In this paper, we take a critical look at the notion of musical qualia. Although different conceptions of qualia are often used by theorists to describe musical experience, there is little consensus as to just what this entails. Broadly speaking, some argue that qualia are best understood as pregiven attributes of the musical environment, whereas others insist that they are products of information processing confined within the boundaries of the skull. We critically examine these positions and consider how they align (...) with recent work in cognitive science. Although our main goal is to contribute to a richer understanding of what musical experience entails, we present arguments that go beyond the sole domain of music, involving critical neuroscience, Gestalt psychology, and philosophy of mind. Indeed, because music spans such a wide range of human activity, it offers a rich experiential context where theories of cognition may be put to the test. With this in mind, we then explore an alternative embodied perspective that looks beyond dichotomous inner-outer schemas and information-processing frameworks. As we go, we suggest that embodied approaches to musical experience may offer more inclusive and holistic models that better reflect how people actually engage with and talk about music in their day-to-day lives. To conclude, we discuss the relevance of the embodied perspective for the notion of qualia and what such insights might mean for musical research and practice. (shrink)

The notion of affordance has been introduced by Gibson (1977, 1979) as the feature of an object or the environment that allows the observer to perform an action, a set of “environmental supports for an organism’s intentional activities” (Reybrouck 2005). Studied under very different perspectives, this concept has become a crucial issue not only for the ecological psychology, but also for cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence studies, and philosophy of mind. This variety of approaches has widened the already ambiguous definition originally (...) provided by Gibson, contributing to the development of different standpoints in open contrast with each other (see Zipoli Caiani 2011). During the last two decades, moreover, many researchers tried to extend the notion also to musical experience, aiming to draw a coherent theory of musical affordances (e.g. Clarke 2005; Nussbaum 2007; Krueger 2011a; 2011b). In this paper, we will argue for a particular concept of musical affordances, that is, as we see it, one narrower and less ambiguous in scope and more closely related to its original. Taking the discovery of canonical neurons as our starting point, we will (i) introduce the general notion of affordance, (ii) discuss some significant contributions in this area of research, mostly focusing on musical affordances and (iii) propose a motor-based interpretation of musical affordances. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Perception-Action Mutuality Obviates Mental Construction” by Martin Flament Fultot, Lin Nie & Claudia Carello. Upshot: Enactive approaches highlight the deep interdependency of brains, action, agency, and environment in shaping the world we inhabit. This perspective goes beyond input-output models of cognition, postulating instead closed loops of action and perception framed by the agent-environment complementarity. As a unique, dynamical, system, no representational recovery is required for cognitive-behavioral experience to take place.

This book presents the framework for a new, comprehensive approach to cognitive science. The proposed paradigm, enaction, offers an alternative to cognitive science's classical, first-generation Computational Theory of Mind. _Enaction_, first articulated by Varela, Thompson, and Rosch in _The Embodied Mind_, breaks from CTM's formalisms of information processing and symbolic representations to view cognition as grounded in the sensorimotor dynamics of the interactions between a living organism and its environment. A living organism enacts the world it lives in; its embodied (...) action in the world constitutes its perception and thereby grounds its cognition. _Enaction_ offers a range of perspectives on this exciting new approach to embodied cognitive science. Some chapters offer manifestos for the enaction paradigm; others address specific areas of research, including artificial intelligence, developmental psychology, neuroscience, language, phenomenology, and culture and cognition. Three themes emerge as testimony to the originality and specificity of enaction as a paradigm: the relation between first-person lived experience and third-person natural science; the ambition to provide an encompassing framework applicable at levels from the cell to society; and the difficulties of reflexivity. Taken together, the chapters offer nothing less than the framework for a far-reaching renewal of cognitive science. Contributors: Renaud Barbaras, Didier Bottineau, Giovanna Colombetti, Diego Cosmelli, Hanne De Jaegher, Ezequiel A. Di Paolo. Andreas K. Engel, Olivier Gapenne, Véronique Havelange, Edwin Hutchins, Michel Le Van Quyen, Rafael E. Núñez, Marieke Rohde, Benny Shanon, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Adam Sheya, Linda B. Smith, John Stewart, Evan Thompson. (shrink)

Damasio, an eminent neuroscientist explores the science of human emotion and what the great Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza can teach of how and why we feel. Damasio shows how joy and sorrow, those most defining of human feelings, are in fact the cornerstones of our survival and culture.

While philosophers of mind have been arguing over the status of mental representations in cognitive science, cognitive scientists have been quietly engaged in studying perception, action, and cognition without explaining them in terms of mental representation. In this book, Anthony Chemero describes this nonrepresentational approach, puts it in historical and conceptual context, and applies it to traditional problems in the philosophy of mind. Radical embodied cognitive science is a direct descendant of the American naturalist psychology of William James and John (...) Dewey, and follows them in viewing perception and cognition to be understandable only in terms of action in the environment. Chemero argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than in terms of computation and representation. After outlining this orientation to cognition, Chemero proposes a methodology: dynamical systems theory, which would explain things dynamically and without reference to representation. He also advances a background theory: Gibsonian ecological psychology, "shored up" and clarified. Chemero then looks at some traditional philosophical problems through the lens of radical embodied cognitive science and concludes that the comparative ease with which it resolves these problems, combined with its empirical promise, makes this approach to cognitive science a rewarding one. "Jerry Fodor is my favorite philosopher," Chemero writes in his preface, adding, "I think that Jerry Fodor is wrong about nearly everything." With this book, Chemero explains nonrepresentational, dynamical, ecological cognitive science as clearly and as rigorously as Jerry Fodor explained computational cognitive science in his classic work The Language of Thought. (shrink)

There is a new way of thinking about the mind that does not locate mental processes exclusively "in the head." Some think that this expanded conception of the mind will be the basis of a new science of the mind. In this book, leading philosopher Mark Rowlands investigates the conceptual foundations of this new science of the mind. The new way of thinking about the mind emphasizes the ways in which mental processes are embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended. The new (...) way of thinking about the mind, Rowlands writes, is actually an old way of thinking that has taken on new form. Rowlands describes a conception of mind that had its clearest expression in phenomenology -- in the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. He builds on these views, clarifies and renders consistent the ideas of embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended mind, and develops a unified philosophical treatment of the novel conception of the mind that underlies the new science of the mind. (shrink)

This article is interdisciplinary in its claims. Evolving around the ecological concept of affordance, it brings together pragmatics and ecological psychology. Starting from the theoretical writings of Peirce, Dewey and James, the biosemiotic claims of von Uexküll, Gibson’s ecological approach to perception and some empirical evidence from recent neurobiological research, it elaborates on the concepts of experiential and enactive cognition as applied to music. In order to provide an operational description of this approach, it introduces some conceptual tools from the (...) domain of cybernetics with a major focus on the concept of circularity, which links perception to action in a continuous process of sense-making and interaction with the environment. As such, it is closely related to some pragmatic, biosemiotic and ecosemiotic claims which can be subsumed under the general notion of functional significance. An attempt is made to apply this conceptual framework to the process of musical sense-making which involves the realisation of systemic cognition in the context of epistemic interactions that are grounded in our biology and possibilities for adaptive control. Central in this approach is the concept of coping with the environment, or, in musical terms, to perceive the sounding music in terms of what it affords for the consummation of musical behaviour. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question whether we can conceive of music cognition in ecosemiotic terms. It claims that music knowledge must be generated as a tool for adaptation to the sonic world and calls forth a shift from a structural description of music as an artifact to a process-like approach to dealing with music. As listeners, we are observers who construct and organize our knowledge and bring with us our observational tools. What matters is not merely the sonic world in (...) its objective qualities, but the world as perceived. In order to make these claims operational we can rely on the ecological concept of coping with the sonic world and the cybernetic concepts of artificial and adaptive devices. Listeners, on this view, are able to change their semantic relations with the sonic world through functional adaptations at the level of sensing, acting and coordinating between action and perception. This allows us to understand music in functional terms of what it affords to us and not merely in terms of its acoustic qualities. There are, however, degrees of freedom and constraints which shape the semiotization of the sonic world. As such we must consider the role of event perception and cognitive economy: listeners do not perceive the acoustical environment in terms of phenomenological descriptions but as ecological events. (shrink)

Explaining the transition from a signed to a spoken protolanguage is a major problem for all gestural theories. I suggest that Arbib's improved “beyond the mirror” hypothesis still leaves this core problem unsolved, and that Darwin's model of musical protolanguage provides a more compelling solution. Second, although I support Arbib's analytic theory of language origin, his claim that this transition is purely cultural seems unlikely, given its early, robust development in children.

This paper addresses the question whether we can conceive of music cognition in ecosemiotic terms. It claims that music knowledge must be generated as a tool for adaptation to the sonic world and calls forth a shift from a structural description of music as an artifact to a process-like approach to dealing with music. As listeners, we are observers who construct and organize our knowledge and bring with us our observational tools. What matters is not merely the sonic world in (...) its objective qualities, but the world as perceived. In order to make these claims operational we can rely on the ecological concept of coping with the sonic world and the cybernetic concepts of artificial and adaptive devices. Listeners, on this view, are able to change their semantic relations with the sonic world through functional adaptations at the level of sensing, acting and coordinating between action and perception. This allows us to understand music in functional terms of what it affords to us and not merely in terms of its acoustic qualities. There are, however, degrees of freedom and constraints which shape the semiotization of the sonic world. As such we must consider the role of event perception and cognitive economy: listeners do not perceive the acoustical environment in terms of phenomenological descriptions but as ecological events. (shrink)

The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan ...

The same neural structures involved in the unconscious modeling of our acting body in space also contribute to our awareness of the lived body and of the objects that the world contains. Neuroscientific research also shows that there are neural mechanisms mediating between the multi-level personal experience we entertain of our lived body, and the implicit certainties we simultaneously hold about others. Such personal and body-related experiential knowledge enables us to understand the actions performed by others, and to directly decode (...) the emotions and sensations they experience. A common functional mechanism is at the basis of both body awareness and basic forms of social understanding: embodied simulation. It will be shown that the present proposal is consistent with some of the perspectives offered by phenomenology. (shrink)

This is a book about how we see: the environment around us (its surfaces, their layout, and their colors and textures); where we are in the environment; whether or not we are moving and, if we are, where we are going; what things are good for; how to do things (to thread a needle or drive an automobile); or why things look as they do.The basic assumption is that vision depends on the eye which is connected to the brain. The (...) author suggests that natural vision depends on the eyes in the head on a body supported by the ground, the brain being only the central organ of a complete visual system. When no constraints are put on the visual system, people look around, walk up to something interesting and move around it so as to see it from all sides, and go from one vista to another. That is natural vision—and what this book is about. (shrink)

The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience.

The subject of musical emotions has emerged only recently as a major area of research. While much work in this area offers fascinating insights to musicological research, assumptions about the nature of emotional experience seem to remain committed to appraisal, representations, and a rule-based or information-processing model of cognition. Over the past three decades alternative ‘embodied’ and ‘enactive’ models of mind have challenged this approach by emphasising the self-organising aspects of cognition, often describing it as an ongoing process of dynamic (...) interactivity between an organism and its environment. More recently, this perspective has been applied to the study of emotion in general, opening up interesting new possibilities for theory and research. This new approach, however, has received rather limited attention in musical contexts. With this in mind, we critically review the history of music and emotion studies, arguing that many existing theories offer only limited views of what musical-emotional experience entails. We then attempt to provide preliminary grounding for an alternative perspective on music and emotion based on the enactive/dynamic systems approach to the study of mind. (shrink)

Dewey on the reflex arc concept--an important theme in William James.

The overall goal of this target article is to demonstrate a mechanism for an embodied cognition. The particular vehicle is a much-studied, but still widely debated phenomenon seen in 7–12 month-old-infants. In Piaget's classic “A-not-B error,” infants who have successfully uncovered a toy at location “A” continue to reach to that location even after they watch the toy hidden in a nearby location “B.” Here, we question the traditional explanations of the error as an indicator of infants' concepts of objects (...) or other static mental structures. Instead, we demonstrate that the A-not-B error and its previously puzzling contextual variations can be understood by the coupled dynamics of the ordinary processes of goal-directed actions: looking, planning, reaching, and remembering. We offer a formal dynamic theory and model based on cognitive embodiment that both simulates the known A-not-B effects and offers novel predictions that match new experimental results. The demonstration supports an embodied view by casting the mental events involved in perception, planning, deciding, and remembering in the same analogic dynamic language as that used to describe bodily movement, so that they may be continuously meshed. We maintain that this mesh is a pre-eminently cognitive act of “knowing” not only in infancy but also in everyday activities throughout the life span. Key Words: cognitive development; dynamical systems theory; embodied cognition; infant development; motor control; motor planning; perception and action. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.2 (2005) 36-57 [Access article in PDF] "Being With": The Resonant Legacy of Childhood's Creative Aesthetic Lori A. Custodero Teachers College, Columbia University Introduction...enrichment of the present for its own sake is the just heritage of childhood....1In this paper, the qualities of artistic pursuit exemplified in the musical play of children and the compositional processes of adults provide a context for exploring how "being (...) with" influences teaching and learning. Specifically I propose that "being with" music generates a sense of the aesthetic as we both transform musical materials — timbres, pitches, rhythms, phrases, harmonies — and are transformed by our experiences with them, and that "being with" others as we partake in musical activity often broadens and deepens that experience. In many ways, this is an exploration into why childhood matters, how it functions as a mirror for our adult lives as we experience and revel in the seemingly miraculous moments of aesthetic insight, where the familiar is welcomed with fresh perception and the addition of novelty is greeted as the solution to a previously unfathomable problem. It is also about why children matter, as our responses to their ways of being connect and transform us as adults. In this piece, recorded observations of children's musicality are juxtaposed with first-person accounts of adults' creative processes, revealing contributions to our understanding of artistry-in-action as it is manifested in both the musical and the pedagogical. The Aesthetic in Childhood and Adulthood To be "in the moment" is to encounter the aesthetic — fully engaged in an activity for which one's individual contributions are perceived as vital, aware of surprise relationships between seemingly disparate phenomena, and enveloped by sensory messages of color, sound, and movement meeting personal criteria for beauty. Such experiences exemplify features of artistry, an approach defined by openness to possibility and orientation toward discovery, where cues emanating from involvement in activity are clearly interpreted and utilized, and reflection is an ongoing process informing action. Characterized by a sense of wonder and ability to imagine and invent, the creative worlds of young children have provided a source of artistic genesis cited by composers, performers, psychologists, and educators.2Edith Cobb's thoughtful, groundbreaking account of the relationship between childhood and artistry, The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, was introduced by Margaret Mead, who highlighted the work's thesis: "that in the imaginative experiences of childhood could be found the essential kernels of the highest forms of human thought."3 The legacy of childhood is universal to our existence; in acknowledging its contributions to ontological and cultural artistry, we can both connect personal histories across the [End Page 36] lifespan and identify characteristic trends across a spectrum of aesthetic rendering.4One trait common to both the child and the creative adult is a focused attentiveness to perceived affordances, that is, materials and human resources accessible in the environment. Acting upon and with these resources,children and artists become aesthetic agents as sensitivity to both experience and milieu combine to produce relevant and innovative outcomes.5 These two interactive dimensions have been described in interviews with composers I have interviewed as "being with the moment" and "being with yourself and at the same time with another" and are operating in the musical play of children, as noted in this description recorded by a mother/student: On Thanksgiving Day, we had a family gathering of sixteen people, five of whom are under the age of eight years. Three-year-old Louise is thrilled to be with her female cousins, who all dress up in ballet-type frilly costumes in order to put on a "show" for the family. Cousin Lily, now eight years old, assumes the role of pianist, while Louise, and five-year-old cousin Amy creatively dance to Lily's improvised accompaniment. Their movements are directly related to Lily's playing, in her fluidity and well as "jumps!" Here, family members serve as catalysts for creative activity — costumes and musical instruments in the environment... (shrink)