Constructional Tools as the Origin of Cognitive Capacities

It is argued that cognitive capacities can be understood as the outcome of the collective action of a set of agents created by tools that explore possible behaviours and train the agents to behave in such appropriate ways as may be discovered. The coherence of the whole system is assured by a combination of vetting the performance of new agents and dealing appropriately with any faults that the whole system may develop. This picture is shown to account for a range of cognitive capacities, including language

On the Fundamentality of Meaning

The mainstream view of meaning is that it is emergent, not fundamental, but some have disputed this, asserting that there is a more fundamental level of reality than that addressed by current physical theories, and that matter and meaning are in some way entangled. In this regard there are intriguing parallels between the quantum and biological domains, suggesting that there may be a more fundamental level underlying both. I argue that the organisation of this fundamental level is already to a considerable extent understood by biosemioticians, who have fruitfully integrated Peirce’s sign theory into biology; things will happen there resembling what happens with familiar life, but the agencies involved will differ in ways reflecting their fundamentality, in other words they will be less complex, but still have structures complex enough for what they have to do. According to one approach involving a collaboration with which I have been involved, a part of what they have to do, along with the need to survive and reproduce, is to stop situations becoming too chaotic, a concept that accords with familiar ‘edge of chaos’ ideas. Such an extension of sign theory (semiophysics?) needs to be explored by physicists, possible tools being computational models, existing insights into complexity, and dynamical systems theory. Such a theory will not be mathematical in the same way that conventional physics theories are mathematical: rather than being foundational, mathematics will be ‘something that life does’, something that sufficiently evolved life does because in the appropriate context so doing is of value to life

How we might be able to Understand the Brain

Current methodologies in the neurosciences have difficulty in accounting for complex phenomena such as language, which can however be quite well characterised in phenomenological terms. This paper addresses the issue of unifying the two approaches. We typically understand complicated systems in terms of a collection of models, each characterisable in principle within a formal system, it being possible to explain higher-level properties in terms of lower level ones by means of a series of inferences based on these models. We consider the nervous system to be a mechanism for implementing the demands of an appropriate collection of models, each concerned with some aspect of brain and behaviour, the observer mechanism of Baas playing an important role in matching model and behaviour in this context. The discussion expounds these ideas in detail, showing their potential utility in connection with real problems of brain and behaviour, important areas where the ideas can be applied including the development of higher levels of abstraction, and linguistic behaviour, as described in the works of Karmiloff-Smith and Jackendoff respectively

Biological Organisation as the True Foundation of Reality

The presumptions underlying quantum mechanics make it relevant to a limited range of situations only; furthermore, its statistical character means that it provides no answers to the question ‘what is really going on?’. Following Barad, I hypothesise that the underlying mechanics has parallels with human activities, as used by Barad to account for the way quantum measurements introduce definiteness into previously indefinite situations. We are led to consider a subtle type of order, different from those commonly encountered in the discipline of physics, and yet comprehensible in terms of concepts considered by Barad and Yardley such as oppositional dynamics or ‘intra-actions’. The emergent organisation implies that nature is no longer fundamentally meaningless. Agencies can be viewed as dynamical systems, so we are dealing with models involving interacting dynamical systems. The ‘congealing of agencies’ to which Barad refers can be equated to the presence of regulatory mechanisms restricting the range of possibilities open to the agencies concerned

A layered abduction model of perception: Integrating bottom-up and top-down processing in a multi-sense agent

A layered-abduction model of perception is presented which unifies bottom-up and top-down processing in a single logical and information-processing framework. The process of interpreting the input from each sense is broken down into discrete layers of interpretation, where at each layer a best explanation hypothesis is formed of the data presented by the layer or layers below, with the help of information available laterally and from above. The formation of this hypothesis is treated as a problem of abductive inference, similar to diagnosis and theory formation. Thus this model brings a knowledge-based problem-solving approach to the analysis of perception, treating perception as a kind of compiled cognition. The bottom-up passing of information from layer to layer defines channels of information flow, which separate and converge in a specific way for any specific sense modality. Multi-modal perception occurs where channels converge from more than one sense. This model has not yet been implemented, though it is based on systems which have been successful in medical and mechanical diagnosis and medical test interpretation

Reducing uncertainty by using explanatory relationships

Explanatory relationships can be used effectively to reduce the uncertainty that remains after diagnostic hypotheses have been scored using local matching