A freely available piece from Topics in Cognitive Science. With the keywords complexity; dynamical systems; extended cognition; consciousness – who could resist. In fact the whole issue is freely available from this relatively new title published under the auspices of the Cognitive Science Society.
The complex systems approach to cognitive science invites a new understanding of extended cognitive systems. According to this understanding, extended cognitive systems are heterogenous, composed of brain, body, and niche, non-linearly coupled to one another. This view of cognitive systems, as non-linearly coupled brain–body–niche systems, promises conceptual and methodological advances. In this article we focus on two of these. First, the fundamental interdependence among brain, body, and niche makes it possible to explain extended cognition without invoking representations or computation. Second, cognition and conscious experience can be understood as a single phenomenon, eliminating fruitless philosophical discussion of qualia and the so-called hard problem of consciousness. What we call “extended phenomenological-cognitive systems” are relational and dynamical entities, with interactions among heterogeneous parts at multiple spatial and temporal scales.
Readers of TopiCS are invited to join a debate about the utility of ideas and methods of complexity science. The topics of debate include empirical instances of qualitative change in cognitive activity and whether this empirical work demonstrates sufficiently the empirical flags of complexity. In addition, new phenomena discovered by complexity scientists, and motivated by complexity theory, call into question some basic assumptions of conventional cognitive science such as stable equilibria and homogeneous variance. The articles and commentaries that appear in this issue also illustrate a new debate style format for topiCS.
Check out the recently completed online conference. Bravo to Richard Brown for this great initiative. Also check out the forthcoming issue of Consciousness and Cognition that features papers from CO2.
Philosophers of mind who re-visit Friedrich Hayek’s The Sensory Order almost sixty years after its publication should feel humbled, perhaps sheepish, on behalf of their discipline. The book is essentially an exercise in abstract speculative mental architecture construction, the kind of project that has dominated the philosophy of mind since it began to reflect the rise of cognitive science in classic texts such as Dennett’s Content and Consciousness (1969) and Fodor’s Language of Thought (1975). Remarkably, Hayek’s effort is less in need of revision today, despite the mountain of intervening empirical work and technical refinement, then any of these works in its most obvious comparison class that were written by philosophers.
Only now, more than half a century after the publication of his theoretical book (Hayek, 1952), is the reaction to Hayek’s argument beginning to be heard. And it’s a positive reaction, now supported by facts. He used to say that without a theory the facts are silent. Now, belatedly reacting to his book, we can confidently say that modern facts speak eloquently for his theory. In order to understand how modern facts meet Hayek, it is necessary to understand where his thinking came from and where cognitive neuroscience has been going in the past 50 years. Only in this manner can we fully appreciate the happy convergence of two trends of cognitive neuroscience that for most of the 20th century have developed far apart from each other. One is the ‘‘modular’’ trend (one cerebral module for each cognitive function), the other the ‘‘distributed’’ or reticular trend (brain networks of distributed knowledge participating in all the cognitive functions that adapt the individual to his environment). In his The Sensory Order, Hayek was the first to theoretically adopt the latter trend, which has lately developed greatly. Yet, astonishingly, to this day, most of the main actors in the field of cognitive neuroscience don’t even know of Hayek. In my opinion, the chief reason for this lingering neglect of his ideas is the language he used in his book. For example, he used terms that are unusual in physiological psychology, such as ‘‘following’’ and ‘‘map,’’ to characterize what in modern translation corresponds to synaptic association and neural network, respectively. Three powerful intellectual currents shaped Hayek’s psychology: Vienna’s logical positivism, Gestalt psychology, and psychophysics. Curiously, he tried to disown all three, yet ended up modifying them and incorporating them in his thinking.Afourth current, the dynamic systems theory of Von Bertalanffy (1950), came natural to him to theorize about the brain after having accepted the relational code of Gestalt (Koffka, 1935). After all, Hayek had been applying general complex systems theory to economics. With his application of that theory to psychology came the acceptance of a cortical dynamics in which the whole is more than the sum of the parts and irreducible to them: a cortical dynamics in which relationships were established by cell connections. Yet, in his time, little was known about the connectivity or physiology of the brain to support the relational anatomical code or the dynamics of the perceptual system that he devised. Now we know much more about them. Like the positivists of the ‘‘Vienna Circle,’’ Hayek advocated the use of the scientific method devoid of metaphysics as the only valid approach to human knowledge. In dealing with perception, however, he rejected the purely empiricist tenets of the positivists (like his friend Karl Popper, another quasi-renegade among them). According to Hayek, no perception was reducible to raw sensation. The concept of the brain as tabula rasa or passive recipient of sensations was to him unacceptable. The ‘‘elementary sensations’’ (e.g., a pure color) proposed by Ernst Mach (1885), the famous psychophysicist, were literally meaningless as a foundation for perception. Even the simplest of sensations is based on prior experience, either by the self or by the species – thus, in the latter case, inherited.
Colin McGinn locates his position within philosophy of mind. Though not a fashionable position, I’m very sympathetic to it – and of course, it is a position that has much in common with Hayek.
The “mysterianism” I advocate is really nothing more than the acknowledgment that human intelligence is a local, contingent, temporal, practical and expendable feature of life on earth – an incremental adaptation based on earlier forms of intelligence that no one would regard as faintly omniscient. The current state of the philosophy of mind, from my point of view, is just a reflection of one evolutionary time-slice of a particular bipedal species on a particular humid planet at this fleeting moment in cosmic history – as is everything else about the human animal. There is more ignorance in it than knowledge.
Critics of the paradigm of enaction have long argued that enactive principles will be unable to account for the traditional domain of orthodox cognitive science, namely “higher-level” cognition and specifically human cognition. Moreover, even many of the paradigm’s “lower-level” insights into embodiment and situatedness appear to be amenable to a functionalist reinterpretation. In this review, I show on the basis of the recently published collection of papers, Enaction, that the paradigm of enaction has (a) a unique foundation in the notion of sense-making that places fundamental limits on the scope of functionalist appropriation; (b) a unique perspective on higher-level cognition that sets important new research directions without the need for the concept of mental representation; (c) a new concept of specifically human cognition in terms of second-order sense-making; and (d) a rich variety of approaches to explain the evolutionary, historical, and developmental origins of this sophisticated human ability. I also indicate how studies of the role of embodiment for abstract human cognition can strengthen their position by reconceiving their notion of embodiment in enactive terms.
2. Autopoiesis, Systems Thinking and Systemic Practice: The Contribution of Francisco Varela by Alberto Paucar-Caceres, Roger Harnden & André Reichel introduction to a special themed issue Systems Research and Behavioral Science:
This special issue of Systems Research and Behavioral Sciences (SRBS) is a memorial issue to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the tragic early death of Francisco Varela (7 September 1946–28 May 2001). A truly remarkable ‘renaissance man’, his wide spectrum of interests encompassed biology, mathematics, neuroscience, epistemology, cognitive science, ethics and philosophy. His early death could not mask an amazingly productive life nor the creative and open way he approached all his activities. Because his ideas have been extremely influential and inspiring, we wanted to remember him with a tribute issue composed of papers reflecting and highlighting his influential work in contemporary science, particularly with regard to systems thinking and system practice.
Varela is well known in the systems sciences for his work on second-order cybernetics, biology of cognition and especially autopoietic theory. His concern during this period was to find an appropriate epistemological foundation for the self-reference inherent in life and mind. In his later years, Varela began to develop the so-called ‘enactive’ approach to cognitive science, which sets itself apart from other sciences by promoting a careful consideration of concrete experiential insights. His final efforts were thus dedicated to finding a pragmatic phenomenological foundation for life and mind. It is argued that Varela’s experiential turn—from epistemology to phenomenology—can be seen as a natural progression that builds on many ideas that were already implicit in second-order cybernetics and biology of cognition. It is also suggested that the rigorous study of conscious experience may enable us to refine our theories and systemic concepts of life, mind and sociality.
I review here my personal and scientific interactions with Francisco Varela, starting from our meeting in 1983 in Alpbach, Austria, a momentous meeting, which was also the place where the Mind and Life Institute and independently the Cortona week were conceived. Later on, the scientific cooperation focussed on autopoiesis and permitted to arrive at the experimental autopoiesis on the basis of the self-reproduction of micelles and vesicles. I then briefly describe how Francisco, based on the complementary notion of cognition, was able to draw the bridge between biology and cognitive sciences. The main keywords here are enaction and embodied mind. From here, and towards the end of his life, Francisco focussed mostly on neurobiology, where he introduced the notion of neurophenomenology centred on first-person reports. However, his seminal work on autopoiesis was instrumental to conceive the new field of research on the minimal cells, which is briefly described. I conclude with an overview of the meaning of the work of Francisco for life sciences at large.
