The following article showed up in my stream, an interview about Radical Embodied Cognition. It's an alternative to a computational, representational theory of mind. Very interesting. However, it appears to me to be even more mechanistic and deterministic than the computational, representational approach to mind.
Radical embodied cognition: an interview with Andrew Wilson « Mind Hacks
The computational approach is the orthodoxy in psychological science. We try and understand the mind using the metaphors of information processing and the storage and retrieval of representations. These ideas are so common that it is easy to forget that there is any alternative. Andrew Wilson is on a mission to remind us that there is an alternative – a radical, non-representational, non-information processing take on what cognition is. ...
At the end of the interview, several books and links were given for further reading about REC.
Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists: What else could it be? The case of the centrifugal govenor.
Previously, I’ve dismissed the idea of mental representation because 1) no one knows what a representation is and 2) the arguments for representation tend to be pretty weak. Now, I’d like to spend a bit of time discussing a possible alternative – a dynamical systems approach to cognition. To frame this discussion, I’m going to summarise a very handy philosophy paper by Van Gelder (1995) in which he distinguishes between a computational and dynamical solution to a particular problem (see also Andrew's post on the polar planimeter). Van Gelder has clearly picked a side - that cognition emerges from dynamical systems and that cognitive processes are evolutions in the state-space within these systems. One of the main arguments for computation is that it’s difficult to imagine what else could be going on (see footnotes p. 346 for references for this argument). So, Van Gelder wrote this paper, not to decisively rule out computation, but to provide an answer to the question “what else could [cognition] be?” ...
However, it is also possible to describe decisions in terms of state space evolution in a dynamical system. For example, motivational oscillatory theory (MOT; cf. Townsend) describes oscillations resulting from satiation of persisting desires. We approach food when we’re hungry, but not when we’ve just eaten and are temporarily satiated. It’s possible to interpret this behaviour as a decision – when I’m hungry, I decide to eat. But, in this model there are no discrete states and no algorithmic processes effecting transformation on these states. There is just the evolution of the system over time. Furthermore, peculiarities in human decisions that cannot be accounted for by utility theory (e.g., the common consequence effect Allais paradox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia emerge naturally in the dynamic framework.
The ability to describe the governing problem in two completely different ways is a good illustration of the choice facing cognitive psychology. The computer/information processing model is so embedded in most people’s conception of cognition that it can feel impossible to characterise the system any other way. However, Van Gelder outlines a clear and promising, nonrepresentational alternative based on dynamical systems. In the future I’ll tie this discussion back to Gibson and describe why this is the type of solution animals, who have to solve real problems related to survival, are likely to have evolved (see also here).
This is some of the clearest, most concise, jargon-free writing on embodied cognition that I've encountered. It's finally nice to understand what is meant by the idea that "the brain is not a computer." However, this alternative to computation and representation seems to reduce the mind to mere mechanisms that are tightly, intimately, and deterministically linked to the environment.
So I'm wondering if the Embodied Cognition approach to mind leaves any room for free will, and I found the following, also easy to read, collection of essays.
http://www.humanamente.eu/PDF/Issue15_CompletePDF.pdf
Agency: From Embodied Cognition to Free Will
For the phenomenological debate, the notion of embodiment coincides
with the rebuttal of what is usually considered the Cartesian dualism, that is,
the segregation of any bodily influence from the subjective experiential
domain. Crossing the history of western thought, this problem acquires a
critical dimension in the twentieth century philosophical debate. The way to
understand the relationship between body and consciousness finds a new style
after the establishment of the phenomenological framework. Following the
path originally drawn by Husserl and successively developed by Merleau-Ponty,
it is possible to figure out how the phenomenological tradition, from its early
stages, has originally approached the mind-body problem underlying the
opportunity to develop an interactive conception based on the assumption of a
radical interweaving between the experiential and the bodily domains.
According to this view, perceptive experience can be conceived as a method
through which the subject travels in the environment following his motor
intentions and exploiting his skillful knowledge of the sensorimotor
constraints that link the execution of a goal oriented action to the variation of
the phenomenal features.
Working on the clarification of the notion of embodiment we have the
opportunity to cease to unreflectively privilege only one possible explanation
of our experience. The human mind, observed through the lenses of
embodiment, emerges at the interface of the brain, the body, the material and
social environment. This is an inextricable mash influencing all aspects of our
life. We are agents whose nature is fixed by a complex interaction involving our
personal experience, a particular kind of physical embodiment and a certain
embedding in the environment. This very combination of experience, flesh and
environment is the main character of our being in the world.
The assumption of agency as a critical aspect of our experience motivates
the introduction of another classical philosophical problem such as that
concerning the notion of free will. We usually consider human beings natural
organisms that are morally responsible for their own actions. Yet this
assumption represents one of the most intriguing puzzles that, from ancient
Greece to the contemporary era, has absorbed philosophers and scientists of
every kind. Are we really free agents? What does our subjective experience of
agency reveal to us? And how do these questions relate to the fact that we are
natural embodied beings?
Except in cases where we are physically constrained, we consider ourselves
free beings that think, believe and act autonomously, that is, according to the
states of consciousness that characterize our own mental life. We consider
ourselves responsible for our own acts because we perceive ourselves as being
able to freely project the actions that our body can perform. Accordingly, the
possibility of a free choice appears to be strictly related to the possibility of
assigning independence to a particular domain such as our subjective
consciousness.
The subjective sense of agency, that is, the feeling that we control our own
movements and actions, is certainly an essential, constant element of our
everyday experience. It seems obvious to us that the casual chain leading to the
execution of an action critically derives from our conscious intention.
However, we can try for a moment to imagine we do not have any real power
over our actions. We can imagine that we are prisoners of an illusion that gives
us the impression that we are the causes of our actions, but that we are actually
nothing but automata governed by a sophisticated system of behavioral laws. If
we carried through with this imaginative effort, then the very meaning of the
word “freedom” would need to be modified according to the idea that those we
perceive as our voluntary actions are, in reality, independent of our will. But
does this make sense? Or is it only a philosophical trick?
