Semiotics is widely applied in theories of information. Following the original triadic characterization of reality by Peirce, the linguistic processes involved in information—production, transmission, reception, and understanding—would all appear to be interpretable in terms of signs and their relations to their objects. Perhaps the most important of these relations is that of the representatio...

Is life physicochemically unique? No. Is life unique? Yes. Life manifests innumerable formalisms that cannot be generated or explained by physicodynamics alone. Life pursues thousands of biofunctional goals, not the least of which is staying alive. Neither physicodynamics, nor evolution, pursue goals. Life is largely directed by linear digital programming and by the Prescriptive Information (PI...

17 The computational hypothesis, with its inherent representationalism, and the dynamical hypothesis, with its apparent 18 absence of representations and its commitment to continuous time, stand at an impasse. It is unclear how the dynamical 19 stance can handle representational thought, or how computationalism can deal effectively with a tightly coupled, reciprocally 20 causative agent–environ...

Exemplar, prototype, and connectionist models typically assume that events constitute the basic unit of learning and representation in categorization. In these models, each learning events updates a statistical representation of a category independently of other learning events. An implication is that events involving the same individual affect learning independently and are not integrated into...

Received: 25 January 2011 Revised: 3 August 2011 2nd Revision: 14 April 2012 3rd Revision: 24 July 2012 Accepted: 12 November 2012 Abstract Embodied identity, that is, who we are as a result of our interactions with the world around us with and through our bodies, is increasingly challenged in online environments where identity performances are seemingly untethered from the user’s body that is ...

This note examines some paradigms within cognitive science, in part through the lens of consciousness studies, a recent discipline which takes seriously the experience of having a mind. In particular, it discusses cognitivism and representationalism, and some challenges to them based on broader contexts than the individual. Much of this material comes from my experience as editor in chief of th...

Manyphilosophers and psychologists have attempted to elucidate the nature of mental representation by appealing to notions like isomorphism or abstract structural resemblance. The ‘structural representations’ that these theorists champion are said to count as representations by virtue of functioning as internalmodels of distal systems. In his 2007 book, Representation Reconsidered, William Rams...

1. Pain perception Bodily sensations, for instance pains, are often thought to pose insuperable difficulties for representational theories of consciousness. Chris is never one to dodge a problem, and chapter 6 of his splendid and instructive Consciousness is devoted to outlining a perceptual/representational theory of pain, in the tradition of Armstrong and Pitcher. Perceptual theories of pain ...

Theoretical Neuroscience seeks to delineate conceptualizations which would generate explanatory and predictive accounts of empirical observations in the Neurosciences. At its inception in the late part of the 19th Century, it dealt creatively with what one could call 'virtual objects'. For instance Sherrington's Synapse and 'central excitatory/inhibitory states' were ideas whose actualization i...

Recent years have seen the emergence of a new interdisciplinary field called embodied or enactive cognitive science. Whereas traditional representationalism rests on a fixed inside–outside distinction, the embodied cognition perspective views mind and brain as a biological system that is rooted in body experience and interaction with other individuals. Embodiment refers to both the embedding of...