Advanced perceptual systems are faced with the problem of securing a principled relationship between the world and its internal representation. I propose a unified approach to visual representation, based on Shepard's (1968) notion of second-order isomorphism. According to the proposed theory, a shape is represented internally by the responses of a few tuned modules, each of which is broadly selective for some reference shape, whose similarity to the stimulus it measures. The result is a philosophically appealing, computationally feasible, biologically credible, and formally veridical representation of a distal shape space. This approach supports representation of and discrimination among shapes radically different from the reference ones, while bypassing the need for the computationally problematic decomposition into parts; it also addresses the needs of shape categorization, and can be used to derive a range of models of perceived similarity. Representation is Representation of Sim...

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A list of groceries, Professor Anscombe once suggested, might be used as a shopping list, telling what to buy, or it might be used as an inventory list, telling what has been bought (Anscombe 1957). If used as a shopping list, the world is supposed to

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...

I draw a distinction between orthodox cognitive science and biological cognitive science. The former tends to ignore biological considerations whilst the latter holds that life and mind share a common set of organizational principles. The suggestion here is that artificial life (A-Life) is (potentially) the intellectual engine of the latter. The goal then becomes to map out the conceptual profile of that A-Life-driven cognitive science. Paying special attention to the relationship between neurobiological/biochemical phenomena and cognition, I argue that the commitment to functionalism in orthodox cognitive science provides compelling evidence that that approach is wedded to a recognizably Cartesian account of the relationship between life and mind. By contrast, the fundamental commitments of a biological cognitive science tell in favour of a radically different, generically Aristotelian framework. I show how the concept of self-organization --- arguably the central theoretical idea in...

Evolutionary simulation modelling is presented as a methodology involving the application of modelling techniques developed within the artificial sciences to evolutionary problems. Although modelling work employing this methodology has a long and interesting history, it has remained, until recently, a relatively underdeveloped practice, lacking a unifying theoretical framework.

ample, may see a fly, and, therefore, have the potentiality of flicking its tongue in a certain way followed by eating. But it may simultaneously see the shadow of a hawk overhead, in which case it also has the selection option of jumping into the water. Both potentialities must be somehow indicated to or for the frog so that a selection between them can occur. Furthermore, if the hawk shadow is not present and the frog misses the fly, it may be advantageous to detect that failure of the tongue flicking action and, on the basis of that detection, to make a further selection of interaction. That further selection might be to try again, or might be to move to a different location where flies are perhaps more numerous or slower. It can be advantageous, in other words, to be able to detect failures of actions, as well as to be able to select among potential actions. A slight addition to the ability to indicate potential interactions suffices to allow such error detection. In pa

We live in a meaningful world. Our capacity to deal with the ‘external world ’ is constituted by the possibility of modifying the world by means of our actions; by the possibility of representing the world as an objective reality; and by the possibility of experiencing phenomenally this same objective reality, from a situated,

A working assumption that processes of natural and cultural evolution have tailored the mind to fit the demands and structure of its environment begs the question: how are we to characterize the structure of cognitive environments? Decision problems faced by real organisms are not like simple multiplechoice examination papers. For example, some individual problems may occur much more frequently than others, whilst some may carry much more weight than others. Such considerations are not taken into account when (i) the performance of candidate cognitive mechanisms is assessed by employing a simple accuracy metric that is insensitive to the structure of the decision-maker's environment, and (ii) reason is defined as the adherence to internalist prescriptions of classical rationality. Here we explore the impact of frequency and significance structure on the performance of a range of candidate decision-making mechanisms. We show that the character of this impact is complex, since structured...

In this chapter we establish what it is for something to be implicit or explicit. The approach to implicit knowledge is taken from Dienes and Perner (1999), which relates the implicit-explicit distinction to knowledge representations. What it is for a representation to represent something implicitly or explicitly is defined and those concepts are applied to knowledge. Next we will show how maximally explicit knowledge is naturally associated with consciousness. We argue that each step in a hierarchy of explicitness is related to the unity of consciousness and that fully explicit knowledge should be associated with a sense of being part of a unified consciousness. New evidence indicating the extent of people's implicit or explicit knowledge in an implicit learning paradigm will then be presented. This evidence will indicate people can be consistently correct in dealing with a context-free grammar while lacking any knowledge that they have knowledge. 1.