Richard Menary’s long time coming The Extended Mind is reviewed here by Joseph Ulatowski.
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Colin McGinn: All machine and no ghost?
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.
Remembering Varela
Four articles (and more) of interest to theorists interested in enaction:
1. Tom Froese’s new article in Adaptive Behavior:
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.
3. Another Froese article From Second-order Cybernetics to Enactive Cognitive Science: Varela’s Turn From Epistemology to Phenomenology
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.
4. Pier Luigi Luisi’s recollection of Varela in Systems research and behavioral science:
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.
Free will
Two articles on that old philosophical chestnut – free will: one from Intelligent Life (neurons v. free will) and one from the sister title, the Economist (Free will and politics).
Views of Hayek, Hebb, and Heisenberg: Toward an Approach to Brain Functioning
Neuroscientist Erol Basar on Hayek
F. A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order must rate as one of the most creative books written on general philosophy of neuroscience. Although Hayek was a Noble-prize winner in economics and was not educated as a neuroscientist, his book opens up a new window on neuroscience, and this window certainly offers great possibilities to neuroscientists working on unifying aspects of neuroscience. Guided by the fundamental view of Fuster (1995), I have tried to suggestively interpret Hayek’s concepts firstly as a work on memory and brain dynamics (Basar, 2004), and more recently, as a more general work on the brain–body–mind relationship (Basar, 2010). Although a detailed description and interpretation of Hayek’s philosophical psychology is not possible because of space constraints, I try to explain three concepts that are embedded in the work of Hayek:
1. D. O. Hebb’s learning theory (1949),
2. The S-Matrix concept of quantum dynamics developed by W. Heisenberg (1943), and
3. The Feynman diagrams as a consequence of the S-Matrix theory.
Connectome
Here’s a recent WSJ article summing up the state of play in mapping brain connectivity. Here is Susan Bookheimer who holds the Joaquin Fuster Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience chair at UCLA – Fuster is off course a name many readers will recognise from my postings here and here. The images are from the Human Connectome Project.
“The study of connectivity is as hot as hot can get,” said Susan Bookheimer, a neuropsychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is the new head of the Organization of Human Brain Mapping, a large international professional society of neuroimaging researchers.
Nature, nurture and liberal values
Roger Scruton weighs in on the nature/nurture debate via a threefold review. (Image another Steve Pyke portrait).
Andy Clark – “Do Thrifty Brains Make Better Minds?”
I’ve just come across this article by Andy with a follow-up here.
Some recent work in computational and cognitive neuroscience suggests that it is indeed the frugal use of our native neural capacity (the inventive use of restricted “neural bandwidth,” if you will) that explains how brains like ours so elegantly make sense of noisy and ambiguous sensory input.
