The nature of cognition is being re-considered. Instead of emphasizing formal operations on abstract symbols, the new approach foregrounds the fact that cognition is, rather, a situated activity, and suggests that thinking beings ought therefore be considered first and foremost as acting beings. The essay reviews recent work in Embodied Cognition, provides a concise guide to its principles, attitudes and goals, and identifies the physical grounding project as its central research focus.

Similarity-based and rule-based accounts of cognition are often portrayed as opposing accounts. In this paper we suggest that in learning and development, the process of comparison can act as a bridge between similarity-based and rule-based processing. We suggest that comparison involves a process of structural alignment and mapping between two representations. This kind

There is a form of representation that is naturally emergent in the organization of interactive systems. Interactive representation has claims to be the fundamental form of representation, from which all others are derivative. In particular, it naturally satisfies a meta-epistemological criterion that is not addressed by standard approaches in contemporary literature, and is arguably impossible to satisfy within any version those standard approaches. Furthermore, the interactive approach naturally avoids other multiple aporias that bedevil standard approaches. Much effort has been devoted in recent literature to attempts to satisfy a critical meta-epistemological criterion: representation must be capable of being in error. The criterion that I will apply is a strengthening of this one: representation must be capable of being in error in such a way that that condition of being in error is detectable by the agent or system that is doing the representing --- the meta-epistemological crite...

1.1 Four assays of quality................................................................ 4 1.2 The structure of appearance.................................................... 11 1.3 Intrinsic versus relational........................................................ 13 1.4 Four refutations....................................................................... 17 2. Qualities and their Places................................................................ 25 2.1 The appearance of space......................................................... 25 2.2 Some brain-mind mysteries..................................................... 26 2.3 Spatial qualia........................................................................... 33 2.4 Appearances partitioned.......................................................... 35 2.5 Ties that bind........................................................................... 38 2.6 Feature-placing introduced...................................................... 43 3 Places Phenomenal and Real............................................................ 47 3.1 Space-time regions.................................................................. 47 3.2 Three varieties of visual field.................................................. 50 3.3 Why I am not an array of impressions..................................... 55 3.4 Why I am not an intentional object......................................... 58 3.5 Sensory identification.............................................................. 61 3.6 Some examples of sensory reference....................................... 66

this paper is about not semantics but the philosophy of language. Some of us have been poking around in the basement of meaning theory, and we seem to have discovered a large, nasty crack; as far as we can tell, one of the foundation stones is coming unstuck. We thought we'd better tell you about it before things get worse. We'll proceed as follows: First we'll try to say where in the foundations the problem is located; then we'll try to say what the problem is; and then we'll make a suggestion or two about what to do about the problem. The first part of the discussion will be very broad; the second part will be rather more specific; the third part will be practically nonexistent. Here goes. 1. Where the Problem Is A traditional foundational problem in the theory of meaning is: Where do semantic properties come from? The presupposition of this question is that the fact that a word (or a sentence, or whatever) means what it does can't be a brute fact. It can't be a brute fact, for example, that 'dog' means dog and not proton and that 'proton' means proton and not dog. Rather, 'dog' must have some nonsemantic property in virtue of which it means dog and not proton; and 'proton' must have some (different) nonsemantic property in virtue of which it means proton and not dog. To put it in the standard philosophical jargon, semantic properties must supervene on nonsemantic properties. There may be some properties that things just have; that they have for no reason at all. But if there are, they are the kinds of properties that basic physics talks about (like mass, charge, and charm). They certainly don't include the kinds of properties that semanticists talk about (like meaning dog or being a synonym of 'bachelor'). We remark in passing that none of this is to be construed a...

It is argued that theoretical approaches to the nature of the influence of early experience on personality development have been vitiated by incorrect metaphysical assumptions, of a sort historically characteristic of immature sciences. In particular, mind and mental phenomena are construed in terms of various sorts of substances and structures, instead of in terms of process ontologies. We show that these underlying metaphysical assumptions have prevented the most central problems of the influence of early experience from being addressed, and, therefore, from being answered as well. These aporia seriously infect such contemporary approaches as object relations theory, attachment theory, and cognitive behavioral theory. We outline an alternative process ontology of mind and intentionality — specifically, a process-functional ontology for representation — and explore the form of early influence offered within this new perspective. The Influence of Early Experience

Abstract: A naturalistic scheme of primitive conceptual representations is proposed using the statistical measure of mutual information. It is argued that a concept represents, not the class of objects that caused its tokening, but the class of objects that is most likely to have caused it (had it been tokened), as specified by the statistical measure of mutual information. This solves the problem of misrepresentation which plagues causal accounts, by taking the representation relation to be determined via ordinal relationships between conditional probabilities. The scheme can deal with statistical biases and does not rely on arbitrary criteria. Implications for the theory of meaning and semantic content are addressed. 1.

When I have a conscious experience of the sky, there is a bluish way it is like for me to have that experience. We may distinguish two aspects of this “bluish way it is like for me”: (i) the bluish aspect and (ii) the for-me aspect. Let us call the bluish aspect of the experience its qualitative character and the for-me aspect its subjective character. What is this elusive for-me-ness, or subjective character, of conscious experience? In this paper, I examine six different attempts to account for subjective character in terms of the functional and representational properties of conscious experiences. After arguing against the first five, I defend the sixth. There is something at least prima facie mysterious about conscious experience. The problem of consciousness is the problem of demystifying whatever it is that accounts for the prima facie mysteriousness of conscious experience. This would involve showing that the prima facie mysterious aspects of conscious experience are not super-natural phenomena. That is, it would require “naturalizing ” the relevant aspects of conscious experience, presumably by showing how they could exist in a purely physical world. 1 It is useful to refer to the prima facie mysterious element in conscious experience in terms of what it is like for the subject to have or undergo a conscious experience. 2 When I have a conscious experience of the sky, there is a bluish way it is like for me to have or undergo my experience. 3 I suggest that we distinguish two aspects in this “bluish way it is like for me”: (i) the bluish aspect, which we may call the experience’s qualitative character, and (ii) the for-me aspect, which we may call its subjective character. Not only is the experience bluish, but I am also aware of its being bluish. Its being

A distinction is made between superpositional and non-superpositional quantum computers. The notion of quantum learning systems -- quantum computers that modify themselves in order to improve their performance -- is introduced. A particular non-superpositional quantum learning system, a quantum neurocomputer, is described: a conventional neural network implemented in a system which is a variation on the familiar two-slit apparatus from quantum physics. This is followed by a discussion of the advantages that quantum computers in general, and quantum neurocomputers in particular, might bring, not only to our search for more powerful computational systems, but also to our search for greater understanding of the brain, the mind, and quantum physics itself. 1 Quantum computers & quantum learning In both the search for ever smaller and faster computational devices, and the search for a computational understanding of biological systems such as the brain, one is naturally led to consider the ...

How systems can represent and how systems can learn are two central problems in the study of cognition. Conventional contemporary approaches to these problems are vitiated by a shared error in their presuppositions about representation. Consequently, such approaches share further errors about the sorts of architectures that are required to support either representation or learning. We argue that the architectural requirements for genuine representing systems lead to architectural characteristics that are necessary (though not sufficient) for heuristic learning and development. These architectural constraints, in turn, explain properties of the functioning of the central nervous system that remain inexplicable for standard approaches. Topologies