Evolutionary Path Making and Natural Drift

This chapter demonstrates how unique histories of structural coupling can be understood from the vantage point of evolution. To this end, it provides a critique of the adaptationist view of evolution as a process of progressive fitness, and articulates an alternative view of evolution as natural drift. These unique histories of coupling, which enact incommensurable kinds of “color space,” should not be explained as optimal adaptations to different regularities in the world. Instead, they should be explained as the result of different histories of natural drift. Moreover, since organism and environment cannot be separated but are in fact codetermined in evolution as natural drift, the environmental regularities that one associates with these various color spaces must ultimately be specified in tandem with the perceptually guided activity of the animal.

Enaction: Embodied Cognition

This chapter explains embodied action. The term embodied highlights two points: first, that cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities, and second, that these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural context. The term action emphasizes that sensory and motor processes, perception and action, are fundamentally inseparable in lived cognition. Indeed, the two are not merely contingently linked in individuals; they have also evolved together. The chapter then discusses enaction. In a nutshell, the enactive approach consists of two points: (1) perception consists in perceptually guided action and (2) cognitive structures emerge from the recurrent sensorimotor patterns that enable action to be perceptually guided.

The Cartesian Anxiety

This chapter examines directly the feeling that arises when one senses that one can no longer trust the world as a fixed and stable reference point. The nervousness that one feels is rooted in “the Cartesian anxiety.” The anxiety is best put as a dilemma: either one has a fixed and stable foundation for knowledge, or one cannot escape some sort of darkness, chaos, and confusion. Ultimately, this feeling of anxiety arises from the craving for an absolute ground. When this craving cannot be satisfied, the only other possibility seems to be nihilism or anarchy. The search for a ground can take many forms, but given the basic logic of representationism, the tendency is to search either for an outer ground in the world or an inner ground in the mind. By treating mind and world as opposed subjective and objective poles, the Cartesian anxiety oscillates endlessly between the two in search of a ground.

What Do We Mean “Human Experience”?

This chapter examines human experience. It is necessary to have a disciplined perspective on human experience that can enlarge the domain of cognitive science to include direct experience. Such a perspective already exists in the form of mindfulness/awareness meditation. Mindfulness/awareness practice, phenomenological philosophy, and science are human activities; each is an expression of human embodiment. The chapter then looks at the Buddhist method of examining experience called mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness/awareness meditation can provide a natural bridge between cognitive science and human experience. Particularly impressive is the convergence among some of the main themes of Buddhist doctrine, phenomenology, and cognitive science—themes concerning the self and the relation between subject and object.

Selfless Minds

This chapter looks at Marvin Minsky's and Seymour Papert's recent proposal to study the mind as a society, which takes the patchwork architecture of cognition as a central element. Minsky and Papert present a view in which minds consist of many “agents” whose abilities are quite circumscribed: each agent taken individually operates only in a microworld of small-scale or “toy” problems. This model of the mind as a society of numerous agents is intended to encompass a multiplicity of approaches to the study of cognition, ranging from distributed, self-organizing networks to the classical, cognitivist conception of localized, serial symbolic processing. The society of mind purports to be, then, something of a middle way in present cognitive science. This middle way challenges a homogenous model of the mind, whether in the form of distributed networks at one extreme or symbolic processers at the other extreme.

A Fundamental Circularity: In the Mind of the Reflective Scientist

This chapter describes cognitive science. In its widest sense, the term cognitive science is used to indicate that the study of mind is in itself a worthy scientific pursuit. At this time, cognitive science is not yet established as a mature science. It does not have a clearly agreed upon sense of direction and a large number of researchers constituting a community. Rather, it is really more of a loose affiliation of disciplines than a discipline of its own. Interestingly, an important pole is occupied by artificial intelligence—thus, the computer model of the mind is a dominant aspect of the entire field. The other affiliated disciplines are generally taken to consist of linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, sometimes anthropology, and the philosophy of mind. Each discipline would give a somewhat different answer to the question of what is mind or cognition, an answer that would reflect its own specific concerns.

The Middle Way

This chapter argues that contemporary Western views have been unable to articulate together the loss of foundations for the self and for the world. There is no methodological basis for a middle way between objectivism and subjectivism (both forms of absolutism). In cognitive science and in experimental psychology, the fragmentation of the self occurs because the field is trying to be scientifically objective. Precisely because the self is taken as an object, like any other external object in the world, as an object of scientific scrutiny—precisely for that reason—it disappears from view. That is, the very foundation for challenging the subjective leaves intact the objective as a foundation. Ultimately, when contemporary traditions of thought discover groundlessness, it is viewed as negative, a breakdown of an ideal for doing science, for establishing philosophical truth with reason, or for living a meaningful life.

Symbols: The Cognitivist Hypothesis

This chapter explores cognitivism and the cognitivist hypothesis. The central intuition behind cognitivism is that intelligence—human intelligence included—so resembles computation in its essential characteristics that cognition can actually be defined as computations of symbolic representations. The cognitivist argument is that intelligent behavior presupposes the ability to represent the world as being certain ways. Another cognitivist claim is that the only way one can account for intelligence and intentionality is to hypothesize that cognition consists of acting on the basis of representations that are physically realized in the form of a symbolic code in the brain or a machine. Ultimately, the cognitivist hypothesis entails a very strong claim about the relations between syntax and semantics.

The I of the Storm

This chapter discusses the self. The tension between the ongoing sense of self in ordinary experience and the failure to find that self in reflection is of central importance in Buddhism—the origin of human suffering is just this tendency to grasp onto and build a sense of self, an ego, where there is none. As meditators catch glimpses of impermanence, selflessness, and suffering, and some inkling that the pervasiveness of suffering may have its origin in their own self-grasping, they may develop some real motivation and urgency to persevere in their investigation of mind. They try to develop a strong and stable insight and inquisitiveness into the moment to moment arising of mind. The search for how the self arises is thus a way of asking, “What and where is mind?” in a direct and personal way.

Laying Down a Path in Walking

This concluding chapter examines some of the ethical dimensions of groundlessness in relation to the concern with nihilism that is typical of much post-Nietzschean thought. In the humanities—in art, literature, and philosophy—the growing awareness of groundlessness has taken form not through a confrontation with objectivism but rather with nihilism, skepticism, and extreme relativism. Indeed, this concern with nihilism is typical of late-twentieth-century life. Its visible manifestations are the increasing fragmentation of life, the revival of and continuing adherence to a variety of religious and political dogmatisms, and a pervasive yet intangible feeling of anxiety, which writers depict so vividly. It is for this reason—and because nihilism and objectivism are actually deeply connected—that the chapter turns to consider in more detail the nihilistic extreme.