Foundations of Understanding
... The most fundamental schema for analogical transfer of meaning across domains involves the body's ability to act (Newton, 1996). It is an innate neurologically based body schema that provides a common basis of both somatic and symbolic levels of reality, allowing for visual information, behavioral information, and symbolic information to be manifested through the same medium (Winkelman, 2010a). ...
... This preverbal communication system, manifested in bodily movements, facial expressions and gestures, is an innate system that links the minds of human infants with their social world from the beginning of life. Mimesis produces meaning through metaphor, using gesture and imitation in an enactment that involves a mapping of body actions onto an imagined context (Newton, 1996). Body metaphors express meanings through the ability to mediate between the sensory domains and the domains of meaning through analogical reasoning processes involving the body. ...
Neuropharmacological effects of psychedelics have profound cognitive, emotional, and social effects that inspired the development of cultures and religions worldwide. Findings that psychedelics objectively and reliably produce mystical experiences press the question of the neuropharmacological mechanisms by which these highly significant experiences are produced by exogenous neurotransmitter analogs. Humans have a long evolutionary relationship with psychedelics, a consequence of psychedelics' selective effects for human cognitive abilities, exemplified in the information rich visionary experiences. Objective evidence that psychedelics produce classic mystical experiences, coupled with the finding that hallucinatory experiences can be induced by many non-drug mechanisms, illustrates the need for a common model of visionary effects. Several models implicate disturbances of normal regulatory processes in the brain as the underlying mechanisms responsible for the similarities of visionary experiences produced by psychedelic and other methods for altering consciousness. Similarities in psychedelic-induced visionary experiences and those produced by practices such as meditation and hypnosis and pathological conditions such as epilepsy indicate the need for a general model explaining visionary experiences. Common mechanisms underlying diverse alterations of consciousness involve the disruption of normal functions of the prefrontal cortex and default mode network (DMN). This interruption of ordinary control mechanisms allows for the release of thalamic and other lower brain discharges that stimulate a visual information representation system and release the effects of innate cognitive functions and operators. Converging forms of evidence support the hypothesis that the source of psychedelic experiences involves the emergence of these innate cognitive processes of lower brain systems, with visionary experiences resulting from the activation of innate processes based in the mirror neuron system (MNS).
... As the name implies, enactivism begins with the idea that there is such a thing as action—not merely a sequence of re-actions. As is now well known, new scientific work on the theory of self-organization in certain kinds of physical systems promises to allow the whole organism to act from its own self-initiated motivations, and not merely to react or to display a complicated system of reactions (see Kauffman 1993; Monod 1971; Newton 1996 Newton , 2000 The distinction between action and reaction, construed scientifically, can be grounded in the idea of complex dynamical systems, which I take as synonymous with self-organizing systems. As Newton (2000) defines it, a dynamical system is a thermodynamic system that maintains the continuity of its functional patterns while exchanging energy and materials with the environment. ...
... The philosopher Natika Newton has elaborated an entire theory of consciousness around the notion that, in effect, we must subliminally use " sensorimotor action images " to imagine the action affordances of objects in order to be consciously aware of them (this careful analysis is developed through a sequence of detailed studies, including Newton 1982 Newton , 1989 Newton , 1991 Newton , 1992 Newton , 1993 Newton , 1996 Newton , 2000). According to Newton, perceptual consciousness is always preceded by an act of imagination. ...
This paper considers where contemporary neuroscience leaves us in terms of how human consciousness fits into the material world, and whether consciousness is reducible to merely mechanical physical systems, or on the contrary whether consciousness is a self-organizing system that can in a sense use the brain for its own purposes. The paper discusses how phenomenology can be integrated with new findings about “neural plasticity” to yield new approaches to the mind–body problem and the place of consciousness as a causal player in the physical world. By phenomenology, I mean simply any attempt to have introspective or reflective access to the meaning of our own conscious states, and to carefully take account of the notorious pitfalls of subjective introspection (often subsumed within the concept of “folk psychology” in the empirically oriented cognitive theory literature).
... 472). Others make a similar point [65][66][67]. Contra O'Regan, however, according to ACT, every image includes one or more schema of each type, that is, type-S, type-M and type-P schemata [68,69]. ...
The Action Cycle Theory (ACT) is an enactive theory of the perception and a mental imagery system that is comprised of six modules: Schemata, Objects, Actions, Affect, Goals and Others’ Behavior. The evidence supporting these six connected modules is reviewed in light of research on mental imagery vividness. The six modules and their interconnections receive empirical support from a wide range of studies. All six modules of perception and mental imagery are influenced by individual differences in vividness. Real-world applications of ACT show interesting potential to improve human wellbeing in both healthy people and patients. Mental imagery can be applied in creative ways to make new collective goals and actions for change that are necessary to maximize the future prospects of the planet.
... Visual information and motor activity can affect the motor center in the brain. Visually looking at an object can evoke the sensation of using that object in our imagination (Newton, 1996;O'Regan, Rensink, and Clark, 1999). Visually observing objects and tools can affect people's perception of the action and the environment (Ellis, 1995, p.209). ...
Consumer’s ability to touch products is an essential component of one’s retail shopping experience. When the ability to touch is not available, Virtual Reality (VR) platforms may provide a simulated medium for consumers to haptically explore products. In multiple studies, we discover that a VR retail environment (vs. an online retail website) positively impacts hedonic shopping value. Further, we demonstrate that a VR retail environment leads to consumers perceiving certain products as an extension of the body as opposed to perceiving it as a presentation of the body. Our findings reveal that a VR retail environment is more suitable for products that are perceived as an extension of the body (e.g., tools) rather than as a presentation of the body (e.g., clothes). Finally, we unveil mediating pathways to these relationships involving telepresence and need for touch.
... Contextualists, on the other hand, doubt that this is sufficient. Instead, they account for inter-personal stability by stressing the similarities between the physical make-up of humans and the similarities of contexts (Barsalou, 1999;Clark & Prinz, 2004;Newton, 1996;Tomasello, Kruger, & Ratner, 1993). So, according to contextualists, we can only account even for typical instances of communication if we include contextual information. ...
Invariantists argue that the notion of concept in psychology should be reserved for knowledge that is retrieved in a context-insensitive manner. Contextualists argue that concepts are to be understood in terms of context-sensitive ad hoc constructions. I review the central empirical evidence for and against both views and show that their conclusions are based on a common mischaracterization of both theories. When the difference between contextualism and invariantism is properly understood, it becomes apparent that the way the question of stability is currently investigated will not lead to a consensus. Instead of focusing directly on stability, we should turn our attention to other desiderata on a theory of concepts. In particular, I show that invariantism, but not contextualism, fails to account for compositionality and abstract concepts.
... Body metaphors express meanings through analogical reasoning processes involving the body and its ability to mediate between the sensory domains and domains of meaning. The most fundamental schema for analogical transfer involves the body's ability to act, an innate neurologically-based body schema that provides a common basis of both somatic and symbolic levels of reality (Laughlin, 1997;Newton, 1996). Mimesis enables the entrainment of the body with external rhythms in the abilities of dance and music which evolved as an interrelated set of capacities that exploited the full body capacity related to the inherent rhythm of bipedal movement (Merker, 2000(Merker, , 2009. ...
The features of shamanism found cross-culturally identify the foundations for a biogenetic paradigm. Similarities of shamanic ritual with chimpanzee displays involving ritualized bipedal charges, communal vocalizations and drumming point to the hominid ritual foundations and community dynamics from which shamanism emerged. Hominid collective rituals expanded over human evolution in enhanced capacities for mimesis, music, and dance, factors selected for as part of an enhanced behavioral and symbolic capacity for ritual participation. Ritual practices produce changes in consciousness and experience of self that reflect access to basic structures of consciousness, exemplified in out-of-body experiences. Shamanism engages our innate psychology to produce symbols, reflected in concepts of animism, animal spirit identities and powers, and animal totemic groups. This innate psychology of shamanism is based in symbolic processes produced by the cross-modal integration of innate processing modules for the natural world (animal species) self-representation, inference of mental processes, and identification with social references.
... The third solution to the symbol grounding problem, but one that is incompatible with both LSA and HAL, is to drop the assumption that meaning is based on abstract symbols arbitrarily related to their referents. This type of solution is being used by an increasing number of researchers (e.g., Barsalou, 1999;Glenberg, 1997;Lakoff, 1987;MacWhinney, 1998;Newton, 1996) investigating meaning from the perspective of embodied cognition. Here we sketch one such solution based on Glenberg (1997;Glenberg & Robertson, 1999) that provides an alternative to LSA and HAL. ...
Latent Semantic Analysis (Landauer & Dumais, 1997) and Hyperspace Analogue to Language (Burgess & Lund, 1997) model meaning as the relations among abstract symbols that are arbitrarily related to what they signify. These symbols are ungrounded in that they are not tied to perceptual experience or action. Because the symbols are ungrounded, they cannot, in principle, capture the meaning of novel situations. In contrast, participants in three experiments found it trivially easy to discriminate between descriptions of sensible novel situations (e.g., using a newspaper to protect one's face from the wind) and nonsense novel situations (e.g., using a matchbook to protect one's face from the wind). These results support the Indexical Hypothesis that the meaning of a sentence is constructed by (a) indexing words and phrases to real objects or perceptual, analog symbols; (b) deriving affordances from the objects and symbols; and (c) meshing the affordances under the guidance of syntax.
In the last chapter, we saw that epistemic intuition is an essential constituent of epistemic thought experiments. The question then arises: what is the nature of epistemic intuition? To answer this question, I reviewed some examples of intuition given by three of the most distinct intuition-theorists’ accounts. I argued that these intuitions belong to a Platonic kind of realm and, accordingly, are different from intuitions pumped by epistemic thought experiments. As a result, the question remains the same: what is the nature of thought experiment-generated intuition? It is now time to attempt to develop one core concept of what epistemic intuition is so that we can assess the merits of the various types of epistemic theorizing. It is my contention that there is a better form of epistemic intuition than the Platonic one. This conception of epistemic intuition is important in that it will serve to determine whether the various types of analysis concerning the structure of epistemic intuition are plausible in yielding our epistemic goals (whether they are justified by a good or legitimate reason). To this end, the goal of this chapter is devoted to developing such a conception.
Recent developments in cognitive theory, and particularly new work on consciousness, suggest that the old dichotomy of “emergence versus reduction” is now an oversimplification. Instead, we now have a variety of theories that include various degrees of nonreductive physicalism, based largely on the implications of neural plasticity from brain research, and the theory of self-organization coming from theoretical chemistry, biology, and chaos theory. These new trends allow for new ontologies of mind and consciousness that are neither “reductive” in the sense of reduction to push–pull linear causal mechanisms, nor are they necessarily “emergent” in a sense that could entail a counter-scientific metaphysical dualism.
Keywords:
cognitive science;
neuroscience;
psychology of consciousness;
brain;
dynamical systems;
holism;
mental causation;
mind-body problem;
neural plasticity;
reductionism
This article is motivated by a formulation of biotic self-organization in Friston (2013), where the emergence of “life” in coupled material entities (e.g., macromolecules) was predicated on bounded subsets that maintain a degree of statistical independence from the rest of the network. Boundary elements in such systems constitute a Markov blanket; separating the internal states of a system from its surrounding states. In this article, we ask whether Markov blankets operate in the nervous system and underlie the development of intelligence, enabling a progression from the ability to sense the environment to the ability to understand it. Markov blankets have been previously hypothesized to form in neuronal networks as a result of phase transitions that cause network subsets to fold into bounded assemblies, or packets (Yufik and Sheridan, 1997; Yufik, 1998a). The ensuing neuronal packets hypothesis builds on the notion of neuronal assemblies (Hebb, 1949, 1980), treating such assemblies as flexible but stable biophysical structures capable of withstanding entropic erosion. In other words, structures that maintain their integrity under changing conditions. In this treatment, neuronal packets give rise to perception of “objects”; i.e., quasi-stable (stimulus bound) feature groupings that are conserved over multiple presentations (e.g., the experience of perceiving “apple” can be interrupted and resumed many times). Monitoring the variations in such groups enables the apprehension of behavior; i.e., attributing to objects the ability to undergo changes without loss of self-identity. Ultimately, “understanding” involves self-directed composition and manipulation of the ensuing “mental models” that are constituted by neuronal packets, whose dynamics capture relationships among objects: that is, dependencies in the behavior of objects under varying conditions. For example, movement is known to involve rotation of population vectors in the motor cortex (Georgopoulos et al., 1988, 1993). The neuronal packet hypothesis associates “understanding” with the ability to detect and generate coordinated rotation of population vectors—in neuronal packets—in associative cortex and other regions in the brain. The ability to coordinate vector representations in this way is assumed to have developed in conjunction with the ability to postpone overt motor expression of implicit movement, thus creating a mechanism for prediction and behavioral optimization via mental modeling that is unique to higher species. This article advances the notion that Markov blankets—necessary for the emergence of life—have been subsequently exploited by evolution and thus ground the ways that living organisms adapt to their environment, culminating in their ability to understand it.
The extent to which the intensity of R&D employees' interaction with market-oriented employees, proactive customer orientation, and responsive customer orientation affect the ability to reduce product-related uncertainties at the fuzzy front end of innovation was analyzed. They investigated 160 product innovation projects in various high-tech industries and identified proactive customer orientation as an important moderator of the link between R&D employees' interaction with market-oriented employees and the reduction of product-related uncertainties at the fuzzy front end. They also found that responsive customer orientation diminishes the ability to reduce product-related uncertainties at the fuzzy front end. The theoretical and managerial implications of the results are discussed.
This paper begins with an account of a high-profile political speech event centring on Chinese slangy expression '[we] bu zheteng' when it was used by the then Chines President Hu Jintao in a 2008 speech, of which the Chinese government preferred a zerotranslatio despite the existing translations and various choices already available i Chinese-English dictionaries. The paper then discusses from the perspective of grammatica metaphor how and why an innocent-looking pragmatic usage has given rise to series of ideologically charged debates over its translation. To that end, the paper conduct a critical review of grammatical metaphor, a key Systemic Functional Linguisti concept in describing congruence-To-metaphor evolution of language. Our cross lingua observation of this translation-related speech event enables us to argue that differen textual means of presentation/concealment of human participation in transitivity are ke to accounting for the discursive function of grammatical metaphors and to discerning th "chain" between congruent and metaphorical expressions. In the light of concealment o human participation in the transitivity process, the paper also observes that it is th association between the vague self-referencing 'we' and the adverse actions/situations that is, (causing) commotions, alluded to by the term zheteng that has made a semanticall explicit translation ideologically less desirable. As such, this operation of zero translatio appears to be an instance of discursive manoeuvre rather than a sign of semanti impasse. To substantiate its theoretical claim, the paper relates the case to some simila political speech events in the world's political arena and demonstrates how, prompte by this functional awareness of grammatical metaphors, one may devise a translation wit better informed sensitivity to identity presentation/concealment in discourse.
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The worldwide development of raves and similar collective rituals characterized by all night communal rituals involving dance, drumming, music, and often the use of psychedelic substances can be understood as a modern manifestation of the same biological principles underlying shamanism. The shamanic ritual was a nighttime ceremony which engaged all of the community in a powerful interaction with the spirit world as the shaman beat drums or rattled while singing, chanting and dancing. The common underlying biogenetic structures of shamanism and raves involve: the social functions of ritual; the effects of dance and music as systems for social bonding and emotional communication; and the effects on consciousness that produce alterations of emotions, identity and consciousness and personal healing.
The primary purpose of decision support systems (DSS) is to improve the quality of decisions. Since decisions are based on an individual’s mental model, improving decision quality is a function of discovering the decision maker’s mental model, and updating and/or enhancing it with new knowledge; that is, the purpose of decision support is knowledge creation. This article suggests that BI techniques can be applied to knowledge creation as an enabling technology. Specifically, the authors propose a business intelligence design theory for DSS as knowledge creation, a prescriptive theory based on Nonaka’s knowledge spiral that indicates how BI can be focused internally on the decision maker to discover and enhance his/her mental model and improve the quality of decisions.
In a recent paper, Andy Clark (2008) has argued that the literature on embodied cognition reveals a tension between two prominent strands within this movement. On the one hand, there are those who endorse what Clark refers to as body-centrism, a view which emphasizes the special contribution made by the body to a creature’s mental life. Among other things, body centrism implies that significant differences in embodiment translate into significant differences in cognition and consciousness. On the other hand, there are those who endorse what Clark calls extended functionalism, a view which sees the mind as the joint product of the computational resources presented by (i) intracranial processing, (ii) bodily input, and (iii) environmental scaffolding. As such, extended functionalism allows for the possibility that any contribution of the body to cognition and consciousness can be compensated for by the other two contributing factors. While Clark’s sympathies lie with the latter approach, we argue in favour of the former. In particular, we focus on consciousness and argue that the unique contribution the body makes to a creature’s manifold of phenomenal experience cannot be compensated for, in the manner, and on the scale, that Clark envisages.
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