Philosophy of Mind, Cognitive Sciences, Epistemolgy

The aim of this paper is to examine the nature, scope and importance of philosophy in the light of its relation to other disciplines. This work pays its focus on the various fundamental problems of philosophy, relating to Ethics, Metaphysics, Epistemology Logic, and its association with scientific realism. It will also highlight the various facets of these problems and the role of philosophers to point out the various issues relating to human issues. It is widely agreed that philosophy as a multi-dimensional subject that shows affinity to others branches of philosophy like, Philosophy of Science, Humanities, Physics and Mathematics, but this paper also seeks, a philosophical nature towards the universal problems of nature. It evaluates the contribution and sacrifices of the great sages of philosophers to promote the clarity and progress in the field of philosophy.

In this paper, we discuss the Extended Self Hypothesis proposed by Andy Clark and David Chalmers, and address the objection that the extended self lacks stability and continuity needed to be considered identical over time. We try to show that such an objection is untenable. We also discuss the view according to which another type of self, i.e., the narrative self, can also be seen as extended, and argue that stability and continuity of this type of self is also not threatened by its extension beyond the boundaries of person’s body. Hence, at least as far as these types of self are concerned, there is no need to confine ourselves to the internalized self when thinking about the problems of personal identity.

A basic challenge of contemporary thought is to better understand the origin, persistence, and future course of international/ comparative law. I suggest that a foundational step is to begin treating the law as a philosophical matter. I propose that comparative and international legal theory require a distinct methodology that is as integrated and systematic as positivism, but which better recognizes the dialectic interdependence of normative and empirical and the metaphysical interdependence of theory and practice. Philosophical Method, as systematized by R.G. Collingwood, promotes the dialectic over the eristic, looks for overlap rather than definitive scientific classification, argues for comprehensive philosophy rather than isolated theory and recognizes a proper logical metaphysics of absolute and relative presuppositions rather than a positive legal practice isolated from its inherent philosophical determinants

This paper explores a constructive revision of the conceptual underpinnings of Attachment Theory through an encounter with the diverse elements of 4e cognition. Attachment relationships involve the development of preference for one or a few carers and expectations about their availability and responsiveness as a haven of safety and a base from which to explore. In Attachment Theory, mental representations have been assigned a central organising role in explaining attachment phenomena. The 4e cognition approaches in cognitive science raise a number of questions about the development and interplay of attachment and cognition. These include: (1) the nature of what Bowlby called "internal working models of attachment"; (2) the extent to which the infant-carer dyad functions as an extension of the infant's mind; and (3) whether Bowlby's attachment control system concept can be usefully re-framed in enactive terms where traditional cognitivist representations are: (3i) substituted for sensorimotor skill-focused mediating representations; (3ii) viewed as arising from autopoietic living organisms and/or (3iii) mostly composed from the non-contentful mechanisms of basic minds?. A theme that cross-cuts these research questions is how representations for capturing meaning, and structures for adaptive control, are both required to explain the full range of behaviour of interest to Attachment Theory researchers.

Philosophy is considered the mother of all the other disciplines because of the generality and vastness of its subject matter in contrast to other forms of human inquiry. People talk of philosophy without understanding its role in educational research, particularly its significant contribution to all the other disciplines. It is worth noting that there is nothing in the universe that does not concern or interest philosophy hence philosophical enterprise is essentially the application of reasoning to a wide variety of topics. It is therefore of paramount importance to highlight the important role that philosophy plays in other fields of study in that every discipline raises questions which philosophical investigation can help clarify. Because of the complexity of the world we live in, our efforts to comprehend it are just as diverse. Besides, our different aspirations, interests and activities factor in our endeavor to understand the world and these aspirations and interests find expressions in various fields of study such as history, law, theology, education, economics, political science etc. Although these fields of study play an important role in our lives generally and in our endeavours to comprehend the world specifically, one cannot divorce them from philosophy. How can this be demonstrated? Given the unrestricted nature of the subject matter of philosophy, one can say that philosophy is an attempt to understand the world, its meaning and values. It examines rationally the fundamental problems affecting man and the world in which he lives. Its field is broad and inclusive. While using the facts and descriptive material presented by other specialized fields of study, philosophy goes beyond description to inquire into the nature, the values and the possibilities of things. Its goal is inclusive, comprehension and wisdom. That notwithstanding, philosophy cannot do without the results of other disciplines. It constantly interrogates and assesses the subject matters of the various fields of inquiry with a view of coming up with a conception of the universe that is coherent and systematic. This paper therefore aims at highlighting the contribution of philosophy to other fields of study such that questions and issues raised in every disciplineare addressed in a fundamental and comprehensive manner.Every domain of human existence confronts us with problems on which philosophical reflection can shed light.

El presente  texto  busca  conformar  una  introducción  a  las  particularidades  epistémicas  de  las ciencias ambientales a través de sistematizar las posturas y paradigmas que las atraviesan. Guía el texto la pregunta “¿qué es lo que hace que una ciencia sea ambiental?”.Buscamos responder esta pregunta  mediante  la  filosofía  de  la  ciencia  de  Thomas  Kuhn  y,mediante  el desarrollo  y cuestionamiento dedistintas definiciones de ciencias ambientales,develar las bases epistémicas de las  mismas.Partimos  de tres  definiciones  de  ciencias  ambientales  que  remiten  a  problemas ambientales.  Posteriormente,  apelamos  a  otra  definición  que  no  acude  a  tales  problemas  para definir  las  ciencias  ambientales.  Este  análisisteóriconos  lleva  a  encontrar  dos  tendencias  de comprensión y práctica de las ciencias ambientales que dificultan la integración de las mismas.El problema del criterio de demarcación, aparentemente sólo teórico, resulta ser un problema práctico. Según la matriz disciplinaria apelada se puede descartar o no un conocimiento o proyecto como pertinente para las ciencias ambientales, lo que afecta a los proyectos de investigación aceptados o rechazados como de ciencias ambientales en posgrados y revistas.

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has concentrated its research interest in the philosophical theories of embodied cognition (EC). Seeking a way out of the GOFAI’s dead-end attempt to develop intelligent robots with the ability to perform complex tasks in unknown and changing environments, AI adopted basic principles of the EC, like the body's direct interactions with the world. This view inspired AI researchers to abort traditional "sense-plan-act" architectures in favor of bottom-up approaches that focused on the integration of action and perception. However, the embodied AI community, tried to integrate these concepts by encapsulating them into frameworks that relied heavily in fundamental assumptions and mechanisms, that violated core principles of EC, both ontologically and practically, as in the utilization of sensorimotor knowledge in the sense of information extraction -instead of using sensorimotor knowledge in the sense of a meaningful "know-how", the utilization of internal states and representations coupled with computational information processing based architectures, and the conceptualization of affordances grounded in categorization and internal representations. In this paper our objective is to identify and classify the fundamental principles and properties, by which embodied AI and EC differ, in a philosophical as well as in a technical context. In our view, grasping this fundamental ontological bounds, apart from being philosophically interesting, will contribute to the understanding of the limits of the capabilities of embodied AI, compared to the concept of embodied cognition.

The " Natural Problem of Consciousness " is the problem of understanding why there are presently conscious beings at all. Given a non-reductive naturalist framework taking consciousness as an ontologically subjective biological phenomenon, how can we rationally explain the fact that the actual world has turned out to be one where there are presently living beings that can feel, rather than having developed as a zombie-world in which there would be no conscious experiences of any kind? This book introduces the Natural Problem by relating it to central problems in the philosophy of mind (metaphysical mind-body problem, Hard Problem of consciousness) and emphasizing the distinctive interest of its diachronic dimension. Ranging from philosophy to biology and neuroscience, it offers a thorough analysis aimed at better understanding what could explain why phenomenal consciousness has been preserved throughout evolution by natural selection. This is an original, engaging, and thought provoking philosophical study of a neglected but fundamental question regarding the nature and origin of consciousness.

The aim of the paper is to offer a characterisation of delusional systems of belief. The view defended in the paper is that the explanations that appear in delusional systems of belief do not effect a reduction in the number of things left unexplained. In this respect, it is argued, delusions differ from both common sense and from scientific explanations. The thesis is defended with a range of examples, including some simple examples from the history of science. Particular attention is paid to differences between scientific explanations and those that figure in delusions.
Since delusions leave more things unexplained than common-sense and science, it follows that a person suffering from delusional belief has a reduced level of understanding of the world around them.
It is also argued that that the thesis that delusional beliefs fail to minimise that which requires explanation is able to deal with some usually “difficult cases” for accounts of delusional thinking.

Explorations of the traditional branches of philosophy and (the seemingly endless differentiation of the philosophical discourse into) new, highly specialized, always more microscopic, areas of doing professionalized philosophy, in an attempt to reveal traces of and hints to the remaining, if any, valid and meaningful subject-matter of philosophizing. This is executed against the background and the fact that the socio-cultural practice of philosophy have lost most, if not all, its areas of investigation to other disciplines and inter-disciplinary fields such as  the Cognitive Sciences.....

I examine the significance and promise of the " paradigm shift " evinced by the emergence and reception of the " embodied and situated cognition " research program (ESC) in the past few decades. Such a program puts in question age-old assumptions, dichotomies and distinctions in the history of Western philosophy stretching back to Plato and onward to Descartes and beyond, up to the so-called 'cognitivist framework' (CF), which has come to dominate in both (Anglo-American) philosophy and the cognitive sciences. In order to better understand the main point(s) of contention between theses programs, I begin by tracing historically the emergence of CF to the Cartesian legacy –properly understood and interpreted, and proceed to characterize the fundamental contrast between CF and ESC, as I see it, in light of some of the empirical work done in recent years. I then turn to a philosophical discussion of the notions of 'embodiment' and situatedness' in order to delineate the proper and necessary background context for understanding ultimately what is at stake, in an effort to see how they are best 'cashed in' both theoretically and empirically. Finally, I re-focus on the situatedness of human cognition in order to make a modest proposal that further emphasizes its importance and significance within a properly conceived ESC research program, in which, I argue, despite claims to the contrary, the distinction between 'embodied' and 'situated cognition' does not make much sense. My proposal has, I contend, profound implications for future work at the intersection of philosophy, the cognitive sciences, and socio-cultural studies, and possibly for re-conceiving these endeavors and their relations altogether.

The Pribram-Bohm holoflux theory, a model describing the topology of consciousness in the universe, is presented here to address the issue posed by David Chalmers in his “hard problem of consciousness.” The theory emerges from an integral evaluation of evidence drawn from two sources: (1) the holonomic mind/brain theories of Karl Pribram, (2) the ontological interpretation of quantum theory by David Bohm. From their work emerges the holoflux theory, after a term proposed by Karl Pribram to express the flow characterized by David Bohm as the “holomovement,” a two-way flow of consciousness between the explicate order and the implicate order. This hypothesis supports both local and non-local phenomena in the observable cosmos.
Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance and Ervin László’s holofield theory are examined and shown to be congruent with the holoflux theory. László’s postulated existence of two domains or dimensions of cosmological architecture, an “A-dimension” equivalent to Bohm’s implicate order and an “M-dimension,” equivalent to Bohm’s explicate, space–time material domain. Sheldrake’s morphic resonance biological forms are described as products of a Fourier transform-like process between these same two domains.
Concluding remarks support the congruence of the Pribram–Bohm topological model with other major paradigms of consciousness, including those elaborated by Chalmers, Lilly, Block, and Teilhard de Chardin.

Embodied Cognition is an approach to cognition that departs from traditional cognitive science in its reluctance to conceive of cognition as computational and in its emphasis on the significance of an organism's body in how and what the organism thinks. Three lines of ...

Hands undoubtedly matter. Few, I suspect, would disagree. Yet The Hand, an Organ of the Mind uses this commonplace to dispel what is termed the "intellectualist illusion" (p370), the illusion that the things we do with our hands are always and everywhere guided by an in--the--head centralised planner. Radman's spirited collection of essays makes the point that we are not the sort of "centralised knowers" (p369) that the history of cognitive science might have us believe. Rather the manual is primary: it not only structures our encounters with the world; it is also constitutive of those encounters. We are in fact manual beings (p389).

Die Frage nach der Natur des menschlichen Geistes ist das zentrale Thema sowohl der Philosophie des Geistes, als auch der Neurowissenschaften. Die beiden Disziplinen stellen dabei allerdings verschiedene Aspekte in den Mittelpunkt: Während man in der Philosophie des Geistes Menschen als Personen versteht, die mit ihrer sozialen und physischen Umwelt interagieren und die Freiheit haben, gewisse Handlungen auszuführen und andere zu unterlassen, geht man in den Neurowissenschaften von der Tatsache aus, dass Menschen körperliche Wesen und als solche, wie alle materiellen Entitäten, den Gesetzen der Naturwissenschaften unterworfen sind. Mentale Phänomene werden in den Neurowissenschaften als Prozesse des Gehirns (ev. in Verbindung mit anderen Teilen des menschlichen Körpers) verstanden, das, wie alle körperlichen Organe, vollständig durch eine Auflistung der kausalen Prozesse, die sich in ihm abspielen beziehungsweise abspielen können, beschrieben werden kann.