Information Processing Models Don't Explain Autonomy?

Thompson and Stapleton write,

The enactive approach regards these information-processing models as limited.  From the enactive perspective, their problem is fundamental: they do not explain autonomy hence cannot explain cognition. 

     Information-processing models of the mind leave unexplained the autonomous organization proper to cognitive beings because they treat cognitive systems as heteronomous systems.  ... These models characterize cognitive systems in terms of informational inputs and outputs instead of the operational closure of their constituent processes.  As a result, they do not explain how certain processes actively generate and sustain an identity that also constitutes an intrinsically normative way of being in the world. (Thompson and Stapleton, 2010, p. 28).

This is one I just don't get.  I don't see the argument here.  So, let us grant T&S the idea that cognitive processes are personal level processes and that autonomy is an organismal level property.  Now, of course, one does not have to explain the whole of the organism by appeal only to one of its components, namely, the brain.  But, I-P approaches can appeal to other components of a person beside the brain, e.g. the parts of the body. Indeed, there are many areas where the properties and processes of a system are explained in terms of the properties and processes of its components.  Haugeland (who appears to be sympathetic to enactivist ideas) describes this kind of approach in his "Mind Embodied and Embedded", but it is also familiar from Rob Cummins' account of functional analysis and Machamer, Darden, and Craver's theory of mechanistic explanation.  And, there is also Craver's Explaining the Brain.  It seems as though T&S suppose that the only way I-P theories can explain autonomy is by limiting their attention to the brain.  But, that is not right.  In fact, it is hard to believe that this is what they can be assuming.  So, what is going on here?

Maiese Review of Clark's Supersizing

Not sure how long this has been out, but the review in Mind is here.

Who Supports Revolutionary EC? 7

Thompson and Stapleton:

What goes on strictly inside the head never as such counts as a cognitive process.  It counts only as a participant in a cognitive process that exists as a relation between the system and its environment.  (Thompson and Stapleton, 2010, p. 26).

Given that Thompson and Stapleton are, or at least appear to be, revolutionaries regarding any kind of intracranial cognition.  We should expect an argument that there is none such.  Tune in tomorrow...

Farina Review of Clark's Supersizing

Available here.

How do these fit?

Thompson and Stapleton write,

Of course, what goes on inside the system is crucial for enabling the system's cognitive or sense-making relation to its environment, but to call internal process as such cognitive is to confuse levels of discourse or to make a category mistake (neurons do not think and feel; people and animals do).  (Thompson and Stapleton, 2010, p. 26).

Personally, I don't put that much stake in worries about category mistakes for the reasons I think are well-fleshed out by Searle and Dennett in Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language. (And, the rhetoric is somewhat misleading, since one might say that, while neurons probably do not think and feel, perhaps the whole brain does.) But, how is this category mistake idea to be reconciled with this:

Attention to the inseparability of emotion and cognition is an emerging trend in cognitive science.  For example, Marc Lewis (2005) argues that appraisal and emotion processes are thoroughly interdependent at both psychological and neural levels.  ... (ibid, p. 26).

and this:

In a recent review, Pessoa (2008) provides extensive evidence from neuroscience that supports this view of the neural underpinnings of emotion and cognition (p. 27).

It's pretty hard to catch a philosopher in an outright contradiction, but the tension is obvious.  How can one assert that there is evidence that neural cognitive processes and neural emotive processes are integrated, when it is a category mistake (i.e. nonsense) to talk about neural cognitive processes?

Is sense-making cognition?

Thompson and Stapleton write,

Whether we choose to call the sense-making of bacteria cognitive or proto-cognitive is not something we need to dispute here.  ... The important point is that a living organism is a system capable of relating cognitively to the world ... because it is a sense-making system (Thompson and Stapleton, 2010, p. 24).

This seems to me to just talk around the issue.  Now, one should have some sympathy for not wanting to get into a terminological dispute.  Fine.  But, then why insist on saying that cognition is sense-making?  Thompson and Stapleton don't do that exactly, but it is not clear why anyone who resists the idea that sense-making is cognition would be willing to accept the claim that a living organism is a system capable of relatively cognitively to the world because it is a sense-making system.  This move seems to me merely to change the way in which the issue is framed, but not its substance.

Forthcoming posts

I'm thinking that for a blog to be successful, it has to be more interactive than this one has been.  So, I am hoping that my forthcoming posts on Thompson and Stapleton's paper, "Making sense of Sense-Making" will encourage my Toronto readers to chime in.  There are things in this paper I just don't get.

A Prediction of Chemero's Theory of Cognition?

In RECS, Chemero writes,

I take it that cognition is the ongoing, active maintenance of a robust animal-environment system, achieved by closely co-ordinated perception and action.  Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, p. 212.

So, is it a prediction of this theory that a normal human being who is subsequently completely immobilized by neuromuscular blockade (hence cannot act) and who has all cranial nerves severed (or whatever) (hence cannot perceive) not a cognitive agent?  That seems to be an implausible thing to predict.

It seems just like predicting that a computer with all of its peripherals (keyboard, mouse, monitor, speakers, etc.) removed is no longer a computer.

Chemero's reply to the C-C Fallacy

Chemero, 2009, pp. 31-32, claims that the C-C fallacy is only a fallacy when the coupling between agent and environment is linear.  "When the agent and environment are nonlinearly coupling, they, together, constitute a non-decomposable system, and when this is the case, the coupling-constitution fallacy is not a fallacy."

By "non-decomposable" Chemero means
"Nondecomposable, nonlinear systems can only be characterized using global collective variables and/or order parameters, variables or parameters of the system that summarize the behavior of the system's components".

Now, as mentioned in an earlier post, we need to distinguish an extended cognitive systems hypothesis from an extended cognitive processes hypothesis.

I know that it is common to say that "non-linear coupled dynamical systems are non-decomposable", but I'm not sure what that really means or why that matters for the c-c fallacy.  For example, take a double pendulum (somewhat different than was discussed in Bounds, p. 108f.)   You get elaborate equations of motion for this system.  So why is this non-decomposable and why does this mean that you cannot distinguish the two coupled things?  Why can we not distinguish the swinging process in the one pendulum from the swinging process in the other?

Chemero promises a more detailed discussion in other works, so maybe there is an answer there.

Chemero's statement of the coupling-constitution fallacy

Adams and Aizawa call this the coupling-constitution fallacy: they argue that the fact that a wide computational system is coupled to the environment does not imply that the environment is partly constitutive of the system (Chemero, 2009, p. 31)

 Close, but not exactly.  We run the argument on processes (and sometimes objects), but we concede the coupling-constitution arguments for systems. See Adams and Aizawa, (2008), chapters 6 and 7.  This has to do with our drawing a distinction between what we might call an extended cognitive systems hypothesis and an extended cognitive processes hypothesis.  The former (roughly) states that cognitive systems extend beyond the boundary of the brain, where the latter states that cognitive processes extend beyond the boundary of the brain.

But, also the objection is not framed exclusively in terms of computational systems, wide or otherwise.