What is the relation between the material, conventional symbol structures that we encounter in the spoken and written word, and human thought? A common assumption, that structures a wide variety of otherwise competing views, is that the way in which 10 these material, conventional symbol-structures do their work is by being translated into some kind of content-matching inner code. One alternative to this view is the tempting but thoroughly elusive idea that we somehow think in some natural language (such as English). In the present treatment I explore a third option, which I shall call the ‘‘complementarity’ ’ view of language. According to this third view the actual symbol 15 structures of a given language add cognitive value by complementing (without being replicated by) the more basic modes of operation and representation endemic to the biological brain. The ‘‘cognitive bonus’ ’ that language brings is, on this model, not to be cashed out either via the ultimately mysterious notion of ‘‘thinking in a given natural language’ ’ or via some process of exhaustive translation into another inner code. Instead, 20 we should try to think in terms of a kind of coordination dynamics in which the forms and structures of a language qua material symbol system play a key and irreducible role. Understanding language as a complementary cognitive resource is, I argue, an important part of the much larger project (sometimes glossed in terms of the ‘‘extended mind’’) of understanding human cognition as essentially and multiply hybrid: as involving 25 a complex interplay between internal biological resources and external non-biological resources.

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.

How should we characterize the functional role of conscious visual experience? In particular, how do the conscious contents of visual experience guide, bear upon, or otherwise inform our ongoing motor activities? According to an intuitive and (I shall argue) philosophically influential conception, the links are

in Sydney. He is interested in the interdisciplinary study of memory, and in testing the methodological implications of distributed cognition and the ‘extended mind’ hypothesis by seeing if these frameworks have anything to offer memory researchers in a range of other disciplines. His other interests include Descartes, animal spirits, habit and skill, dreaming, the history and philosophy of science, and the foundations of cognitive science. Synthesizing the domains of investigation highlighted in current research in distributed cognition and related fields, this paper offers an initial taxonomy of the overlapping types of resources which typically contribute to distributed or extended cognitive systems. It then outlines a number of key dimensions on which to analyse both the resulting integrated systems and the components which coalesce into more or less tightly coupled interaction over the course of their formation and renegotiation.

The social brain hypothesis is a well-accepted and well-supported evolutionary theory of enlarged brain size in the non-human primates. Nevertheless, it tends to emphasize an anthropocentric view of social life and cognition. This often leads to confusion between ultimate and proximate mechanisms, and an over-reliance on a Cartesian, narratively structured view of the mind and social life, which in turn lead to views of social complexity that are congenial to our views of ourselves, rather than necessarily representative of primate social worlds. In this paper, we argue for greater attention to embodied and distributed theories of cognition, which get us away from current fixations on ‘theory of mind ’ and other high-level anthropocentric constructions, and allow for the generation of testable hypotheses that combine neurobiology, psychology and behaviour in a mutually reinforcing manner.

ABSTRACT: A central issue in philosophy and neuroscience is the problem of unified visual consciousness. This problem has arisen because we now know that an object’s stimulus features (e.g., its color, texture, shape, etc.) generate activity in separate areas of the visual cortex (Felleman & Van Essen, 1991). For example, recent evidence indicates that there are very few, if any, neural connections between specific visual areas, such as those that correlate with color and motion (Bartels & Zeki, 2006; Zeki, 2003). So how do unified objects arise in visual consciousness? Some neuroscientists propose that neural synchrony is the mechanism that binds an object’s features into a unity (e.g., see Crick,

Despite substantial efforts by many researchers, we still have no scientific theory of how brain activity can create, or be, conscious experience. This is troubling, since we have a large body of correlations between brain activity and consciousness, correlations normally assumed to entail that brain activity creates conscious experience. Here I explore a solution to the mind-body problem that starts with the converse assumption: these correlations arise because consciousness creates brain activity, and indeed creates all objects and properties of the physical world. To this end, I develop two theses. The multimodal user interface (MUI) theory of perception states that perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world. Conscious realism states that the objective world consists of conscious agents and their experiences; these can be mathematically modeled and empirically explored in the normal scientific manner.

The belief that conscious will is merely ‘‘an illusion created by the brain’ ’ appears to be gaining in popularity among cognitive neuroscientists. Its main adherents usually refer to the classic, but controversial ‘Libet-experiments’, as the empirical evidence that vindicates this illusion-claim. However, based on recent work that provides other interpretations of the Libet-experiments, we argue that the illusion-claim is not only empirically invalid, but also theoretically incoherent, as it is rooted in a category mistake; namely, the presupposition that neuronal activity causes conscious will. We show that the illusion-claim is based on the behaviorist ‘input-output ’ paradigm, and discuss the notions of ‘self-organization ’ and ‘self-steering ’ to provide an alternative perspective on the causal efficacy of conscious will. In the final sections, a tentative theoretical picture is sketched of conscious will as an instance of self-steered self-organization. We conclude that the subjective experience of conscious will is not a misguided one, but rather that the mechanisms supporting conscious will are considerably more complex than mainstream cognitive neuroscience currently acknowledges. Keywords: Conscious Will; Benjamin Libet; Self-Organization 1.

Some conscious states occupying the same stretch of time are together, while others are separate. While I talk to you, I see your face and hear my own voice. These experiences are together or united within one consciousness: they are co-conscious. But you also hear my voice, and your experience is separate from mine. We have an intuitive, pretheoretical idea that two conscious states must either be together, co-conscious, or separate, not co-conscious. But what is it for simultaneous conscious states to be united or separate? Can we give an account of the unity of consciousness that will apply not just to easy cases like the example I just gave, but also to various hard cases described by neuropsychologists? I’m going to focus here on just one aspect of this question: is it necessary for consciousness to be fully unified, or is it possible for consciousness to be only partially unified? Keep in mind that my topic is not personal identity over time, but the unity of consciousness at a time. We normally assume that consciousness must be fully unified. What does this mean? We can use the intuitive idea of togetherness or co-consciousness to explain full unity. Full unity requires that if two conscious states are co-conscious at a time, then each is also co-conscious with

In this paper, we discuss the thesis of selective representing---the idea that the contents of the mental representations had by organisms are highly constrained by the biological niches within which the organisms evolved. While such a thesis has been defended by several authors elsewhere, our primary concern here is to take up the issue of the compatibility of selective representing and realism. In this paper we hope to show three things. First, that the notion of selective representing is fully consistent with the realist idea of a mind-independent world. Second, that not only are these two consistent, but that the latter (the realist conception of a mind-independent world) provides the most powerful perspective from which to motivate and understand the differing perceptual and cognitive profiles themselves. And third, that the (genuine and important) sense in which organism and environment may together constitute an integrated system of scientific interest poses no additional threat to the realist conception.