Continuity: Kinks Not Breaks

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel D. Hutto ◽  
Erik Myin
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Scientific Naturalism ◽  
The Hard Problem ◽  
Hard Problem Of Content ◽  
The Way

Chapter 6 sets out to show REC can allow for content-involving cognition in nature without itself falling foul of the Hard Problem of Content and without introducing unbridgeable evolutionary discontinuity or gaps in nature. Thus it crucially defuses critical concerns about REC’s NOC program in order to establish that it is a tenable way of explaining the how content-involving cognition arose and arises naturally, and where content can be found in nature. It then lays out the broad outlines of REC’s proposed explanation for the Natural Origins of Content – its NOC program that draws on Neo-Pragmatist resources and advocates the adoption of a Relaxed as opposed to Strict Scientific Naturalism. It advances a multi-storey explanation, involving kinks not breaks. This explains how content-involving cognition could have arisen through the mastery of special socio-cultural practices, providing new resources but without changing the fundamental character of cognition. Its basic sketch of how the NOC program might be pursued paves the way for further research.

Going Radical

2018 ◽  
pp. 94-116
Author(s):  
Daniel D. Hutto ◽  
Erik Myin
Keyword(s):  
Research Program ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Positive Research ◽  
The Hard Problem ◽  
Conceptual Revolution ◽  
Hard Problem Of Content

E-approaches to cognition—enactive, embodied, ecological—conceive of minds as fundamentally relational and interactive. They are often heralded as offering a new paradigm for thinking about the mental. Yet only the most radical versions of E-approaches—those that seek not to complement but to replace traditional cognitivist accounts of mind—have any prospect of ushering in a truly revolutionary rethink of the nature of cognition. This chapter considers whether such a conceptual revolution might really be in the cards. It identities the major options proposed by E-theorists, rating each in terms of degree of radicality. It reminds readers of the hard problem of content and reviews the range of options for handling it. It argues that “going radical” is one of the most attractive ways of dealing with the hard problem of content and that it is worth exploring the positive research program that going radical opens up.

Epilogue: Missing Information?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel D. Hutto ◽  
Erik Myin
Keyword(s):  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Informational Content ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Missing Information ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Positioning Systems ◽  
The Hard Problem ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Hard Problem Of Content

The epilogue takes a last look at the possibility that REC may be leaving out something explanatorily important because it says nothing about how the brain processes informational content. Focusing on a prominent case, it is demonstrated that REC has the resources to understand the groundbreaking research on positioning systems in rat brains. It is argued that rat brains can be informationally sensitive without processing informational content. No explanatory power is lost in adopting REC’s deflated explanation; but much is gained by doing so since it avoids the Hard Problem of Content. The chapter concludes by showing how REC’s proposed vision of neurodynamics is wholly compatible with its dynamical and extensive account of cognition; a vision of cognition that opens the door to broader lines of research in the cognitive sciences that taking into account the ways in which culture can permeate cognition.

Contemporary Echoes of the World Soul

2021 ◽  
pp. 320-342
Author(s):  
Valia Allori
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
Quantum Theory ◽  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Quantum Theories ◽  
The World ◽  
The Hard Problem ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

Quantum mechanics is a groundbreaking theory: it not only is extraordinarily empirically adequate but also is claimed to having shattered the classical paradigm of understanding the observer-observed distinction as well as the part-whole relation. This, together with other quantum features, has been taken to suggest that quantum theory can help one understand the mind-body relation in a unique way, in particular to solve the hard problem of consciousness along the lines of panpsychism. In this chapter, after having briefly presented panpsychism, Valia Allori discusses the main features of quantum theories and the way in which the main quantum theories of consciousness use them to account for conscious experience.

scholarly journals LINGUAGEM E ENATIVISMO

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcos Silva ◽  
Iana Cavalcanti ◽  
Hugo Mota
Keyword(s):  
Representational Content ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Linguistic Practices ◽  
The Hard Problem ◽  
Hard Problem Of Content ◽  
Internal Mental States

Language does not have to be held as a problem for radical enactivists. The scope objection usually presented to criticize enactivist explanations is a problem only if we have a referentialist and representationalist view of the nature of language. Here we present a normative hypothesis for the great question concerning the hard problem of content, namely, on how linguistic practices develop from minds without content. We carry representational content when we master inferential relations and we master inferential relations when we master normative relations, especially when we are introduced into frameworks of authorizations and prohibitions. Inspired by the anti-intellectualism of the later Wittgenstein and Brandom’s inferentialism, we present the hypothesis that language emerges from inferentially articulated action from normative elements and not from manipulation in internal mental states of contents fixed by reference to external things.

Reasons to REConceive

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel D. Hutto ◽  
Erik Myin
Keyword(s):  
Information Processing ◽  
Environmental Factors ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Cognitive Activity ◽  
Mental Content ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Cognitive Capacities ◽  
The Hard Problem ◽  
Basic Cognition ◽  
Hard Problem Of Content

Chapter 2 introduces REC’s Equal Partner Principle, according to which invoking neural, bodily, and environmental factors all make equally important contributions when it comes to explaining cognitive activity. In line with that principle, it is made clear how REC can accept that cognitive capacities depend on structural changes that occur inside organisms and their brains, without understanding such changes in information processing and representationalist terms. This chapter explicates the Hard Problem of Content, aka the HPC, as basis for a compelling argument for REC. The HPC is a seemingly intractable theoretical puzzle for defenders of unrestricted CIC. A straight solution to the HPC requires explaining how it is possible to get from informational foundations that are noncontentful to a theory of mental content using only the resources of a respectable explanatory naturalism that calls on the resources of the hard sciences. It is revealed how the need to deal with the HPC can be avoided by adopting REC’s revolutionary take on basic cognition, and why going this way has advantages over other possible ways of handling the HPC.

INCOMPLETE NATURE AND SELF - BODY PROBLEM: EMERGENTIST TRANSCENDENCE OF THE DUALISM OF SPIRIT AND MATTER

METOD ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 77-90
Author(s):  
Ivan Fomin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Body Problem ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Dynamic Coupling ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
David Chalmers ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
The Hard Problem ◽  
Material Information ◽  
The Way

The article presents an overview of the key arguments of Terrence Deacon's theory of how mind emerged from matter. Deacon’s emergentism is analyzed as a way of refocusing the «hard problem» of consciousness. He suggests considering the phenomenon of consciousness as a dynamic coupling of mutually constraining processes. Such coupling is the defining feature of the subjective self and other teleodynamic phenomena. So self cannot be found as something embodied in existing material substrates. Consciousness is not present in such substrates themselves, but in the way different processes unfolding in these substrates constrain each other. Deacon shows that even looking at the simplest forms of life (autogens) one can observe that in them each part, interacting with other parts, creates the whole, and the whole as a synergetic complex makes possible the reproduction of its parts. The same principle underlies the organization of subjective consciousness, as subjective consciousness is hierarchically entangled with other levels of sentience. Thus, Deacon's emergentism is an attempt to take seriously the problem of the interrelation of spirit and matter by not simply to disregarding explanations that refer to the spiritual substance, but by offering the models of consciousness, sentience and purposiveness that could convincingly solve fundamental questions about the nature of consciousness in an alternative way. It is also an attempt to avoid the «naturalistic dualism» of David Chalmers, which involves splitting material information into physical and phenomenal aspects. According to Deacon, in explaining subjective self, one can do without both Cartesian spiritual substance and Chalmers' phenomenal information, but then what is necessary is to acknowledge the significance of absential phenomena (the phenomena that are intrinsically existing in relation to something missing, separate or nonexistent).

scholarly journals How experimental neuroscientists can fix the hard problem of consciousness

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Klein ◽  
Andrew B Barron
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Second Order ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Experimental Project ◽  
The Hard Problem ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

Abstract For the materialist, the hard problem is fundamentally an explanatory problem. Solving it requires explaining why the relationship between brain and experience is the way it is and not some other way. We use the tools of the interventionist theory of explanation to show how a systematic experimental project could help move beyond the hard problem. Key to this project is the development of second-order interventions and invariant generalizations. Such interventions played a crucial scientific role in untangling other scientific mysteries, and we suggest that the same will be true of consciousness. We further suggest that the capacity for safe and reliable self-intervention will play a key role in overcoming both the hard and meta-problems of consciousness. Finally, we evaluate current strategies for intervention, with an eye to how they might be improved.

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