A Catalytic Theory of Embodied Mind

This paper describes a catalytic theory that grounds cognition in biology, building on the proposals of (a) Gibson and ecological psychologists concerning the role of invariance and (b) Shepard, Gestaltists and neuroscientists concerning the role of ‘resonating’ neural waves. Enzyme catalysis increases the speed of a molecular reaction, perhaps via a type of wave, a soliton, whose formation, persistence and form depend on the structural invariance of its environment. Generalizing to cognition (Davia, 2006), the waves of neural activity constitute a catalytic process, with the organism’s perceptionaction invariance playing the role of the environmental structure. This ‘generalized catalysis’ is a process by which an entity mediates its environment and is the organism’s