scholarly journals Minds, Brains, and Capacities: Situated Cognition and Neo-Aristotelianism

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-Johann Glock
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Situated Cognition ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Computational Process ◽  
Category Mistake ◽  
Central Tenet ◽  
Mereological Fallacy ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

This article compares situated cognition to contemporary Neo-Aristotelian approaches to the mind. The article distinguishes two components in this paradigm: an Aristotelian essentialism which is alien to situated cognition and a Wittgensteinian “capacity approach” to the mind which is not just congenial to it but provides important conceptual and argumentative resources in defending social cognition against orthodox cognitive (neuro-)science. It focuses on a central tenet of that orthodoxy. According to what I call “encephalocentrism,” cognition is primarily or even exclusively a computational process occurring inside the brain. Neo-Aristotelians accuse this claim of committing a “homuncular” (Kenny) or “mereological fallacy” (Bennett and Hacker). The article explains why the label “fallacy” is misleading, reconstructs the argument to the effect that encephalocentric applications of psychological predicates to the brain and its parts amount to a category mistake, and defends this argument against objections by Dennett, Searle, and Figdor. At the same time it criticizes the Neo-Aristotelian denial that the brain is the organ of cognition. It ends by suggesting ways in which the capacity approach and situated cognition might be combined to provide a realistic and ecologically sound picture of cognition as a suite of powers that flesh-and-blood animals exercise within their physical and social environments.

Consciousness

2020 ◽  
pp. 651-676
Author(s):  
David Clarke
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Neural Activity ◽  
Philosophical Study ◽  
Computational Process ◽  
The World ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

Our understanding of the numerous and significant problems of consciousness is inseparable from the often incommensurable disciplinary frameworks through which the topic has been approached. Music may offer a range of perspectives on consciousness, some issuing from interdisciplinary alliances (such as with cognitive psychology and neuroscience), others tapping into what is distinctively musical about music and what music shares with comparable aesthetic formations. Philosophically speaking, music might afford valuable complementary perspectives to approaches within the empirical sciences that see consciousness as essentially a computational process (Pinker, Dennett), or as solely an epiphenomenon of neural activity within the brain. This chapter will look to experiences of music that support views of the mind as extended and embodied, and that see consciousness as ecologically bound up with Being-in-the-world, to adopt notions from Gibson and Heidegger respectively. In this way, music studies can make a contribution to the philosophical study of consciousness from epistemological, phenomenological, and ontological standpoints.

scholarly journals Common Brain Regions with Distinct Patterns of Neural Responses during Mentalizing about Groups and Individuals

2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (9) ◽  
pp. 1406-1417 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Manuel Contreras ◽  
Jessica Schirmer ◽  
Mahzarin R. Banaji ◽  
Jason P. Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Social Cognition ◽  
Cognitive Processes ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Neural Responses ◽  
Physical Attributes ◽  
Medial Pfc ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

An individual has a mind; a group does not. Yet humans routinely endow groups with mental states irreducible to any of their members (e.g., “scientists hope to understand every aspect of nature”). But are these mental states categorically similar to those we attribute to individuals? In two fMRI experiments, we tested this question against a set of brain regions that are consistently associated with social cognition—medial pFC, anterior temporal lobe, TPJ, and medial parietal cortex. Participants alternately answered questions about the mental states and physical attributes of individual people and groups. Regions previously associated with mentalizing about individuals were also robustly responsive to judgments of groups, suggesting that perceivers deploy the same social-cognitive processes when thinking about the mind of an individual and the “mind” of a group. However, multivariate searchlight analysis revealed that several of these regions showed distinct multivoxel patterns of response to groups and individual people, suggesting that perceivers maintain distinct representations of groups and individuals during mental state inferences. These findings suggest that perceivers mentalize about groups in a manner qualitatively similar to mentalizing about individual people, but that the brain nevertheless maintains important distinctions between the representations of such entities.

scholarly journals Why to Study the Brain

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Ruggero Micheletto
Keyword(s):  
Computer Algorithm ◽  
Computational Process ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain ◽  
The Universe

The brain is the ultimate computational machine in the universe. Despite what was thought about the brain decades and centuries ago, now it is well understood that the brain is a calculator, a machine that does computational things. In other words the brain is something that takes information in its input, elaborates it and then spit-out some result in form of information or actions. Many centuries ago, the brain was the location of the mind. The mind was considered like a mysterious entity where our thought, our consciousness and our feeling resided. The definition of mind of course is still valid today, in some sense. What has changed is the fact that now we know that the mind is the results of a computational process. A very, complex process, presumably a stochastic one, but as far as we know, something that we can define as a computer “algorithm” is running inside our brains. Data are processes in a way that is not yet completely clear, and the result is our entire behavior, our thoughts our actions and our perception of reality

Lighting Up the Brain to Illuminate the Mind

2004 ◽  
Vol 49 (6) ◽  
pp. 713-716
Author(s):  
Ellen S. Berscheid
Keyword(s):  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

How Does the Brain Make the Mind? We Do Not Know.

PsycCRITIQUES ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 61 (32) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher A. Was
Keyword(s):  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

Big Heads title page

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
vernon thornton
Keyword(s):  
Title Page ◽  
Language Of Thought ◽  
Correct Version ◽  
Evolutionary Context ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

A description of of the mind and its relationship to the brain, set in an evolutionary context. Introduction of a correct version of 'language-of-thought' called 'thinkish'.

Zombies and Dolls

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcello Massimini ◽  
Giulio Tononi
Keyword(s):  
Body Problem ◽  
Thought Experiments ◽  
Turing Test ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Mind Body Problem ◽  
The Hard Problem ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain

This chapter uses thought experiments and practical examples to introduce, in a very accessible way, the hard problem of consciousness. Soon, machines may behave like us to pass the Turing test and scientists may succeed in copying and simulating the inner workings of the brain. Will all this take us any closer to solving the mysteries of consciousness? The reader is taken to meet different kind of zombies, the philosophical, the digital, and the inner ones, to understand why many, scientists and philosophers alike, doubt that the mind–body problem will ever be solved.

scholarly journals Agency, Responsibility, Selves, and the Mechanical Mind

Philosophies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Fiorella Battaglia
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Technology ◽  
Extended Mind ◽  
Human Machine Interaction ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Legal Perspective ◽  
Area Of Concern ◽  
Third Person Perspective ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Brain

Moral issues arise not only when neural technology directly influences and affects people’s lives, but also when the impact of its interventions indirectly conceptualizes the mind in new, and unexpected ways. It is the case that theories of consciousness, theories of subjectivity, and third person perspective on the brain provide rival perspectives addressing the mind. Through a review of these three main approaches to the mind, and particularly as applied to an “extended mind”, the paper identifies a major area of transformation in philosophy of action, which is understood in terms of additional epistemic devices—including a legal perspective of regulating the human–machine interaction and a personality theory of the symbiotic connection between human and machine. I argue this is a new area of concern within philosophy, which will be characterized in terms of self-objectification, which becomes “alienation” following Ernst Kapp’s philosophy of technology. The paper argues that intervening in the brain can affect how we conceptualize the mind and modify its predicaments.

The brain as a mediator of the mind and the world

Cortex ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 45 (7) ◽  
pp. 904-905
Author(s):  
Zhicheng Lin
Keyword(s):  
The World ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain
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