Cognition

I am a philosopher who works in the areas of cognitive science, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind. On this site you will find information about my work.

Antonio Damasio is an internationally recognized leader in neuroscience. His research has helped to elucidate the neural basis for the emotions and has shown that emotions play a central role in social cognition and decision-making.

According to Clark, the dynamic loops through which mind and world interact are not merely instrumental. The cycle of activity that runs from brain through body and world and back again actually constitutes cognition. The mind, on this account, is not bounded by the biological organism but extends into the environment of that organism.

Philosophers such as Berkeley, and Hume, and early experimental psychologists, such as Wundt and James, understood ideas in general to be mental images, and today it is very widely believed that much imagery functions as mental representations (or mental models), playing an important role in memory and thinking. Indeed, some have gone so far as to suggest that images are best understood as by definition a form of inner, mental or neural representation; in the case of hypnagogic and hypnapompic imagery, however, it is not representational at all. Others, however, reject the view that the image experience may be identical with (or directly caused by) any such representation in the mind or the brain; their case, however, still needs to take account of the non-representational forms of imagery.

Walter J. Freeman (born January 30, 1927) is an American biologist, theoretical neuroscientist and philosopher who has conducted pioneering research in how brains generate meaning. His main body of research has been on the perception of rabbits using electroencephalography. Based on a theoretical framework of neurodynamics that includes chaos theory, he believed that the currency of brains is primarily meaning and only secondarily information.

The influential critique of the ontological assumptions of computationalist and representationalist cognitive science, as well as artificial intelligence, made by philosopher Hubert Dreyfus has marked new directions for integration of neurosciences with an embodied ontology. The work of Dreyfus has influenced cognitive scientists and neuroscientists to study phenomenology and embodied cognitive science and/or enactivism. One of such cases is neuroscientist Walter Freeman, whose neurodynamical analysis has a marked Merleau-Pontyian approach. However, recent trends on the matter appear to reject Dreyfus' interpretation of Husserl while at the same time maintaining a high interest in the integration of Husserlian phenomenology into the sciences of mind, as demonstrated by Evan Thompson's recent work.

Embodied Cognitive Science is an interdisciplinary field of research, the aim of which is to explain the mechanisms underlying intelligent behavior. It comprises three main methodologies: 1) the modeling of psychological and biological systems in a holistic manner that considers the mind and body as a single entity, 2) the formation of a common set of general principles of intelligent behavior, and 3) The experimental use of robotic agents in controlled environments.

The embodied mind thesis is opposed to other theories of cognition, such as cognitivism, computationalism and Cartesian dualism. The idea has roots in Kant and 20th century continental philosophy (such as Merleau-Ponty). The modern version depends on insights drawn from recent research in linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, robotics and neurobiology.

In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another, for example, understanding quantity in terms of directionality (e.g. "prices are rising"). A conceptual domain can be any coherent organization of human experience. The regularity with which different languages employ the same metaphors, which often appear to be perceptually based, has led to the hypothesis that the mapping between conceptual domains corresponds to neural mappings in the brain.

If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (so we claim) part of the cognitive process. Cognitive processes ain't (all) in the head!

via-fconil

Since the pure concepts of the understanding, or categories, are characteristics of all objects in general, they can never be associated with the image of any specific, particular, individual object. "Since they are pure, they cannot be pictures..."[32] "Yet there must be some connection between the abstract idea and the experienced world to which the idea is expected to apply..."[33] "In order for the pure categories to have objective validity (and not merely subjective validity) they must be related to sensibility."[34]

A vantagem da Teoria de Mudança Representacional é de que ela especifica as condições (já comprovadas experimentalmente) pelas quais podemos mudar a representação de um problema, e consequentemente, gerar o insight.

He argued for a revised version of Kant's notion of the schema as the crucial imaginative link between our concrete perceptions of an object (e.g. my dog Fido) and our experience of categories (the class of things called dogs). However, where Kant wanted schemata to serve as a bridge between non-empirical concepts and perceptual images, Johnson maintained that image schema are regularly recurring embodied patterns of experience that are acquired during the course of early child development. Such schemata are image-like in that they are analogic neural activation patterns which preserve the topological contours of perceptual experience as a cohesive whole. Image schemata are not strictly 2D pictures, but a rich image-like whole that contain procedural as well as perceptual information about the object as a whole. Johnson explicitly states that image schemata are not restricted to visual modality and can be kinesthetic, auditory and cross-modal.