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Publications (51)
It remains a standing problem how and why the first nervous systems evolved. Molecular and genomic information is now rapidly accumulating but the macroscopic organization and functioning of early nervous systems remains unclear. To explore potential evolutionary options, a coordination centered view is discussed that diverges from a standard input...
In this article, I provide an account that rejects the claim that there is a fundamental dichotomy between our subjective mental domain and the objective external world. I will work with the premise that both belong to a single cohering set of natural processes, following what I will call full naturalism. Full naturalism accepts that subjective men...
Discussions of the function of early nervous systems usually focus on a causal flow from sensors to effectors, by which an animal coordinates its actions with exogenous changes in its environment. We propose, instead, that much early sensing was reafferent ; it was responsive to the consequences of the animal's own actions. We distinguish two gener...
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Basal cognition: multicellularity, neurons and the cognitive lens'.
This paper criticizes the role of intuition-based ascriptions of cognition that are closely related to the ascription of mind. This practice hinders the explication of a clear and stable target domain for the cognitive sciences. To move forward, the proposal is to cut the notion of cognition free from such ascriptions and the intuition-based judgme...
The computer metaphor invites views on mental, neural, and behavioral processes built around the input-output relations between an inner and an outer domain usually cast in terms of information processing. This metaphor also operates in ways that make the material constitution and context of these processes and domains less relevant. There are two...
The brain-as-computer metaphor has anchored the professed computational nature of mind, wresting it down from the intangible logic of Platonic philosophy to a material basis for empirical science. However, as with many long-lasting metaphors in science, the computer metaphor has been explored and stretched long enough to reveal its boundaries. Thes...
The premise of this two-part theme issue is simple: the cognitive sciences should join the rest of the life sciences in how they approach the quarry within their research domain. Specifically, understanding how organisms on the lower branches of the phylogenetic tree become familiar with, value and exploit elements of an ecological niche while avoi...
As long as the concept “embodiment” remains tied to the widely applicable notion of “agent,” it will remain insufficiently constrained and kept away from the empirical foundation that living bodies provide for the cognitive sciences.
Brette criticizes the notion of neural coding as used in neuroscience as a way to clarify the causal structure of the brain. This criticism will be positioned in a wider range of findings and ideas from other branches of neuroscience and biology. While supporting Brette's critique, these findings also suggest the need for more radical changes in ne...
In this chapter, we provide an overview of the relations between neuroscience and psychology. We discuss how the autonomy of psychology with respect to neuroscience is challenged in various ways, but also how psychology can reposition itself with respect to these challenges. We organize our chapter around five specific issues: (a) a brain-mapping c...
Compared to other forms of multicellularity, the animal case is unique. Animals—barring some exceptions—consist of collections of cells that are connected and integrated to such an extent that these collectives act as unitary, large free-moving entities capable of sensing macroscopic properties and events. This animal configuration is so well-known...
Hidetaka Yakura provides an interesting contribution to the discussion on minimal cognition. He develops the idea that the CRISPR/Cas immune system, as present in many bacteria and archaea, can itself be cast as a minimal cognitive system.
The brain and the body are conceptually far apart for most researchers working in the various cognitive and neurosciences. Of course, brains are physically situated in biological bodies, brains develop as a part of these bodies, functionally brains remain intricately connected to those bodies, and brains totally depend on these bodies for their mat...
To understand how neurons and nervous systems first evolved, we need an account of the origins of neural elongations: Why did neural elongations (axons and dendrites) first originate, such that they could become the central component of both neurons and nervous systems? Two contrasting conceptual accounts provide different answers to this question....
Godfrey-Smith’s environmental complexity thesis (ECT) is most often applied to multicellular animals and the complexity of their macroscopic environments to explain how cognition evolved. We think that the ECT may be less suited to explain the origins of the animal bodily organization, including this organization’s potentiality for dealing with com...
The study of evolutionary patterns of cognitive convergence would be greatly helped by a clear demarcation of cognition. Cognition is often used as an equivalent of mind, making it difficult to pin down empirically or to apply it confidently beyond the human condition. Recent developments in embodied cognition and philosophy of biology now suggest...
This paper discusses Moreno and Mossio’s book Biological autonomy: A philosophical and theoretical enquiry. The book provides an up-to-date overview of the authors’ work within the organizational approach to mind and life, which is linked to the work of Maturana and Varela but which is here developed in new ways and with a strong focus on the auton...
The origin of nervous systems has traditionally been discussed within two conceptual frameworks. Input–output models stress the sensory-motor aspects of nervous systems, while internal coordination models emphasize the role of nervous systems in coordinating multicellular activity, especially muscle-based motility. Here we consider both frameworks...
The origin of nervous systems has traditionally been discussed within two conceptual frameworks. Input-output models stress the sensory-motor aspects of nervous systems, while internal coordination models emphasize the role of nervous systems in coordinating multicellular activity, especially muscle-based motility. Here we consider both frameworks...
Internal coordination models hold that early nervous systems evolved in the first place to coordinate internal activity at a multicellular level, most notably the use of multicellular contractility as an effector for motility. A recent example of such a model, the skin brain thesis, suggests that excitable epithelia using chemical signaling are a p...
Nervous systems are standardly interpreted as information processing input–output devices. They receive environmental information from their sensors as input, subsequently process or adjust this information, and use the result to control effectors, providing output. Through-conducting activity is here the key organizational feature of nervous syste...
How the very first nervous systems evolved remains a fundamental open
question. Molecular and genomic techniques have revolutionized our knowledge of
the molecular ingredients behind this transition but not yet provided a clear
picture of the morphological and tissue changes involved. Here we focus on a
behavioural perspective that centres on movem...
The Sphex story is an anecdote about a female digger wasp that at first sight seems to act quite intelligently, but subsequently is shown to be a mere automaton that can be made to repeat herself endlessly. Dennett and Hofstadter made this story well known and widely influential within the cognitive sciences where it is regularly used as evidence t...
Plant intelligence has gone largely unnoticed within the field of animal and human adaptive behavior. In this
context, we will introduce current work on plant intelligence as a new set of relevant phenomena that deserves attention and also discuss its potential relevance for the study of adaptive behavior more generally. More specifically, we first...
Embodied cognition has come of age and is now diversifying. In this paper, I discuss four different approaches within embodied cognition: a biogenic approach, an enactive approach, a sensorimotor approach and a scaffolding approach. The four approaches can be differentiated according to their commitments to either biology (biogenic and enactive app...
We discuss the possibility and the meaning of the claim that plants are cognitive from the perspective of embodied cognition. In embodied cognition, the notion of cognition can be interpreted in a very broad way and applied to many free-moving creatures.
In this chapter, we discuss whether and (if so) how this approach applies to intelligence in pl...
A serious difficulty for theories of consciousness is to go beyond mere correlation between physical processes and experience. Currently, neural workspace and sensorimotor contingency theories are two of the most promising approaches to make any headway here. This paper explores the relation between these two sets of theories. Workspace theories bu...
Dynamic, embodied and situated cognition set up organism-environment interaction — agency for short — as the core of cognitive systems. Robotics became an important way to study this behavioral kernel of cognition. In this paper, we discuss the implications of what we call the biological grounding problem for robotic studies: Natural and artificial...
In this paper, we challenge Jaegwon Kim's version of neural reductionism according to which the causal powers of mental properties are pre-empted by those of neural properties. Using empirical and theoretical developments from the field of embedded cognition, we articulate and defend a notion of process externalism that extends Clark and Chalmers'...
What is cognition? It is now common knowledge that, so far, no one has a ready answer. It is much less generally acknowledged that this is a matter of strong concern when it comes to the further development of the cognitive sciences. We discuss how cognitivism provided a strongly human orientation on cognition, which hindered the development of the...
Within the cognitive sciences, cognition tends to be interpreted from an anthropocentric perspective, involving a stringent set of human capabilities. Instead, we suggest that cognition is better explicated as a much more general biological phenomenon, allowing the lower bound of cognition to extend much further down the phylogenetic scale. We argu...
The notion of cognition has been difficult to pin down. Embodied and situated approaches to cognition now suggests that agency, construed in terms of perceptionaction coupling, might provide a clear foundation for cognition. Yet, this attempt has problems of its own. First, a demarcation problem: Which systems are agents and why? Second, a graduali...
This paper aims to do three things: First, to provide a review of John Staddon’s book Adaptive dynamics: The theoretical analysis of behavior. Second, to compare Staddon’s behaviorist view with current ideas on embodied cognition. Third, to use this comparison to explicate some outlines for a theoretical analysis of behavior that could be useful as...
A reaction to Randall Beer’s paper in the same issue. The problem addressed by Beer is to develop a dynamical model of minimally cognitive behavior. An often heard criticism is that the models used by him and others in this field do not really exhibit cognition, as they are too simple. As a remedy Beer focuses on decision making, a clearly cognitiv...
Self-organization has become a well-established phenomenon in physics. It is now also propagated as an important phenomenon in psychology. What is the difference between these two forms of self-organization? One important way in which these two forms are distinguished is by the additional presence of some internal guiding force in the psychological...
The move toward a dynamical and embodied understanding of cognitive processes initiated a debate about the usefulness of the notion of representation for cognitive science. The debate started when some proponents of a dynamical and embodied approach argued that the use of representations could be discarded in many circumstances. This remained a min...
Representation is a fundamental concept within cognitive science. Most often, representations are interpreted as mental representations, theoretical entities that are the bearers of meaning and the source of intentionality. This approach views representation as the internal reflection of external circumstances—that is, as the end station of sensory...
Borrett, Kelly and Kwan claim to provide neural-network models of important aspects of subjective human experience. To sidestep the long-standing and assumedly insurmountable problems with providing models of inner experience, they turn to a body-centered interpretation of experience, drawn from the work of Merleau-Ponty. This body-centered interpr...
Van Gelder presents the distinction between dynamical
systems and digital computers as the core issue of current
developments in cognitive science. We think this distinction is
much less important than a reassessment of cognition as a neurally,
bodily, and environmentally embedded process. Embedded cognition
lines up naturally with dynamical m...
A discussion is going on in cognitive science about the use of representations to explain how intelligent behavior is generated. In the traditional view, an organism is thought to incorporate representations. These provide an internal model that is used by the organism to instruct the motor apparatus so that the adaptive and anticipatory characteri...
Autonomous agents research aims to understand adaptive behavior by building models that exhibit such behavior. In this paper, I describe some theoretical worries about the tendency to simplify the sensory-motor control of these behaving models as much as possible. Wheeled robots provide a good example of this tendency. The worries derive from the i...
Cognitive science's basic premises are under attack. In particular, its focus on internal cognitive processes is a target. Intelligence is increasingly interpreted, not as a matter of reclusive thought, but as successful agent-environment interaction. The critics claim that a major reorientation of the field is necessary. However, this will only oc...
Psychological theory is currently undergoing a change more profound than the `cognitive revolution' of the 1950s and 1960s. The present change involves a reconceptualization of the very concepts of cognition and mind. Cognitive science and cognitive psychology are turning away from the long dominant view of mind as an encapsulated, rational entity,...
A review of Alva Noë’s Action in perception
