Emergence

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Humphreys
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Downward Causation ◽  
Comprehensive Account ◽  
Weak Emergence ◽  
Vast Literature ◽  
Ontological Emergence

This chapter surveys contemporary theories of emergence and argues that no comprehensive account currently exists. It separates ontological emergence, epistemological emergence, and conceptual emergence, as well as discussing synchronic and diachronic forms of each. It further argues that the emphasis on emergence in the philosophy of mind has led to a neglect of diachronic emergence and that the contrast between reduction and emergence has reinforced that bias. Downward causation is assessed as being less of a problem for ontological emergence than usually supposed; recent presentations of weak emergence and of undecidability results are discussed. Universality and nonlinearity as sources of emergence are examined, as is the role of holism in emergence and skepticism about the existence of emergence. Finally, a tentative suggestion is made about how to bring order to this vast literature.

scholarly journals Temporal fine structure influences voicing confusions for consonant identification in multi-talker babble

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vibha Viswanathan ◽  
Barbara G. Shinn-Cunningham ◽  
Michael G. Heinz
Keyword(s):  
Fine Structure ◽  
Cochlear Implants ◽  
Background Noise ◽  
Speech Intelligibility ◽  
Temporal Fine Structure ◽  
Vast Literature ◽  
Listening Environments ◽  
Intact Condition ◽  
Speech Content

To understand the mechanisms of speech perception in everyday listening environments, it is important to elucidate the relative contributions of different acoustics cues in transmitting phonetic content. Previous studies suggest that the energy envelopes of speech convey most speech content, while the temporal fine structure (TFS) can aid in segregating target speech from background noise. Despite the vast literature on TFS and speech intelligibility, the role of TFS in conveying additional speech content over what envelopes convey in complex acoustic scenes is poorly understood. The present study addresses this question using online psychophysical experiments to measure consonant identification in multi-talker babble for intelligibility-matched intact and 64-channel envelope-vocoded stimuli. Consonant confusion patterns revealed that listeners had a greater tendency in the vocoded (versus intact) condition to be biased towards reporting that they heard an unvoiced consonant, despite envelope and place cues being largely preserved. This result was replicated when babble instances were varied across independent experiments, suggesting that TFS conveys important voicing cues over what envelopes convey in multi-talker babble, a masker that is ubiquitous in everyday environments. This finding has implications for assistive listening devices that do not currently provide TFS cues, such as cochlear implants.

scholarly journals The potential role of illness expectations in the progression of medical diseases

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Pagnini
Keyword(s):  
Physical Reality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Mediating Effects ◽  
Vast Literature ◽  
Nocebo Effects ◽  
Behavior Modifications ◽  
Implicit And Explicit ◽  
Physical Changes ◽  
Medical Symptoms

Abstract To what extent can one’s mind promote direct changes to the body? Can one’s beliefs about the body become a physical reality, without mediating effects from behaviors? Specifically, can medical symptoms and the course of a disease be directly affected by a person’s mindset about the illness? There is a vast literature about placebo and nocebo effects, that promote physical changes by creating the expectation of a change through a primer (for example, a fake pill). Placebos, however, often imply deception, or at least ambiguity, to be effective. The concept of Illness Expectation describes the expectations, both implicit and explicit, that a person who has received a diagnosis makes about the course of the disease. It can be characterized by different degrees of rigidity, and it is argued here that these expectations can ultimately lead to changes in the disease progression. These changes may happen through behavior modifications, or through a non-behavioral pathway, which may deserve exploration efforts from the scientific literature.

scholarly journals Top-down causation: an integrating theme within and across the sciences?

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-3 ◽  
Author(s):  
George F. R. Ellis ◽  
Denis Noble ◽  
Timothy O'Connor
Keyword(s):  
Downward Causation ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Adaptive Selection ◽  
The World ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
Holistic Concept ◽  
Scientific Context ◽  
Semantic Frames ◽  
Whole Systems

This issue of the journal is focused on ‘top-down (downward) causation'. The words in this title, however, already raise or beg many questions. Causation can be of many kinds. They form our ways of ordering our scientific understanding of the world, all the way from the reductive concept of cause as elementary objects exerting forces on each other, through to the more holistic concept of attractors towards which whole systems move, and to adaptive selection taking place in the context of an ecosystem. As for ‘top’ and ‘down’, in the present scientific context, these are clearly metaphorical, as some of the articles in this issue of the journal make clear. Do we therefore know what we are talking about? The meeting at the Royal Society on which this set of papers is based included philosophers as well as scientists, and some of those (Jeremy Butterfield, Barry Loewer, Alan Love, Samir Okasha and Eric Scerri) have contributed articles to this issue. We would like also to thank those (Claus Kiefer, Peter Menzies, Jerome Feldman and David Papineau) who contributed only to the discussion meeting. Their contributions were also valuable, both at the meeting and by influencing the articles that have been written by others. We include a glossary with this introduction, composed by one of us (O'Connor). The clarification of the use of words and their semantic frames is an important role of philosophy, and this was evident in the discussions at the meeting and is now evident in many of the articles published here. Moreover, philosophical analysis is not limited to the papers by the professional philosophers. The idea of top-down causation is intimately related to concepts of emergence; indeed, it is a key factor in strong theories of emergence.

Fauré and the Effable: Theatricality, Reflection, and Semiosis in the mélodies

2015 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 497-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Rumph
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Song Cycle ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Charles Sanders Peirce ◽  
Musical Experience ◽  
Gabriel Faure ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
French Composers ◽  
Musical Hermeneutics

Gabriel Fauré plays a leading role in Vladimir Jankélévitch's influential critique of musical hermeneutics, La musique et l'ineffable (1961). For the French philosopher, Fauré's works epitomized music that resists verbal interpretation and demands absorption in temporal experience. Yet, like many French composers, Fauré drew upon theatrical song in his mélodies, introducing a performative element that encourages distance as well as absorption. These hybrid mélodies invite both singer and audience to listen critically, savoring the performance within the performance; indeed, these songs offer up music itself as an object of reflection. This article reassesses Jankélévitch's idea of ineffability in light of Fauré's use of diegetic song, questioning the apparent claim that musical experience is incompatible with critical reflection. An introductory analysis of La musique et l'ineffable explores the crucial role of Henri Bergson's philosophy of mind, especially his theory of perception, and demonstrates the inseparable role of both metaphysical cognition and representation in Bergsonian phenomenology. The following song analyses illustrate the need for both reflective and immersive listening. An examination of two settings from Théophile Gautier's La comédie de la mort reveals how Fauré responded to the poet's writerly play between lyric and performative modes, while a longer analysis of the song cycle La chanson d'Ève, based upon a stage ballad, demonstrates how Fauré exploited theatrical song to portray Eve's fall into self-consciousness. Finally, the conclusion proposes a musical hermeneutics compatible with Jankélévitch's idea of ineffability, one informed by the semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce.

scholarly journals Embodiment and the Philosophy of Mind

1998 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 35-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Clark
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Real World ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Local Environment ◽  
Inner Model ◽  
The World ◽  
Cognitive Scientist ◽  
Biological Problem ◽  
The Mind

Cognitive science is in some sense the science of the mind. But an increasingly influential theme, in recent years, has been the role of the physical body, and of the local environment, in promoting adaptive success. No right-minded cognitive scientist, to be sure, ever claimed that body and world were completely irrelevant to the understanding of mind. But there was, nonetheless, an unmistakeable tendency to marginalize such factors: to dwell on inner complexity whilst simplifying or ignoring the complex inner-outer interplays that characterize the bulk of basic biological problem-solving. This tendency was expressed in, for example, the development of planning algorithms that treated real-world action as merely a way of implementing solutions arrived at by pure cognition (more recent work, by contrast, allows such actions to play important computational and problem-solving roles). It also surfaced in David Marr's depiction of the task of vision as the construction of a detailed threedimensional image of the visual scene. For possession of such a rich inner model effectively allows the system to ‘throw away’ the world and to focus subsequent computational activity on the inner model alone.

scholarly journals The Evolution of Moral Cognition

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Tony James Scott
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Extended Cognition ◽  
Moral Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Capacities ◽  
Inheritance Model ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Evolution Of Mind ◽  
Dual Inheritance

<p>Many modern approaches to the evolution of mind have claimed that the fundamental drivers of our cognitive capacities and cultures are genetically specified psychological adaptations, which evolved in response to evolutionary pressures deep within our lineage's history. Many of our cognitive capacities are innate. Recent approaches to moral cognition have similarly argued that moral cognition is innate. In this thesis, I argue that even though our capacity for moral cognising is an adaptation, it is a learned adaptation. Moral cognition is not innate. In arguing this thesis I will question many of the assumptions of traditional cognitive science and evolutionary approaches to the mind. By incorporating theory and evidence from cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, I apply the explanatory frameworks of embodied and extended cognition to the domain of morality: moral cognition is both embodied and extended cognition. This places particular importance on the role of our bodies and world in the fundamental structuring and scaffolding of the development and execution of moral cognition. Putting this in an evolutionary framework, I develop a dual inheritance model of the non-nativist evolution of moral cognition focusing on the roles of niche construction, biased learning and active learning in the transfer of moral phenotypes between generations. Morality is a learned adaptation that evolved through the dynamic and reciprocal interaction between genes and culture.</p>

Psychotherapy in An Age of Neuroscience

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Paris
Keyword(s):  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Common Mental Disorders ◽  
Scientific Evidence ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Clinical Problem ◽  
Social Interventions ◽  
Vast Literature

Psychiatry, once proud of its biopsychosocial model, has now adopted a neuroscience-based approach that strongly favors psychopharmacological treatments and downplays the role of psychotherapies (or social interventions). This kind of practice can be sufficient for the psychoses, but it is neither evidence-based nor beneficial for patients with common mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, substance use, and personality disorders. Current practice derives from a theoretical model in which psychiatry is viewed primarily as an application of neuroscience, with little reference to the vast literature on psychology, social sciences, and psychotherapy. This book reviews research bearing on these issues, and it shows why existing data support a different set of conclusions from those held by many experts and most practitioners. Common mental disorders often require psychological interventions. This book reviews the evidence supporting the prescription of psychotherapy in these disorders. It shows how this option, particularly when time-limited, is both accessible and cost-effective. It discusses why psychiatrists are not offering psychological treatments, as well as the problem of access to these interventions. It also discusses why psychotherapy, like psychopharmacology, should not be considered a panacea for every kind of clinical problem but, rather, should be prescribed with care based on a large body of scientific evidence.

Emergence, Downward Causation, and No Brute Facts in Biological Systems

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Argyris Arnellos ◽  
Charbel El-Hani
Keyword(s):  
Biological Systems ◽  
Downward Causation ◽  
Organizational Characteristics ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Biological Organization ◽  
Ontological Dimension ◽  
Efficient Causation ◽  
Ontological Emergence ◽  
Formal Causation

This chapter explains emergence in biological organizations through a conception of ontological emergence according to which certain types of dynamical organizations possess irreducible properties that are nevertheless derivable from the substrate. The authors concentrate on the ontological dimension of emergence as the irreducibly causal configuration exhibited by all organizations that manifest persistence and stability in their environment. This is a conception of ontological emergence where the locus of novel causal powers is the configuration of constituents into stable dynamic organizations. There is nothing brute to be explained in the emergence of causal properties in a biological organization; all that is needed is the consideration of its organizational characteristics in terms of same-level and inter-level causal interactions, the type of which is of formal causation for interactions among the constituents of the organization and of efficient causation for interactions among the constituents and the micro-properties of their surrounding emergence base.

The Interoceptive Mind

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Body ◽  
Mental Life ◽  
Traditional Role ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
Cognitive Neurosciences ◽  
Affect And Cognition

This volume focuses on the role of interoception for mental life and lived experience, from the perspectives of neurosciences, psychological sciences, and philosophy. Interoception is the body-to-brain axis of signals originating from the internal body and visceral organs (such as gastrointestinal, respiratory, hormonal, and circulatory systems), and plays a unique role in ensuring homeostasis. This volume goes beyond the traditional role of interoception for homeostasis and offers a state-of-the-art overview of and new insights into the role of interoception for mental life, awareness, subjectivity, affect, and cognition. Structured across three parts, this multidisciplinary volume highlights the role that interoceptive signals and awareness thereof play in our mental life (Part I), considers deficits in interoceptive processing and awareness in various mental health conditions but also the equally important role of interoception for well-being (Part II), and approaches interoception from a theoretical and philosophical perspective, representing a highly novel departure for philosophy of mind and subjectivity (Part III). The chapters share a common concern for what it means to experience oneself, for the crucial role of emotions, and for issues of health and well-being, discussed on the joint basis of our bodily existence and interoception. The research presented here will hopefully accelerate the much-anticipated coming of age of interoceptive research in psychology, cognitive neurosciences, and philosophy.

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