A Theory of Immediate Awareness: Self-Organization and Adaptation in Natural Intelligence

ISBN-13: 9789048162512 / Angielski / Miękka / 2010 / 316 str.

M. Estep

Opis

This book presents a realist, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary theory of immediate awareness showing it is the most primitive cognitive network underlying all our natural intelligence. Including preattentive and attention processes, as well as primitive relations of the senses, imagination and memory, immediate awareness is a kind of knowing deeply embedded and interwoven throughout our multiple kinds of natural intelligence. It permits as well as drives our knowing how, our bodily intelligence. Against the Cartesian mind-body split found in earlier and current theories, the author shows how immediate awareness permits emergent properties of mind in multilayered primitive relations of touching and moving in bodily kinesthetic intelligence. Contrary to existing theories, she argues that sensation is not cognitively "neutral," nor does it require a "representation" in order to be accessible to cognitive processes. Dr. Estep presents empirical evidence and arguments that sensation of immediate awareness is itself cognitive and embedded within our sensory and somatosensory-motor processes.
The author's aim is to turn to a more geometric approach to natural intelligence, as opposed to the prevalent symbol-based view. In this approach, she uses random Boolean networks as a way of obtaining law-like properties of those primitive relations of immediate awareness in terms of dynamical systems theory. This demonstrates the properties of self-organization and adaptation of immediate awareness without committing one to a physicalist/materialist theory. It gives us a way of understanding core properties of our own inner conscious lives, and of understanding the smooth and seamless sensitivity of primitive sensory and somatosensory-motor awareness.
Dr. Estep's theory of immediate awareness also shows that the computational view of mind is wrong. Though our minds do classify, classification is not all they do. Our immediate awareness indexically selects sui generis objects that are unique and of no kind or class. The influence of nominalism and narrow naturalist theories have resulted in extremely narrow concepts of the human knowing mind and intelligence, leaving out immediate awareness altogether. We slip into subtle nominalist fallacies when we take our language metaphors &endash; and language itself &endash; too far.

Spis treści

Dedication. Contents. List Of Figures. Preface. Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1: The Problem of Immediate Awareness. 1.1. The Influence of Nominalism, Idealism, and Behaviorism. 1.2. A Place for Ontological Questions. 1.3. Historical Background of the Problem: The Dualist Legacy of Descartes' Crooked Question. 1.4. From The Linguistic Turn to the Cognitive Naturalistic Turn. 1.5. The Knowing That and Knowing How Distinction: Manner of a Performance and Multiple Intelligences. 1.6. The Limits of Representation (Classification): The Role of Indexicals and Unique Objects Present. 1.7. Analyze This. 1.8. The Indexical Operator, Unlike Any Other: Sui Generis Objects. 1.9. The Basic Computational Idea and Argument. 2: The Primitive Relations of Knowledge by Acquaintance. 2.1. A Realist Theory of Immediate Awareness. 2.2. Analysis of Experience: Russell's Knowledge by Acquaintance. 2.3. Acquaintance with Mathematical Objects: Problems with Unnameables, Nameability and the Berry Paradox. 2.4. The Primitive Relations. 2.5. The Concept of Image. 2.6. Imagination and Sensation Defined. 2.7. Primitive Acquaintance with Relations Themselves. 2.8. Summary. 3: Arguments Against Immediate Awareness: The Case of Naturalism. 3.1. Definitions of Certain Terms. 3.2. Non-Inferential Beliefs: Self-Evident Beliefs and a Vox Populi Theory of Knowledge. 3.3. Indeterminacy of Translation and Other Problems. 3.4. Are There Immaculate Sensations? 3.5. Matching Up Stimulations. 3.6. Are Meaning Structures Equivalent to Neural Structures? 3.7. Critique of Naturalist Theory of Knowledge. 3.8. Summary. 4: What Does the Evidence Show. 4.1. Problems with Subjective Definitions of Awareness. 4.2. Neurophysical Experiments. 4.3. Cortical Information, the Preattentive and Attentive Phases. 4.4. The Primitives of the Preattentive Phase. 4.5. Evidence for Cognitive Immediate Awareness. 4.6. Where Do We Enter the Circle of Cognition? 4.7. Learning All Over the Nervous System: Multiple Intelligences. 4.8. Bodily Kinaesthetic Intelligence. 4.9. Classification of Performances. 4.10. The Hierarchy of Primitive Relations of Immediate Awareness. 4.11. Primitive Relations of Preattending, Attending and the Problem with Paying Attention. 4.12. Multiple Spaces of Primitive Immediate Awareness. 4.13. The Primitive Relation of Imagining; Hierarchy of the Senses, Touching, Moving, Probing and Their Spaces. 4.14. Summary. 5: Boundary Set S: At the Core of Multiple Intelligences. 5.1. Kinds of Knowing in Boundary Set S. 5.2. A Framework for Thinking About Boundary Set S: Dynamical Systems Theory and Kauffman's Random Boolean Nets for a Geometry of Knowing. 5.3. The Formal and Geometric Structure of the Knowing Universe. 5.4. Digraph Theory of Knowing Relations. 5.5. Properties of Relations: Natural and Artificial Intelligence Systems. 5.6. Information-Theoretic (H) Measures of the Universal Epistemic Set. 5.7. Mechanism or Organicism. 5.8. Poincaré Map and Random Graphs of Primitive Knowing Relations: From a Symbol-Based View to a Geometric View. 5.9. A Toy Model of a Random