A regular commenter (by email) has taken me to task about my recent post on cognitive science. Which is fair, I’m open to criticism; I can always learn more! Yet, I feel that the complaint isn’t actually fair. So I raise the debate here about our (post) cognitive nature. I welcome feedback!
So, the gist of the discussion is whether I’m positing a reductionist and mechanistic account of cognition. I argue, basically, that we are ‘meat’. That is, that our cognition is grounded in our physiology, and that there’s nothing ephemeral about our cognition. There is no ineffable element to our existence. To be clear, my correspondent isn’t claiming a metaphysical element either, it’s more nuanced than that.
What I am missing, supposedly, is the situated nature of our cognition. We are very much a product of our action, is the claim. Which I don’t dispute, except that I will maintain we have to have some impact on our cognitive architecture. Channeling Paul Kirschner, learning is a change in long-term memory, which implies the existence of the latter. For instance, I argued strongly against a view that all that we store from events is the emotional outcome. If that were the case, we’d have nothing to recreate the experience, yet we can recount at least some of the specifics. More emotional content means more recall, typically.
The accusation is that I’m being too computational, in that even if I go sub-symbolic, I’m still leveraging a computational model of the world. Whereas I believe that our thinking isn’t formal logical (as I’ve stated, repeatedly). Instead, we build inaccurate and incomplete models of the world (having shifted from formal mental models to a more predictive coding view of the world). Further, those models are instantiated in consciousness in conjunction with the current context, which means they’re not the same each time.
Which is where I get pilloried. Since we haven’t (yet) explained consciousness, there must be something more than the physical elements. At least as I understand it, and it’s not clear I do. Yet, to me, this sort of attitude seems to suggest that it’s beyond comprehension, and maybe even matter. Which I can’t countenance.
So, that’s where the discussion is currently. Am I still cognitivist, or am I post-cognitivist? I’m oversimplifying, because it’s been the subject of a number of exchanges, without resolution as yet. This may trigger more discussion ;). No worries, discussion and even debate is how we learn!
My view is that if you’re still channeling Paul Kirschner you are at the very least endorsing an idea of cognition as a representational system, even if not a physical symbol system, in which there is a clear separation between ‘content’ and other (presumably incidental) cognitive activities. That to my mind would be enough to make you a cognitivist.
This isn’t contrary to situationism. It can be true that our actions can inform our cognitive state, and still have a basis in both ‘content’ and (presumably incidental) non-content. Consider for example Wittgenstein inferring what a person ‘knows’ or ‘believes’ about the thickness of the ice as we walks across the frozen lake. And how we act can feed back into what we ‘know’ through the creation of contentful experiences.
I think that to be a non-cognitivist it is necessary to be a non-representationalist. What that means is a bit difficult to tease out (since, in principle, anything can be a representation of anything, if viewed in the right way). Minimally, though, to be a representationalist is to be able to describe functionally some significant property of a person that can be shared across physical instances without respect to the physical constitution of that property. In other words, for ‘content’, qua content, to have physical effects (ie., to influence thoughts, experiences and behavioiurs).
This is where the debate on consciousness comes in. We all (presumably) have consciousness. But what is it? Many (most?) theorists say that consciousness has to be consciousness *of* something (cf Descartes’ cogito). So we can draw a separation between the ‘content’ of consciousness, and the experience (or ‘qualia’). “There must be something more than the physical elements.” But must there? In my view, consciousness is experience – that is, to be conscious is to have experiences. There’s no distinction to be drawn between the two.
If you go sub-symbolic (which I think you do) then the ‘representations’ are patterns of neural activation. To be a cognitivist from that perspective becomes rather more difficult, as in requires holding that there are certain patterns of activation that are common across individuals (ie., you could see pattern P in both person A and person B) and where the *pattern* – and not the physical instantiation of the pattern – is causally relevant. I can’t imagine such a thing, but I guess there are some constructivists that can.
In general – the cognitivist (ie., the non-reductionist) will always say there’s something (usually formal) and non physical that constitutes (actual) cognition, and that it is this ‘content’ that is what we are trying to pass from person to person in education. Presented in bits and pieces it can sound convincing, but when we view the mechanism as a whole, it becomes (to my mind) implausible.