Happy New Year 2011

Noë: "The brain is necessary for our life, but it is hardly sufficient"

This is a little wooly, since there is a perfectly legitimate sense in which the brain is not sufficient for life.  We have to have some functioning method for breathing and obtaining nourishment, for example.

And, there is some need for clarification of what kind of necessity and sufficiency one is talking about. 

But, the neuromuscular blockade stuff shows pretty strongly as far as I can tell that the brain is a minimal supervenience base for consciousness, as opposed to life.  The only reply I've heard to this observation is that the neuromuscular blockade results do not show that the brain alone is that all conscious states.

How do you get to HEC from here?

I have repeatedly stated my position that cognitive integration starts from the following positions:

• That we are actively embodied in a socially constructed cognitive niche and
• That phylogenetically and ontogenetically there is good evidence to suppose that we acquire cognitive capacities to create, maintain and manipulate the shared cognitive niche and
• That this has led to the development of hybrid cognitive systems where the bodily manipulation of vehicles (some of them representational) in the niche involves the coordination of neural, bodily and environmental vehicles.
• Cognitive processing sometimes involves these online bodily manipulations of the cognitive niche, but also collaborative thinking and offline private thinking.

Consequently, I propose that I am not committed to the view that cognition is first in the head and then gets extended into tools. Nor does it follow that I am committed to the idea that pencils can think for themselves. (Menary, 2010)

So, as I read these claims, I don't see HEC on the list.  I don't see anything like the claim that cognitive processes are realized by (or supervene on) brain, body, and world.  But, maybe that's just my shortsightedness.  Doesn't Menary believe that cognitive processes are realized by or supervene on brain, body, and world?

Or, maybe there's an argument that links these theses to HEC.  If so, what is it?

Wherein Menary is Right

I have repeatedly stated my position that cognitive integration starts from the following positions:

• That we are actively embodied in a socially constructed cognitive niche and
• That phylogenetically and ontogenetically there is good evidence to suppose that we acquire cognitive capacities to create, maintain and manipulate the shared cognitive niche and
• That this has led to the development of hybrid cognitive systems where the bodily manipulation of vehicles (some of them representational) in the niche involves the coordination of neural, bodily and environmental vehicles.
• Cognitive processing sometimes involves these online bodily manipulations of the cognitive niche, but also collaborative thinking and offline private thinking.

Consequently, I propose that I am not committed to the view that cognition is first in the head and then gets extended into tools. Nor does it follow that I am committed to the idea that pencils can think for themselves. (Menary, 2010)

A&A agree with all of these claims.  We think Menary is right on this stuff.  (Incidentally, this is why we largely ignore Menary's four claims about integration: "Adams and Aizawa, strangely, fail to notice the discussion of four different theses that are supposed to motivate integration: the manipulation thesis, the hybrid mind thesis, the transformation thesis and the cognitive norms thesis." (Menary, 2010).)

But, notice that this list of positions does not contain HEC: "According to this view ... human cognitive processing literally extends into the environment and surrounding organism, and human cognitive states literally comprise--as wholes do their proper parts--elements in that environment" (Rupert, 2004, p. 393).  Menary does not include the claim that "the material vehicles of cognition can be spread out across brain, body and certain aspects of the physical environment itself’"

So, maybe he is not defending EC after all, or at least the version of EC that Clark defends.  (Of course, Menary does claim that "cognitive integration starts from the following positions", so maybe he still does want to defend HEC.  Not absolutely clearly.)

But, why would A&A have thought that Menary defends the kind of EC that Clark does?  His 2006 paper begins with this:

Recently internalists (Adams & Aizawa, 2001, 2006; Rupert, 2004) have mounted a counter-attack on the attempt to redefine the bounds of cognition. Their counterarguments are aimed at the extended mind hypothesis, which, as Andy Clark has recently put it, is the view that ‘‘the material vehicles of cognition can be spread out across brain, body and certain aspects of the physical environment itself’’ (Clark, 2005, p. 1).
     However, I think that the extended mind hypothesis is part of a more radical
project which I call ‘‘cognitive integration,’’ which is the view that internal and
external vehicles and processes are integrated into a whole. It is this more radical
project that Clark and others are really engaged in.  (Menary, 2006, p. 329).

So, insofar as Menary's complaint is that we have not challenged the items in his bulleted lists, he's right.  We have mostly set aside discussion of those things, since we think they are correct.  What we have strived to challenge is HEC (and mostly the arguments typicaly given for HEC), or the idea that cognitive processes are typically realized by processes in brain, body, and world.

Noë on Why we think we are our brain 2

Despite having learned so much about the anatomy and physiology of the human brain in the last century, we don’t actually have a better account of how consciousness and cognition arise in the brain than it arises out of immaterial soul-stuff.

This last claim is not controversial, not really. But then why are we so certain, as a scientific and as a popular culture, that the secrets to our nature lie inside us, in the brain?

Answer: We can’t imagine an alternative to this “you are your brain” idea that does not end up giving up on science. Either you are your brain, or you are a mystery.

Why are we so certain that the secret to our nature lies in the brain?  Roughly, the leg doesn't matter because you are still present when you break your leg or your leg is amputated.  Same for arm, left lung, right lung, heart, etc.  Much of this would be evident from observing the effects of injuries.  In the 20th Century, this common sense has been supported by experiments with neuromuscular blockade in which mental life is surprisingly stable, despite essentially complete bodily incapacitation.  That seems to me to be a start on at least a solid (albeit defeasible) basis for thinking that you are your brain, even not the basis of some certainty. 

Gregory on the Grand Illusion

It is sometimes said that all perception is a grand illusion. But this does not help. We may be driven into saying that 'everything is illusion', but this is as pointless as saying 'everything is a dream'. For when applied to everything, the words 'dream' and 'illusion' cease to have meaning. We need contrasts for seeing, and contrasts for describing and thinking. To claim that there is an illusion, there must be some contrasting non-illusion. This applies across the board. If every object were red there would be no point in seeing red, or using the word 'red'.

What are illusions?  

We may say that illusions are departures from reality-but what reality? Appearances are very different from deep realities of physics. If these are taken as reference truths we would have to  say that all perceptions are illusions. This is as pointless as saying that perception is a dream.  Illusions are judged with simple common-sense ideas of physics, and measured with kitchen instruments: rulers, clocks, scales, thermometers, and so on. We might define illusions as deviations from kitchen physics. (Gregory, 2009, pp. 9-10).

I think this is a disappointing reply to the idea of the grand illusion: "To claim that there is an illusion, there must be some contrasting non-illusion."  All of vision could be a grand illusion if all visual perception were a deviation from kitchen physics.  (Set aside the worries one might have about this definition.)  The contrast would be if a visual perception were not a deviation from kitchen physics.  I would think that the illusion/non-illusion distinct only requires a conceptual or theoretical distinction or a logical possibility of something that is an illusion and something that is a non-illusion.  We seem to have this.  We do not, however, require positive instances of both illusions and non-illusions.

Noë on Why we think we are our brain 1

From Noë's NPR blog post a few weeks back ...

Despite having learned so much about the anatomy and physiology of the human brain in the last century, we don’t actually have a better account of how consciousness and cognition arise in the brain than it arises out of immaterial soul-stuff.

This last claim is not controversial, not really. But then why are we so certain, as a scientific and as a popular culture, that the secrets to our nature lie inside us, in the brain?

Answer: We can’t imagine an alternative to this “you are your brain” idea that does not end up giving up on science. Either you are your brain, or you are a mystery.

It seems to me to be pretty common in the history of science to know that some object produces some phenomenon without knowing how that object produces that phenomenon.  So, for example, humans knew for millennia that the sun produces light, but only for the last hundred years or so have humans known that the sun produces light by nuclear fusion.  The organs of the body provide especially clear cases.  Humans have known for millennia that the alimentary canal digests food, but only for the last hundred years or so have humans known how the alimentary canal digests food.  Humans have known for millennia that the muscles produce contractile forces that move the body, but only for the last fifty years or so have humans known how the muscles produce contractile forces that move the body.  So, it's roughly par for the course to be in a situation where we understand that the brain is the seat of the self, but not know how the brain produces the self.

Sterelny as Fan of EC?

I have not read Sterelny's paper in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, but I am skeptical that he is the fan of EC that Menary suggests he is.  Here is Sterelny from a paper back in 2004.

"to depict much of advanced cognition as rooted in the operation of the same basic kinds of capacity used for on-line, adaptive response, but tuned and applied to the special domain of external and/or artificial cognitive aids-the domain, as I shall say, of wideware or cognitive technology."((Clark forthcoming) chapter 8)

To a significant extent we are serial processing inference engines. But we are so only because of our reliable, designed, adjusted coupling with a staggering array of cognitive artefacts, including linguistic and quantitative systems of serial representation. Our extended mind uses and processes linguiform representations even though (quite likely) naked human brains do not.
     Furthermore, some of these artefacts can literally be parts of an agent's cognitive system. In The Extended Mind, Andy Clark and David Chalmers develop a thought-experiment about an Alzheimers sufferer (Mr T, as I shall call him). Mr T cannot unaided remember the location of an exhibit he wants to visit. But he manages such problems by writing down in a notebook crucial information for his daily plans notebook. He then acts by consulting this book. Clark and Chalmers argue that the information in the notebook plays the same functional role for Mr T that an ordinary (non-occurrent) belief plays for ordinary human agents. They conclude we should count the notebook as part of the patient's mind, and the location of the exhibit as one of Mr T's beliefs (Clark and Chambers 1998). Clark is careful not to trivialise this extension of the boundaries of the mind. He insists that agents' minds include only those exter¬nal tools to which they have regular, unfettered access: "the props and aids which can count as part of my mental machinery ... are at the very least, reliably available when needed and used or accessed pretty much as automatically as biological processing and memory" (2001, p139).
     While agreeing with Clark on the fundamental role of epistemic agency in explaining human rationality, I have reservations about this picture. Even when there is a reliable link between user and tool, there are important differences between internal and external cognitive resources. The external storage of information is very important, but the psychological and evolutionary dynamics of mind /filofax relations are critically different from those of mind/memory interactions. So I do not think it is helpful to think of epistemic artefacts as literally parts of the minds of the agents that regularly use them. Moreover and more importantly, Clark underplays the importance of non-exclusive use of epistemic artefacts. Many of our most important cognitive tools are common-use tools, not parts of coupled systems. (Sterelny, 2004, p. 245).

Far from supporting EC, it seems to me that Sterelny comes very close to the Adams and Aizawa view.  Instead, he seems to be supporting something like HEMC.  

The way the Sutton and Menary papers are shaping up, it sounds to me as though they are unhappy that I am challenging, say, Clark's version of EC, but not their version of EC. 

Menary and Sterelny are for HEMC?

Indeed, Sterelny argues that our cognitive capacities are deeply dependent upon the cognitive niche such that the cognitive capacities of the agent are transformed by interactions with the niche. It would be closer to the mark to talk of the niche ‘extending’ into the agent, in the sense that the agent acquires new  representations and new capacities by being ‘coupled’ to or scaffolded by the niche. For Sterelny, there is no cognitive agent without embedding in the cognitive niche.

This is consistent with HEMC:

Cognitive processes depend very heavily, in hitherto unexpected ways, on organismally external props and devices and on the structure of the external environment in which cognition takes place (Rupert, 2004, p. 393).

And, of course, interacting with the environment causes changes in the mind and brain.  That's what learning is all about.  Moreover, we talk about the impacts of environmental interaction in the development of visual capacities in Chapter 9 of The Bounds of Cognition.  It's common ground that agents are transformed by their interactions with their niche.

Menary on the Point of the Ecological Turn

The point of the ecological turn in cognitive science is to show that there are deep consequences for our conception of cognitive agents once we consider their embodiment and embedding in an environment. The whole purpose of Adams and Aizawa’s arguments is to deflate those consequences, but you can’t do so just by assuming that agents are cognitive independently of their environmental embedding.  (Menary, 2010)

This comment I think confuses what is at issue.  A&A think it is fine to consider the embodiment and embeddedness of cognitive agents in environments.  That's the whole point of our concession to Sutton, et al., for example, and our point in the early pages of The Bounds of Cognition, that no one (short of Leibniz) doubts that cognitive agents are causally embodied and embedded in an environment.  This is the deflationary side of our view.

What we resist is not looking at brain-body-world interactions.  What we resist, among other things, is the claim that the same theory of cognition that applies to intracranial cognitive processes also applies to transcranial causal processes.  We resist what I have sometimes called a "fractal scaling" approach to brain-body-world interactions.  This is the idea that we have one and the same processes occurring at different scales of nature, in just the brain alone and in brain-body-world.  This is to resist the more familiar version of Clark's EC according to which what is going on in Inga's brain is roughly functionally equivalent to what is going on in Otto+notebook.

And, yes, there are versions of EC that abandon the fractal scaling idea and say that the intracranial processes do not have to be like the transcranial processes.  But, then what is the basis for saying that both are cognitive?  What is the advantage to cognitive science of doing this?  It would appear not to be some deep theoretical unity.  What is the advantage or theoretical insight in claiming that intracranial processes constitute cognition of one sort and transcranial processes constitute cognition of another sort?  Maybe, instead, it is just loose metaphorical talk.

Note that we do not just assume that agents are cognitive independently of their environmental embedding (where this claim is interpreted synchronically).  We have drawn attention to certain discoveries in psychology that provide a principled basis for saying that what takes place in the brain is plausibly construed as cognitive and is qualitatively distinct from what goes on in brain-body-world systems.  See, for example, section 4.2.1 of The Bounds of Cognition.  See much of the discussion in Chapter 9.  In chapter 9, for example, we discuss how it appears that agents can perceive perfectly well despite being completely immobilized by neuromuscular blockade.  As I've mentioned before, Gangopadhyay has written a very detailed empirically informed critique of Chapter 9.  She sees that there are empirical arguments to be met.

I Think Menary Missed an Argument

In the light of these remarks let’s look a little closer at Adams and Aizawa’s
account of causal-coupling to see where they have gone wrong. “If a cognitive agent causally interacts with some object in the external world in some “important” way—if that agent is coupled to an object—then that agent’s cognitive processing is constituted by processes extending into that object.” (2010b) This is precisely what I was objecting to in 2006. It assumes an already formed cognitive agent with, presumably, internal representations manipulated by computational processes, who just happens to interact with the environment. Adams and Aizawa are here leveraging their argument on a premise that I think is false—that we can consider cognitive agents independently of their environments (apart from the inputs from and outputs to the environment).

Menary thinks that we cannot consider cognitive agents independently of their environment.

But, A&A replied to this.  We think this move does not help.  Here is what we said in The Bounds of Cognition, pp. 102-3:

The suggestion appears to be that we should never think of a lone human being as a discrete cognitive system.  Humans are, so this line goes, always cognitive systems integrated into a network of interacting components.  Humans in their mere biological being are never cognitive systems.  Put more boldly, perhaps, insofar as humans are cognitive beings, they are essentially users of external vehicles.
     Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that it is true that, insofar as humans are cognitive agents, they are never entirely bereft of external vehicles that they manipulate.  That is, suppose that every human cognitive agent always engages some external vehicle or another in her cognitive processing.  Even this concession is not adequate to circumvent the coupling-constitution fallacy.  We can simply reformulate the problem to incorporate Menary’s idea.  So, suppose, simply for the sake of argument, that Otto’s biological mass never in itself suffices to form a cognitive system.  Otto’s cognitive being is always enmeshed in a network of tools.  Still, think of “young Otto” before the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.  Young Otto was embedded in one network of tools.  Presumably this network of tools will not include the notebook that will one day, say, 30 years later, be manufactured in some factory and subsequently purchased by “Old Otto” who has come to suffer from Alzheimer’s Disease.  That is, assume that ones cognition does not extend into currently non-existent tools that one will use in the future.  Now consider “Old Otto” following the onset of Alzheimer’s, but prior to the purchase of the notebook.  Still, the notebook lying on a store shelf never seen by Old Otto is not part of Old Otto’s cognitive apparatus.  How, then, does the notebook become part of Old Otto’s cognitive apparatus on a coupling argument?  One might suspect it begins with Otto’s coming to regularly use the apparatus.  It begins when Old Otto begins to manipulate his notebook.  But, it is right here that the coupling-constitution fallacy is committed.  It is committed when one makes the move to include new cognitive processing mechanisms, such as the notebook.  So, even Menary’s strong hypothesis that cognitive agents are never without their cognitive processes extending into tools is not enough to avoid the coupling-constitution fallacy.

Why isn't this a correct statement of Menary's view and also an adequate reply?

Now, later Menary comments, "I am not committed to the view that cognition is first
in the head and then gets extended into tools."  Right.  That's why we wrote,

"The suggestion appears to be that we should never think of a lone human being as a discrete cognitive system.  Humans are, so this line goes, always cognitive systems integrated into a network of interacting components.  Humans in their mere biological being are never cognitive systems.  Put more boldly, perhaps, insofar as humans are cognitive beings, they are essentially users of external vehicles."

Here is how our argument works though.  At t0 Otto is committed to one set of tools, hence not bereft of tools.  But, then at t1 he acquires a new tool, hence is still not bereft of tools.  At t1, Otto is now coupled to something else, but that new coupling does not make the processes that take place in that new tool cognitive processes.  So, we tweaked the C-C fallacy point to deal with change of tools used.  We are trying to give Menary this point, but show that it is of no help to him.  I don't see why this is otiose.

I think there are a couple of slips here ...

I take the following to be the commitments of those working in the extended mind framework: cognitive processes are causal processes (cognitive processes cause certain effects, presumably cognitive states and behaviour), the extended mind holds that certain kinds of coupled processes (processes that span brain, body and local environment) are cognitive processes. So it is certainly true that coupled processes are taken to be cognitive processes but this is a statement of identity.  (Menary, 2010).

I think there are a couple of slips here.

First, it's not a statement of identity that coupled processes are taken to be cognitive processes.  Coupled are processes are cognitive processes is probably what Menary means.

Second, if that's what he means, then while it is an identity statement, it is not a true identity statement, even according to EC.  Couple two pendula together. The joint swinging isn't a cognitive process.  Couple evaporation and condensation in a distillation apparatus.  The distillation doesn't make for a cognitive process.  So, it's clearly not true that coupled processes are cognitive processes.

This brings us to the claim that coupled processes of a certain kind are cognitive processes. That is, the "certain kinds" qualifier obviously disappeared from the conclusion.  Now we have something that appears to be correct, since that is a view one would have if one thought that the coupled process of the right sort is one in which a system manipulates non-derived representations in specific sorts of ways.  Menary and others see that this weak identity claims helps them, insofar as it enables them to avoid the objections that have been leveled against specific kinds of coupling.  But, it's not much in the way of a theoretical advance; instead it is a mere weakening.

And, of course, there is a lack of consensus on how to cash out the qualifier "of a certain kind".

Ramsey on Ross and Ladyman

Finally, undoubtedly the oddest chapter is this volume is one that inadvertently suggests that the whole topic is deeply ill-conceived. In a somewhat condescending tone, Don Ross and James Ladyman tell us that that the coupling-constitution fallacy is based upon a naive and flawed conception of reality, since, at the level of fundamental physics, conventional notions like causation and constitution have no real application. Curiously, they see this as only a problem for the critics of EMH. Given that EMH itself depends on the idea that certain things are parts of other things (minds), their conclusion should have been that EMH is itself a confused non-issue (presumably, their essay isn't "part of" a volume devoted to such a non-issue). Perhaps the real take-home lesson from this chapter is something most of us already believed; namely, that whatever bizarre things physicists tell us about fundamental particles, their statements should have very little bearing on what we think about middle-sized things like cognitive systems.

I like it.

Burge in the NYT

An excellent article.

The only nit I had to pick was that I did not get as much explication as I would have liked regarding representational accuracy.

Menary on Manipulation and Cognitive Processes Extending

It is very clear, to me at least, that the manipulation thesis does not depend upon
any kind of causal coupling (in Adams and Aizawa’s sense) and does not make any claims about cognitive processes extending from brains into bodies and tools.

And, I agree that the manipulation of structures in the environment does not make any claim about cognitive processes extending from brains into bodies and tools.  But, then what is the link between manipulating environmenal structures and extended cognition?  Or, if you don't like the term "extended", what is the link between manipulating structures in the environment and cognitive processes being realized by those manipulation processes?  I've been assuming that observations regarding the manipulation of environmental structures is somehow supposed to bolster the case for EC.  But, that looks to put Menary on the road to committing a version of the C-C fallacy.

Ramsey on the Worry about the C-C Fallacy

All of these authors make a strong case for thinking that various outer, non-biological elements that are markedly different from internal elements are nevertheless important (indeed, necessary) for specific cognitive tasks and activities. They make a strong case for a high degree of integration. Unfortunately, they fail to make a strong case for treating these integrated external structures as parts of an expanded mind. There is nothing here, as far as I can see, that would alleviate the worry that EMH is based upon a coupling-constitution fallacy. ...

What these authors need, but do not really provide, is an argument for treating external structures as not only important for (and integrated with) cognitive systems during various cognitive tasks -- something Adams and Aizawa are happy to concede -- but for also treating them as actually mental states. Why, for example, should the actor's stage artifacts and props be treated as elements of an expanded cognitive system, instead of as, more conventionally, non-cognitive mnemonic tools that aid the actor's memory? Sutton doesn't really tell us. Menary offers the proposal that external elements are not mere tools because biological minds act upon them and vice versa -- that they are reciprocally integrated with one another. But that is hardly a convincing justification for thinking something is part of something else (when chopping wood, I am reciprocally integrated with an ax, but that doesn't make the ax part of me).  ...

In large measure, the essays supporting second-wave EMH in this volume do not answer the coupling-constitution fallacy so much as they simply ignore it.

Go, Bill!

It seems to me that it's one thing for the advocates of EC to say that they do not commit the simplistic C-C fallacy, but another to consistently flesh out their case studies in such a way as to respect a fixed set of conditions on coupling "in the right way".  When ECists leave out the conditions that are supposed to articulate their idea of "in the right way", it looks like they are trying to skate by on the fallacy.

Embodied Cognition over at Brains on Purpose

Here are several posts on embodied cognition from yet another perspective.

Noë: Beyond Brain Reading

Over at the NPR blog.

Ramsey on Sutton's Examples of Second Wave EC

Along similar lines, John Sutton joins Menary in developing a second-wave EMH position. To illustrate his complementarity principle, Sutton discusses two historical examples. The first involves Elizabethan actors at the Globe theater, who were required to perform an incredibly large number of different roles with minimal rehearsal. This was possible only because the physical lay-out of the sets, social variables, and various props served as information-bearing elements that helped to guide the actors' performance. The second example concerns the medieval memory palaces used by monks and scholars for storing large amounts of information. With this mnemonic strategy, buildings or familiar streets were memorized and then used to store various bits of information for later retrieval. Sutton claims this qualifies as a form of extended cognition, though I had a hard time understanding how it does. Given that the process involves everything being internalized (with memorized images of spatial geography used as mnemonic aids), just how this is supposed to support EMH is a bit mysterious.

Here I share with Ramsey, I think, the sense that there is a lot of interesting coupling between brain and environment going on in these cases, but Sutton is less than maximally explicit on how this connects with the hypothesis of extended cognition.  In his recent joint paper in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, for example, he seems to be distancing himself from the issue of whether the mind is really just in the brain or is in part realized by tools.  But, to me at least, that is the central issue in the EC debates.

Menary on Causation and Manipulation

What I do say is that a clear way of motivating cognitive integration was first presented by Mark Rowlands which he calls the manipulation thesis: “Cognitive processes are not located exclusively in the skin of cognising organisms because such processes are, in part, made up of physical or bodily manipulation of structures in the environments of such organisms.” (Rowlands 1999 p. 23)
     It is very clear, to me at least, that the manipulation thesis does not depend upon any kind of causal coupling (in Adams and Aizawa’s sense)

Ok.  Here's something I don't get at all.  Manipulation does not depend on any kind of causal coupling?  But, how can one manipulate structures in the environment without a causal connection to them?  It looks to me as though manipulation just is one kind of causal coupling.

Note when Rowlands writes that "[cognitive] processes are, in part, made up of physical or bodily manipulation of structures in the environments of such organisms.” (Rowlands 1999 p. 23), it seems plausible to me at least to think that he means all cognitive processes are, in part, made up of physical or bodily manipulations of structures, so that all cognitive processes are extended.  Granted in other places he claims only that some cognitive processes are extended.

Systematicity and the Post-Connectionist Era: Taking Stock of the Architecture Of Cognition

19-21 May 2011
San Jose (Andalucia, Spain)
2nd call for papers
Researchers are invited to submit full papers or long abstracts for 40-minute presentations on conceptual, empirical or modeling issues that arise in the treatment of the systematicity challenge from post-connectionist approaches such as behavior-based AI, ecological psychology, embodied and distributed cognition, dynamical systems theory, and non-classical forms of connectionism. The range of topics to be addressed in the workshop really cuts across cognitive science disciplines. We encourage submissions from philosophers, psychologists, and computational neuroscientists alike, among other related fields.

Plenary speakers:

• Ken Aizawa (Philosophy, Centenary College, LA, US)
• Tony Chemero (Psychology, Franklin & Marshall College, PA, US)
• Brian McLaughlin (Philosophy, Rutgers, NJ, US)
• Steve Phillips (Mathematical Neuroinformatics Group, AIST, Japan)

A selection of the material presented will be published as a special issue of the journal Synthese.

For more information: http://www.um.es/dp-filosofia/systematicityworkshop/

Menary Wants A&A to Give Him a Rope

One thing to note, before I continue, is that Adams and Aizawa give no indication of how we are supposed to make the distinction. An account of the difference between causation and constitution would be helpful here, but there is none forthcoming (see Hurley 2010, Ross and Ladyman 2010 for a critique along these lines).

 We tried to forestall this objection in The Bounds of Cognition.  We wrote,

 In a forthcoming paper, Hurley appears to demand that the critic of extended cognition explain what is meant by causation or coupling, on the one hand, versus constitution, supervenience, physical substrate, or embodiment, on the other.  Yet, it is the advocates of extended cognition who have put the distinction on the table.  As seen from the numerous quotations provided at the start of the chapter, there is good reason to think it is one of the defining features of the hypothesis of extended cognition.  If the advocates of extended cognition want to rely on some distinction to present their view, surely they bear the burden of explicating their own view.  Moreover, it is awkward to be a critic of extended cognition and have to explicate and defend a central distinction of extended cognition.  (Adams & Aizawa, 2008, pp. 99-100).

 But, here is Menary invoking the causation/constitution distinction:

The real disagreement between internalists and integrationists is whether the manipulation of external vehicles constitutes a cognitive process. Integrationists think that they do, typically for reasons to do with the close coordination and causal interplay between internal and external processes.  (Menary, 2006, p. 331).

If Menary thinks that the manipulation of external vehicles constitutes a cognitive process, let him explain what constitution is. And, if he thinks that causal interplay between internal and external processes warrant the view that the manipulation of external vehicles constitutes a cognitive process, let him explain causation.  It's not A&A's job to give him the tools to do his job (or better, to hand him the rope with which to hang himself).

Ramsey's take on "The Notebook itself is not cognitive ..."

For example, Clark (along with Menary) criticizes Adams and Aizawa for confusedly thinking that the extended mind position entails that objects (like Otto's notebook) can be intrinsically cognitive, irrespective of whatever role they are playing. As Clark points out, no proponent of EMH thinks that; it is essential that the object be properly conjoined or integrated with a brain. Yet, in fact, this is an uncharitable interpretation of Adams and Aizawa, whose whole argument is designed to show that integration with a brain is not enough.

Go, Bill!

Pardon my self-indulgence as I enjoy having someone agree with me on EC for a change.

Uexküll's book is now out in English

Charles Wolfe over at New APPS, links to this, which links to this.

Ramsey on What Counts as the Parts and Non-Parts of a System

While these exchanges are often insightful, they fail to accomplish any clear consensus or advance the discussion very far. The debate would have benefitted from some prior agreement on what counts as getting it right -- on, say, how we might discern the difference between a cognitive system's parts and non-parts. Without this, the two sides often talk past each other.

I think that there probably is some more work that should be done here, but Rupert talks about this in his book, Haugeland discusses this in his "Mind Embodied and Embedded", Weiskopf discusses this in his Cognitive Systems Research paper, and there are probably others I'm forgetting.

P.S., for some reason I know not what, my post mentioning Weiskopf's paper is--by a wide margin--the most popular post of all time here.  

P.P.S., another "lack of consensus" problem for Menary.

Menary on the Lack of Consensus

What is a mental or cognitive representation? There is no philosophically or
empirically agreed upon account of what makes something a cognitive representation.  This is quite a stunning fact. Imagine genetics without a model of genes, this is the position in which cognitivism finds itself. Adams and Aizawa are not alone in having no criteria for determining when something is to be counted as a representation (oh the irony!) This brings us to the second leg of the grail quest, a theory of content. Adams and Aizawa make much play of a purported naturalistic theory of content for cognitive representations. However, they have no convincing theory available to them, and this explains why they do not attempt to explain how cognitive representations get their contents. This is also quite stunning. (Menary, 2010)

Yes, it is unfortunate that there is no consensus on what makes something a cognitive representation.  But, this is philosophy.  It's typical for there to be no consensus on what makes anything anything.  I surfed over to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and found that there is no consensus on what death is!

So, I don't put that much stock in "lack of consensus" arguments, but if Menary does, maybe he should chew on the fact that there is a lack of consensus in the EC literature regarding the conditions under which cognition extends.  Many of the options are discussed in Chapters 5-9 in The Bounds of Cognition.

Menary on Weak and Strong Cognitivism 3

Weak cognitivism: cognition involves the processing of representations.
Strong cognitivism: all cognition involves the processing of representations with underived content.

... The weak version is consistent with most of the examples of integrated cognition that I present in Dimensions of Mind (Menary 2010). It only conflicts with examples that do not involve the processing of representations. In fact, the claim that Clark and Menary argue against cognitivism is somewhat strange since both of them allow that representations play an important role in cognitive explanations, they just don’t believe that all cognition involves the processing of representations. So their positions are quite consistent with a weak cognitivism, that cognition often involves the processing of representations, but not always.

Now, I don't propose to make much of the issue what to call a view, but the A&A view is that cognition is a matter of specific sorts of manipulations of vehicles bearing non-derived content. So, there is more to cognitivism than just representations.  [Coincidentally, I just mentioned this in my post on Ramsey for this morning.]

Clark often does talk about information processing--which we can take to be the same as manipulation of representations--but Clark does not, to my knowledge, in the EC literature mention any constraints on the types of information processing (representation manipulation) that might count as cognitive.   I could be wrong.

I do have the vague idea that at some point in his career, Andy did claim that symbol manipulation by lookup table would not be cognitive information processing, and I also have the idea that this was related to some exchange with Dennett.  But, I don't know what paper this would be in.  References would be much appreciated as I have been wondering about this literally for years.

Ramsey on the A&A Criterion of the Mental

You know, the idea of a review of a review is kind of strange, but I take it that this blog is mostly a collection of philosophical snippets, typically things I would never publish.  So, here it goes.

To bolster their claim, Adams and Aizawa propose their own criterion for mentality: non-derived intentionality, which is lacking in external symbol systems like Otto's notebook.

Now, technically speaking, A&A do throw in the condition that not just any sort of use of non-derived representations counts as cognitive processing.  (That probably did not come out very clearly or explicitly in the papers in Menary's collection.)  Maybe the spiny lobster ganglia that Clark, 2005, describes have non-derived content, but A&A do not expect those representations to be manipulated in the way that representations in typical cognitive processes are manipulated.  This condition on manipulation also seems to me to separate the A&A view from, for example, Rowlands' view in "Extended Cognition and the Mark of the Cognitive".

Clark in the NYT Again

They can't get enough of the man! 

Taught MSc programme in Mind, Language and Embodied Cognition at Edinburgh

The Mind and Cognition group at the University of Edinburgh invite applications for a taught MSc programme (commencing September 2011) in Mind, Language and Embodied Cognition. Students will  tackle the key questions that are at the heart of the recent renaissance in the philosophical and scientific study of the embodied and environmentally embedded mind. The programme draws on  teaching from across the university, but students will be based in the School of Philosophy,  Psychology and Language Sciences. In addition to courses offered as a part of the programme  students will have the opportunity to enrol on relevant courses in Psychology, Linguistics, Informatics, and beyond.

For more on the Mind and Cognition group, see:

http://www.ppls.ed.ac.uk/philosophy/groups/mind-cognition-edinburgh


Informal enquiries may be sent to the program director, Professor Andy Clark:

andy.cl...@ed.ac.uk

Gibson's Rejection of the Retinal Image 4

It is not necessary to assume that anything whatever is transmitted along the optic nerve in the activity of perception. We need not believe that either an inverted picture or a set of messages is delivered to the brain. We can think of vision as a perceptual system, the brain being simply part of the system. The eye is also part of the system, since retinal inputs lead to ocular adjustments and then to altered retinal inputs, and so on, The process is circular, not a one-way transmission. The eye-head-brain-body system registers the invariants in the structure of ambient light. The eye is not a camera that forms and delivers an image, nor is the retina simply a keyboard that can be struck by fingers of light. (Gibson, 1979, p. 61).

"It is not necessary to assume that anything whatever is transmitted along the optic nerve in the activity of perception."  Really?!  What about action potentials? Maybe one could draw attention to the fact that Gibson throws in the qualifier "it is not necessary to assume", since that could make for a nice fig leaf.  But, the simple fact is that action potentials are transmitted down the optic nerve during perception.  There is at least a correlation between perceptual events and action potentials, right?

We can think of vision as a perceptual system, the brain being simply part of the system. The eye is also part of the system, since retinal inputs lead to ocular adjustments and then to altered retinal inputs, and so on. The process is circular, not a one-way transmission.

I'm ok with this.  I get this, but one does not have to deny that the eye is a camera, that there is computation in the retina and optic nerve to accept these conclusions.  Gibson is proposing a false dichotomy here.

Menary on Weak and Strong Cognitivism 2

Weak cognitivism: cognition involves the processing of representations.
Strong cognitivism: all cognition involves the processing of  representations with underived content.

...  Adams and Aizawa are inconsistent in the strength of their claims as they also assert that cognitive content must be underived (in this world at least). If they hold to that stipulation—that cognitive content must be underived—then they cannot, as they do in this issue, allow the possibility of weak cognitivism (in this world).

Now, it seems that we were not explicit enough in pointing out that we were only entertaining weak cognitivism for the sake of argument.  We really do stick by strong cognitivism.  That's why Adams & Aizawa, 2010, defend it over the course of several pages, namely, pp. 582-589.

I am not sure why Menary thinks that if we hold what he calls "strong cognitivism" that we cannot allow the possibility of weak cognitivism.  As I understand the positions, the strong position entails the weak position, so if we hold the strong position (which we do) then we had better maintain the weak position, hence allow the possibility of the weak position.

Ramsey's Review of Menary's The Extended Mind

Over at NDPR.

I think I agree with 95%+ of what Ramsey has to say about the papers.

Shorter Sutton and Menary

One nagging concern I've had about the Sutton, et al., and Menary "Holy Grail" papers is that they do not seem to me to be all that interested in the claim that cognitive processes are realized by (or supervene upon) processes in the brain, body, and world.   This, however, seems to me to be one of the least problematic ways of stating the hypothesis of extended cognition.  I worry that the discussion has somehow gotten off track.

Future posts 12/13/2010

Today begins a long series of posts on Menary's "Holy Grail". 

What I'll do next on EP is in a bit of disarray.  Andrew's link to the Bingham, Crowell, & Todd, 2004, paper has been very helpful.  The contrast between this and the TSRM paper is striking.  Further reinforcing my preference for psychology that is experimental.

Menary on Strong and Weak Cognitivism 1

Weak cognitivism: cognition involves the processing of representations.
Strong cognitivism: all cognition involves the processing of representations with underived content.

Note that even the strong version is ambiguous, because it allows that there may be some underived representations that are processed, for example, in an extended process that also involves conventional representations (for example see Menary 2006 and Clark 2010). In which case there really is no case left to answer.

Menary's objection here seems to me to be a bit compressed.  The idea, as I've articulated it before, is that when Otto uses his notebook, there are by A&A's  lights non-derived representations in Otto's brain.  So Otto + notebook meets the A&A condition that cognition must involve non-derived representations.

So, I think that Clark and Menary are right to note that "involve" is too weak.  But, the straightforward strengthening that gets at what we are about is to require that the vehicles of content bear non-derived content.  But, the vehicles of content in Otto's notebook are paradigms bearers of derived content.  So, the challenge remains.

Gibson's Rejection of the Retinal Image 3

Even the more sophisticated theory that the retinal image is transmitted as signals in the fibers of the optic nerve has the lurking implication of a little man in the brain. For these signals must be in code and therefore have to be decoded; signals are messages, and messages have to be interpreted. In both theories the eye sends, the nerve transmits, and a mind or spirit receives. Both theories carry the implication of a mind that is separate from a body. (Gobson, 1979, p. 61).

But, the sophisticated theory does not have the lurking implication.  That is the point of computational models of visual processing.  They don't need homunculi to do image processing any more than computers need homunculi to do image processing.

In the background, regarding "messages" and "codes" Gibson is fixated on Shannon information which he took to be a matter of one individual (human being) communicating with another (human being).  But, for better or worse, the talk of code, information, etc., has largely dropped this understanding of "code" and "information". 

And, you don't need dualism either.  The eye sends messages to other regions of the brain.  What's wrong with that idea?

Andy Clark in the NYT

Here.

HT to Leslie Marsh.

Noë at NPR: Does Thinking Happen in the Brain?

Yes, .... or Noë.

.

Walter's "Cognitive extension: the parity argument, functionalism, and the mark of the cognitive"

Available online here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/h21565731471r11h/fulltext.pdf;.

Sven has a nice discussion of the use of the Parity Principle.

Check out, as well, the other papers in the issue by my buds, Carl, Larry, Jacqueline, John, Philippe, and Tom.  It was edited by Jacqueline Sullivan.

Gibson's Rejection of the Retinal Image 2

If the retinal image is not transmitted to the brain as a whole, the only alternative has seemed to be that it is transmitted to the brain element by element, that is, by signals in the fibers of the optic nerve. There would then be an element-to-element correspondence between image and brain analogous to the point-to-point correspondence between object and image. This seems to avoid the fallacy of the little man in the brain who looks at an image, but it entails all the difficulties of what I have called the sensation-based theories of perception. The correspondence between the spots of light on the retina and the spots of sensation in the brain can only be a correspondence of intensity to brightness and of wavelength to color. If so, the brain is faced with the tremendous task of constructing a phenomenal environment out of spots differing in brightness and color. If these are what is seen directly, what is given for perception, if these are the data of sense, then the fact of perception is almost miraculous. (Gibson, 1979, p. 60-1).

From Kandel, Schwarz, & Jessell, 2000.

But, neuroscientists have found many retinotopic maps.  Dozens, right?  So, far from this consequence being an embarrassment, it has been amply confirmed.

"There would then be an element-to-element correspondence between image and brain analogous to the point-to-point correspondence between object and image,"

So, what's the problem?

The correspondence between the spots of light on the retina and the spots of sensation in the brain can only be a correspondence of intensity to brightness and of wavelength to color.

"can only be"?  No, simply wrong.  That's the beauty of non-demonstrative inference.  You can begin with data on intensity and wavelength and up with lots of new things.  So, you might begin with intensity and wavelength and get oriented line detectors, motion sensitive detectors, face sensitive cells, and cells (such as mirror neurons) that are sensitive to grasping.  (In fairness to Gibson, most of the relevant single cell work was just getting up steam near the end of Gibson's career.  Hubel and Wiesel started in the early 1960's, right?  Most, I guess, has been done since 1979.)

If so, the brain is faced with the tremendous task of constructing a phenomenal environment out of spots differing in brightness and color.

Absolutely.  So?

If these are what is seen directly, what is given for perception, if these are the data of sense, then the fact of perception is almost miraculous.

While the sense datum theorists, among others, might have held that what is directly seen are spots of brightness and color, cognitivists typically do not.  But, the fact of perception does seem almost miraculous, if there is no computation in the brain.

Gregory Really Rejects the Homunculus

For many years, the inversion of the retinal image seemed to be a serious problem: do babies have to learn to correct the inversion, to see things the right way up? This question is based on the false notion that the brain is a kind of eye looking at the retinal image, which presumably has its image-with another eye, another image, and so on forever. This notion of an inner eye should have been a non-starter as it can never get anywhere. The point is, one's retinal image is not seen, as an object is seen. The retina is the interface between the optical projection from objects to the neural-coded signals to the brain-arriving down the million fibres of the optic nerve-which are related to touch experience of objects. The inversion in the image does not matter: what matters is the relation of the brain's visual signals to those from touch. Indeed without touch retinal images would have little or no meaning.(Gregory, 1997, pp. 52-53).

Here Gregory presents the inferentialist view of visual images quite succinctly: "one's retinal image is not seen, as an object is seen".  As we shall see, this is the way around the problems Gibson sometimes describes has with retinal images.

I do wonder if Gregory had all this stuff down in earlier editions of Eye and Brain.  I would guess that he did, but our local copy of the first edition from 1966 is checked out.

Rockwell's Critique of Adams and Aizawa's Views

Here in Philosophical Psychology.

Last month it was Menary and Sutton, Harris, Keil, and Barnier.  This month it's Rockwell.  Let's hope the new year starts off better.

Gibson's Rejection of the Retinal Image 1

But this success makes it tempting to believe that the image on the retina falls on a kind of screen and is itself something intended to be looked at, that is, a picture. It leads to one of the most seductive fallacies in the history of psychology-that the retinal image is something to be seen. I call this the "little man in the brain" theory of the retinal image (Gibson, 1966b, p. 226), which conceives the eye as a camera at the end of a nerve cable that transmits the image to the brain. Then there has to be a little man, a homunculus, seated in the brain who looks at this physiological image. The little man would have to have an eye to see it with, of course, a little eye with a little retinal image connected to a little brain, and so we have explained nothing by this theory. We are in fact worse off than before, since we are confronted with the paradox of an infinite series of little men, each within the other and each looking at the brain of the next bigger man. (Gibson, 1979, p. 60).

Now, no one likes the little homunculus for psychological theorizing (even if they are ok for the Men in Black).  But the homunculus hypothesis can be avoided consonant with accepting retinal image processing.  Let an image be a set of (oversimplifying) luminance values.  This can be processed by something other than a homunculus.  It might be processed by a computer.  Bitmap images can be manipulated by computers without supposing that there must be a little CPU inside the CPU.  That was one of the virtues of the computational theory of mind: It shows how one can avoid having to invoke a homunculus to do image processing.  So, Gibson seems to be mistaken in thinking that a retinal image leads to (in the sense of requires, at least) a homunculus.

Gregory's Brainy Mind

Another quick read from Gregory is here.

Differently Quantified Versions of EC

In recent days, I've been tussling here with Mark Rowlands over how one might interpret some of what he has written. This exchange highlights three different EC sorts of hypotheses that different in what quantifiers they invoke, namely,
     1) All cognitive processes are extended.
     2) Most cognitive processes are extended.
     3) Some cognitive processes are extended.
Now, Mark vigorously denies that he has ever held 1), but instead only 3).  And, he indicates that even I accept 3), so that we are really on the same side after all.

But, I only accept 3), insofar as I do, because it's just so hard to muster an argument that absolutely all cognitive processes are indeed internal.  I've all along admitted that extended cognitive processes are possible, so it's hard to rule out any instances of that possibility.

Instead, I have resisted all the proffered instances of EC, e.g. Inga-Otto, Tetris, Kanzi, Rush Hour, the Globe Theatre, etc., etc., and the reasoning that has been offered in support of those instances.

Now, philosophers typically gravitate to the universal and existential quantifiers, but I think the more interesting versions of EC are those that involve other quantifiers, such as in 2).  Now, to my knowledge, no advocates of EC has ever explicitly endorsed a version such as 2), rather than 1) or 3).  1), of course, entails 2), but even advocates of 3) seem to run arguments that, if they were good (which I generally think they are not), would suffice to establish something like 2).  So, philosophers often "undersell" the strength of the arguments they offer.  (To take a possible case, Clark suggests that we are natural born cyborgs.  Maybe if we are perennial tool users and tool use leads to extended cognition, then something like 2) would follow.) 

I think versions like 2) are the most interesting, since 1) is, well, obviously false as Rowlands will now help me argue and 3) is so weak that it does not challenge the scientific enterprise of intracranial cognition.  It doesn't that much matter if there is some unique exotic case of one person with a brain implant in which cognition is extended.  If most instances of cognition are intracranial, then there is perhaps enough there to study to warrant cognitive psychology going on in much the way cognitivists have been going for a couple of decades now.

So, to borrow a phrase from Sutton, et al., I think that versions of EC quantified along the lines of 2) form the rich middle ground.

Fellowships at the Center for Philosophy of Science, Pittsburgh

This has circulated a bit, but maybe not to all those in the EC community.  Coincidentally, Mark Sprevak was a visiting fellow in this program last year.

The application deadline of December 15 is approaching for postdoctoral and visiting fellowships at the Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, for the academic year 2011-2012.

For more details, see "joining" on the Center Web site (http://www.pitt.edu/~pittcntr).

John D. Norton
Director
Center for Philosophy of Science
University of Pittsburgh

Gregory's Case for Filling In

A free online version.

Parsing the A&A Rhetoric

One does not have to insist that the hypothesis of intracranial processes of memory processing is a mere relic of an unexamined Cartesian prejudice. Instead one can  maintain, as we do, that there is a scientifically and philosophically motivated  reason to believe that there are psychological processes that are found in brains that are unlike processes that span brains, bodies, and environments. (2008, p.179)

This rhetoric is particularly puzzling from the point of view of a complementarity theorist, whose projects rest on analyzing such differences between coordinated internal and external processes. In characterizing Sutton’s work as ‘non-revolutionary’, then, Adams and Aizawa must be construing a truly ‘revolutionary’ form of extended cognition as the view that external resources always constitute psychological processes, and that thus memory processing, for example, is never intracranial: but this dramatically extremised view is not one that complementarity theorists, at least, have ever defended .

There are two claims that are up in the air: A) Cognitive processes are commonly realized by the brain, body, and world.  B) There are no intracranial cognitive processes.  A&A think both are false.  A) Sutton, et al., no longer seem to want to argue about this, dismissing the talk of where the mind "really" is.  B) is the "dramatically extremised view" that Sutton, et al., have not noticed has been advocated by many in the EC literature. That's what all the posts on revolutionary EC are about.  Maybe Wilson and Sutton have not made these claims, but plenty of others have.

N.B.: Rowlands vigorously protests that he does not deny, and never has denied, instances of purely intracranial cognition.   (See comments here.)  I still find what he has written on this more equivocal than he does, but that's the state of play.

Shaun Gallagher on How Yoga Works: Posture and Human Potential

An online discussion at The Magazine of Yoga.

What about Menary?

So, Sutton et al. propose that "complementarity theorists" have never denied that there is ever purely intracranial cognition. 

But, isn't Menary a "complementarity theorist" and doesn't he deny that there is ever purely intracranial cognition?  Doesn't Menary think we are always the locus of a complex of tools into which our minds are always extended?

TSRM Bleg #2

Also, have there been any publications anywhere that take up the TSRM strategy for explaining visual illusions?  I have searched the journal Ecological Psychology with "illusion" and "visual illusion" and found nothing promising.  Google scholar doesn't help either.  Nor does PsychInfo. 

I can only say that "To my knowledge, there are no publications that take up the TSRM strategy", but I hate to go with weak claims like that.

What does this mean?

For example, the Müller-Lyer illusion is interpreted traditionally as exemplifying a measurement error. The perceiver sees difference in length between two lines that are equal to some standard of measure, say, a ruler. …  The Establishment is tempted to say that the perceiver … falsely infers from the play of light at the eyes that the two lines are of different lengths when, in fact, they are of the same length.
     What must be assumed to give legitimacy to this claim for perceptual error? The following come quickly to mind: (1) Whatever the proper basis of measurement for describing the figure is, it is one and the same as the basis of the measurement device by which the figure is described. (TSRM, p. 279).

So, I have been wrestling with TSRM for a while now, trying to figure out how they mean to explain visual illusions.  They suggest that cognitivists make assumption (1) above, but I am having a tough time parsing this. I am not sure what they are attributing to cognitivists. Let me explain my confusion.

Suppose, just for expository convenience, that the proper basis of measurement for describing the Müller-Lyer illusion is length, that is, that the Müller-Lyer illusion should be described in terms of length.  Is that one side of the kind of identity claim TSRM are noting?

So, then is length one and the same as "the basis of the measurement device by which the figure is described"?  That doesn't make sense to me.  How can length be a device?  Is there some typo here?

Any help here would be appreciated.

A Blog Commentary on Clark's Supersizing ...

Here.

Gregory Recalls S.B.

An interesting note from Nature from a while ago. Many readers of this blog will know of S.B. (Sidney Bradford) by way of Alva Noë's Action in Perception.  Bradford was one of the  congenitally blind individuals who had corneal grafts in adulthood.  Noe interpreted this case as an illustration of "experiential blindness".

Gregory believes S.B.'s case provides a positive answer to the Molyneaux question.

The Rich Middle Ground

So Adams and Aizawa first treat extended cognition as a ‘revolutionary’ thesis which denies intracranial cognition, and then suggest that complementarity fails to deliver on the revolutionary promise. They are thus seeking to trap the extended cognition theorist in a dilemma: either maintain the extreme ‘revolutionary’ position, or collapse back into individualism. But we reject the alleged dilemma. Along with Clark and the others, we inhabit a rich middle ground, one which this paper continues to develop, which is entirely distinct both from internalist forms of cognitivism and from externalist anti-cognitivism. Yet when Adams and Aizawa do accurately acknowledge that our views are not anti-cognitivist, they try to assimilate us to a more conservative internalism. (Sutton, et al.)

A&A don't offer this dilemma.  That dilemma is of Sutton, et al.'s, making.  The A&A view is easy.  Complementarity does not support the rejection of intracranial cognition.  That's now common ground between A&A and Sutton, et al.  Second, complementarity does not offer an argument for HEC. A&A argued for this, and Sutton, et al., apparently don't want to fight over HEC versus HEMC.  This whole middle ground that they want to explore is what we conceded they should explore ... just don't take it to be HEC or to undermine intracranial cognition.

To me, again the upshot is that, apparent misunderstandings aside, the rich middle ground is a fine topic to study.

The Beautiful Brain

These are genuinely stunning and beautiful images.

HT Eric Schwitzgebel and Theresa Cook.

A&A vs Sutton, et al.

The empirical programs we describe below have their own momentum, independent of any connection with philosophical issues. In particular, we do not argue that the Desert Song case, or any of the other examples of collaborative recall which we discuss below, entails any particular view on whether cognition and memory are in fact often extended or distributed. Theorists can continue to treat each individual’s cognitive processes in isolation, as occurring solely within the head, even if causally triggered or cued by non-cognitive external input. (Sutton, Harris, Keil, & Barnier).

Sutton’s project, they say, ‘can be undertaken while leaving much of the cognitive psychology of memory as the study of processes that take place, essentially without exception, within nervous systems’ (2008, p.179). 

So, why do Sutton, et al., want to disagree with us?  We seem to be on the same page.

Findley & Gilchrist on Active Vision 2

From Active Vision, p. 1

A Martian ethologist observing humans using their visual systems would almost certainly include in their report back: 'they move these small globes around a lot and that's how they see'.
     The starting point for this book is an acceptance of the premise of that ethologist. We believe that movements of the eyeballs are a fundamental feature of vision. This viewpoint is not widely current. Many texts on vision do not even mention that the eye can move. In this chapter, we try to outline the reasons why most work on vision pays so little attention to the mobility of the eyes and set out how we feel this balance should be redressed.

As I mentioned earlier, the parts of their book that I have read have been very interesting.  My only reservation is the extent to which they may overstate the heterodoxy of their approach.  One can get a sense of the extent to which orthodoxy embraces their view by a quick survey of the experimental work they discuss.  There is a lot of it and they have not done it all.  There seems to me to be a good body of research on active vision.  So, it seems to me that they are (understandably) just being  a bit overly enthusiastic in marketing their work.

Future posts 12/3/2010

For next week, I'm going to finish up with a few posts on Sutton's paper, then turn to Menary's "The holy grail of cognitivism: a response to Adams and Aizawa".  Menary seems to really take us to the woodshed, but I'll argue that appearances are misleading.

I'll also post a few comments on Gibson's (1979) treatment of the retinal image.  The short of it is he thinks that postulating a retinal image leads to a mental homunculus.  (Hence all the inferentialist denials of homunculi.)

I have some posts on TSRM in the hopper, but I don't have the whole paper under control.  Moveover, my post topics have not been all that focused this past week or so, so I'm hoping to get a coherent package of posts on TSRM together in the next two weeks.

A&A's Concession to Complementarity

Here is what Sutton, et al., have to say about the A&A concession to complementarity:

After quoting Clark (1998) and Sutton’s (2010) exposition of the complementarity principle, Adams and Aizawa write ‘We agree with this completely’. We are delighted that they accept the basic claims of the complementarity argument.

But, that doesn't get our view right.  We concede that there is a complementarity between brain processes and environmental processes, but we do not concede an argument from complementarity of brain and environmental processes to extended cognitive processes.  So, we do not accept the basic claims of the complementarity argument.  Consider the text of The Bounds of Cognition,

“Second-wave” extended cognition, however, is based on what Sutton calls a ‘complementarity principle”: 

in extended cognitive systems, external states and processes need not mimic or replicate the formats, dynamics, or functions of inner states and processes.  Rather, different components of the overall (enduring or temporary) system can play quite different roles and have different properties while coupling in collective and complementary contributions to flexible thinking and acting” (Sutton, forthcoming)

We agree with this completely.  Only, we do not think this in any way supports the hypothesis that cognitive processes extend from the brain into the body and environment.  Many of the ideas we have developed in previous chapters should make it clear why.  (Adams & Aizawa, 2008, p. 145).

The A&A view is that there is complementarity, but that's no reason to believe in HEC.  One should, however, bear in mind that A&A draw a distinction between the hypothesis of extended cognitive systems and the hypothesis of extended cognition (or hypothesis of extended cognitive processes).

Findley & Gilchrist on Active Vision 1

From the back over of Active Vision.

Active Vision
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LOOKING AND SEEING
More than one third of the human brain is devoted to the processes of seeing vision is after all the main way in which we gather information about the world. But human vision is a dynamic process during which the eyes continually sample the environment. Where most books on vision consider it as a passive activity, this book is unique in focusing on vision as an 'active' process. It goes beyond most accounts of vision where the focus is on seeing, to provide an integrated account of seeing AND looking.
     The book starts by pointing out the weaknesses in our traditional approaches to vision and the reason we need this new framework. It then gives a thorough description of basic details of the visual and oculomotor systems necessary to understand active vision. The book then goes on to show how this approach can give a new perspective on visual attention, and how it has progressed in the areas of visual orienting, reading, visual search, scene perception and neuropsychology. Finally, the book summarizes progress by showing how the active vision approach sheds new light on the old problem of how we maintain perception of a stable visual world.

Although I've only read a fraction of the book, it seems to me that when Findley & Gilchrist talk about active vision, they think of vision as both involving eye and body movements and mechanisms for these as well as active computational mechanisms.  So, they think that vision is active in the two senses to which Gregory alludes.

Need to Procrastinate? Find your Erdős Number

Here.

Thanks to Pete Mandik for the cool link.

Block's Review of Damasio's Self Comes to Mind

In the NYT here.

Sutton's Project and Intracranialism

Sutton’s project, they say, ‘can be undertaken while leaving much of the cognitive psychology of memory as the study of processes that take place, essentially without exception, within nervous systems’ (2008, p.179). We disagree: this reversion to internalism is not an implication of Sutton’s view. (Sutton, Harris, Keil, and Barnier, forthcoming, pp. 8-9).

I think there is a misinterpretation here.  The A&A claim (as one can see from the fragment that Sutton, et al., quote right there) is that Sutton's project can be undertaken ...  It is not that Sutton's project requires or implies that cognitive psychology of memory is, or must be, the study of processes that take place, essentially without exception, within nervous systems.  So, the earlier comment Sutton, et al., made on this score is not a mere typo or accidental infelicity in wording.  They seem genuinely to have mistaken the A&A claim.