Cognition Without Neural Representation: Dynamics of a Complex System

This paper proposes an account of neurocognitive activity without leveraging the notion of neural representation. Neural representation is a concept that results from assuming that the properties of the models used in computational cognitive neuroscience (e.g., information, representation, etc.) must literally exist the system being modelled (e.g., the brain). Computational models are important tools to test a theory about how the collected data (e.g., behavioural or neuroimaging) has been generated. While the usefulness of computational models is unquestionable, it does not follow that neurocognitive activity should literally entail the properties construed in the model (e.g., information, representation). While this is an assumption present in computationalist accounts, it is not held across the board in neuroscience. In the last section, the paper offers a dynamical account of neurocognitive activity with Dynamical Causal Modelling (DCM) that combines dynamical systems theory (DST) mathematical formalisms with the theoretical contextualisation provided by Embodied and Enactive Cognitive Science (EECS).

Enactive Ethics: Difference Becoming Participation

Enactive cognitive science combines questions in epistemology, ontology, and ethics by conceiving of bodies as open-ended and mutually transforming through activity. While enaction is not a theory of ethics, it can contribute to its foundations. We present a schematization of enactive ideas that underlie traditional distinctions between Being, Knowing, and Doing. Ethics in this scheme begins in the relation between knowing and becoming. Critical of dichotomous thinking, we approach the questions of alterity and ethical reality. Alterity is relevant to the enactive approach, but not in the radical sense of transcendental arguments. We propose difference, instead, as a more generative concept. Following Simondon, we see norms and values manifest in webs of past and future acts together with their potentialities for becoming. We propose a transindividual concept of moral attunement that includes ethical know-how and consciousness raising. Through generative difference and attunement to configurations of becoming, enaction underpins an ethics of participation linking virtue ethics and ethics of care.

Mark Making and Human Becoming

This is a paper about mark making and human becoming. I will be asking what do marks do? How do they signify? What role do marks play in human becoming and the evolution of human intelligence? These questions cannot be pursued effectively from the perspective of any single discipline or ontology. Nonetheless, they are questions that archaeology has a great deal to contribute. They are also important questions, if not the least because evidence of early mark making constitutes the favoured archaeological mark of the ‘cognitive’ (in the ‘modern’ representational sense of the word). In this paper I want to argue that the archaeological predilection to see mark making as a potential index of symbolic representation often blind us to other, more basic dimensions of the cognitive life and agency of those marks as material signs. Drawing on enactive cognitive science and Material Engagement Theory I will show that early markings, such as the famous engravings from Blombos cave, are above all the products of kinesthetic dynamics of a non-representational sort that allow humans to engage and discover the semiotic affordances of mark making opening up new possibilities of enactive material signification. I will also indicate some common pitfalls in the way archaeology thinks about the ‘cognitive’ that needs overcome.

Bridges and hobby-horses: John Stewart’s adventure of ideas

I briefly reflect on the work of John Stewart and his instrumental role in the development of enactive cognitive science, his outstanding ability to communicate across disciplines, and his research obsessions.

Meaningful Relations

This collection of works is a contribution to the current debates on the mind-body-problem. It discusses how mind and body make contact in sense-making processes from the point of view of enactive cognitive science and 4E approaches to cognition. It also offers a critical view on non-representational approaches to cognition. The book covers sociology, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, computer science and HRI, media studies, literature and cognitive science. It offers cutting-edge research both for students and for junior and senior researchers in the fields mentioned above.

Dimensions of Musical Creativity

Current literature on creative cognition has developed rich conceptual landscapes dedicated to the analysis of both individual and collective forms of creativity. This work has favored the emergence of unifying theories on domain-general creative abilities in which the main experiential, behavioral, computational, and neural aspects involved in everyday creativity are examined and discussed. But while such accounts have gained important analytical leverage for describing the overall conditions and mechanisms through which creativity emerges and operates, they necessarily leave contextual forms of creativity less explored. Among the latter, musical practices have recently drawn the attention of scholars interested in its creative properties as well as in the creative potential of those who engage with them. In the present article, we compare previously posed theories of creativity in musical and non-musical domains to lay the basis of a conceptual framework that mitigates the tension between (i) individual and collective and (ii) domain-general and domain-specific perspectives on creativity. In doing so, we draw from a range of scholarship in music and enactive cognitive science, and propose that creative cognition may be best understood as a process of skillful organism–environment adaptation that one cultivates endlessly. With its focus on embodiment, plurality, and adaptiveness, our account points to a structured unity between living systems and their world, disclosing a variety of novel analytical resources for research and theory across different dimensions of (musical) creativity.

Embodied Cognition and Perception: Dewey, Science and Skepticism

This article examines how Modern theories of mind remain even in some materialistic and hence ontologically anti-dualistic views; and shows how Dewey, anticipating Merleau-Ponty and 4E cognitive scientists, repudiates these theories. Throughout I place Dewey’s thought in the context of scientific inquiry, both recent and historical and including the cognitive as well as traditional sciences; and I show how he incorporated sciences of his day into his thought, while also anticipating enactive cognitive science. While emphasizing Dewey’s continued relevance, my main goal is to show how his scientifically informed account of perception and cognition combats skepticism propagated by certain scientific visions, exacerbated by commonplace notions about mind, that jointly suggest that human beings lack genuine access to reality.