variation on the standard arguments. The middle third of the thesis investigates persistence, contending that both endurance and perdurance are consonant with the eternalism already endorsed. After introducing these theories of persistence, and discussing in particular how best to formulate an eternalist endurance, I proceed to defend the coherence of this combination. The Problem of Change is addressed here. I then respond in some detail to recent allegations of relativistic threats to endurance. The final third of the thesis questions the validity of the endurantist-perdurantist dispute. I criticize two recently proposed translation schemes that aim to show this dispute to be non-substantive. However, the second scheme suggests a doctrine of "Ontological Equivalence" which I develop and consider. I then address the Rotating Discs Argument, using this to launch a discussion of identity, genidentity, and the relationship between them. (shrink)

The question “What is the nature of experience?” is of perennial philosophical concern. It deals not only with the nature of experience qua experience, but additionally with related questions about the experiencing subject and that which is experienced. In other words, to speak of the philosophical problem of experience, one must also address questions about mind, world, and the various relations that link them together. Both William James and Kitarō Nishida were deeply concerned with these issues. Their shared notion of (...) “pure experience” is the conceptual cornerstone of their attempt to deal with the philosophical problem of experience. This dissertation is an analysis of “pure experience” and its relevance to several issues in contemporary hilosophy of mind. Drawing upon James’s and Nishida’s “pure experience”, I argue both for a sensorimotor-based, “extended” conception of consciousness and a bodily skills-based account of moral psychology. (shrink)

The quest of developing the logistics discipline, with a more theoretical foundation, is something several authors have emphasized and called for. Today one could argue that most of the research on logistics has a strong connection to the positivistic paradigm where there is a great emphasis on prediction, rationality and control in the solutions produced. In order to challenge the common assumptions and develop the logistics discipline, the process of knowledge creation i.e. the epistemological considerations, are central. Since a paradigm (...) consists of metatheoretical assumptions i.e. ontology and epistemology, the paradigmatic question is the key in order to change the frame of reference of the logistics discipline. The overall purpose of this licentiate thesis is to propose a paradigmatic view and a pragmatic approach based on the science of complexity that contribute to the further development of the logistics discipline. Two main methods have been used; one focusing on my main research method, which is my study of literature related to the field, and the other on the empirically oriented case studies that have been conducted The paradigmatic view proposed in this thesis is based on insights gained from the science of complexity. Assumptions made concerning how to approach and transfer knowledge attained from our perceived reality, drive the choices of methods when conducting research and have, of course, great influence on the results obtained and presented from any research process. Adopting a complexity perspective means taking a step away from the common positivistic influenced view, which dominates the logistics discipline, and approaching the phenomena of interest with a different set of assumptions and prerequisites in the research process. This set of assumptions is in line with the complex adaptive system platform developed in the thesis. The CAS platform is the foundation for the proposed pragmatic approach. The first properties of the proposed platform i.e. the CAS feature covering internal properties, are of central importance in order to grasp fully the complexity of a studied system and to understand where it is derived from. The proposed pragmatic approach means vi taking into consideration the smallest elements of, and agents relevant to, the study being conducted. From this internal approach the mindset of the researcher or practitioner is of great importance in the event of what such an approach might reveal about the problem being studied. In order to capture emergent phenomena and identify self-organization on different levels of description, we need a perception of the context as being “gray”; that is not considering the context as something which is static or stable, nor as something totally disoriented and uncontrollable. The metaphorical description of a fitness landscape where coevolution and continuous changes caused by the actions performed by agents inside and outside the perceived system under study, could be beneficial in the research process. This is the case since too many reductions of various factors could result in “far-from-reality” based solutions. The fundamental aspects of the pragmatic approach are a bottom-up perspective, where the smallest elements relevant to a certain logistics problem are considered, the system built up from this and, of course, an alignment with the paradigmatic view based on the science of complexity. (shrink)

Did the universe have a beginning or does it exist forever, i.e. is it eternal at least in relation to the past? This fundamental question was a main topic in ancient philosophy of nature and the Middle Ages. Philosophically it was more or less banished then by Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. But it used to have and still has its revival in modern physical cosmology both in the controversy between the big bang and steady state models some decades (...) ago and in the contemporary attempts to explain the big bang within a quantum cosmological framework. This paper has two main goals: First a conceptual clarification and distinction of different notions of "big bang" and "universe" is suggested, as well as a multiverse taxonomy and a classification of initial and eternal cosmologies. Second, and with the help of this analysis, it is shown how a conceptual and perhaps physical solution of the temporal aspect of Immanuel Kant's "first antinomy of pure reason" is possible, i.e. how our universe in some respect could have both a beginning and an eternal existence. Therefore, paradoxically, there might have been a time before time or a beginning of time in time. - Keywords: cosmology, big bang, big crunch, universe, multiverse, time, general relativity, quantum cosmology, loop quantum cosmology, string cosmology, world models, quantum vacuum, cosmic inflation, anthropic principle, closed timelike loops, Abhay Ashtekar, Hans-Joachim Blome, Martin Bojowald, George F. R. Ellis, Maurizio Gasperini, John Richard Gott III, Alan Guth, Jim Hartle, Stephen Hawking, Mark Israelit, Claus Kiefer, Li-Xin Li, Andrei Linde, Wolfgang Priester, Eckhard Rebhan, Paul Steinhardt, Neil Turok, Gabriele Veneziano, Alexander Vilenkin, H. Dieter Zeh. ›. (shrink)

When we begin to investigate the persistence of objects through time, we find immediately that the sort of concerns embodied in Leibniz's Law cause philosophers to divide themselves into the two major camps of Purdurantists and Endurantists. What is required according to each for a given object at a given time to be identified with a given object at another time is held to be dramatically different, even while both often look to the same general sort of indicators for their (...) answers to identity questions: identity or similarity of physical properties, including relational properties like spatial location. I believe, however, that logically prior to the problem of the persistence of objects through time will be questions regarding the composition of objects--we must have coherent notions of what an object is, what it means for parts to compose an object, and what is required for an object to be considered to exist at a single time before we can discuss the continued existence of objects at other times. I believe that posing the problem of temporal gaps for both the Perdurantist and Endurantist to solve can help us uncover reasonable answers to these more basic questions, and thereby help us judge the comparative coherence of the parent theories. Towards this goal, we investigate here some of the assumptions of persistence theories--that Perdurantists are four-dimensionalists and Endurantists are Presentists, for example--before moving on to find reasonable explanations of the composition of objects from within each theory. Important at this stage is clarifying such concepts as parthood and the present. When we at length turn our attention to the problem of gaps, it becomes useful to distinguish two sorts of gaps, each with their own difficulties: a 'gap' as a length of time during which the proper parts of an object are scattered through space, and a 'gap' as a length of time during which the proper parts of an object do not exist in space at all. My contention here is that Perdurantism, paired with four-dimensional spacetime, provides the most coherent answers to the challenges presented throughout. (shrink)