Distal engagement: Intentions in perception

Non-representational approaches to cognition have struggled to provide accounts of long-term planning that forgo the use of representations. An explanation comes easier for cognitivist accounts, which hold that we concoct and use contentful mental representations as guides to coordinate a series of actions towards an end state. One non-representational approach, ecological-enactivism, has recently seen several proposals that account for “high-level” or “representation-hungry” capacities, including long-term planning and action coordination. In this paper, we demonstrate the explanatory gap in these accounts that stems from avoiding the incorporation of long-term intentions, as they play an important role both in action coordination and perception on the ecological account. Using recent enactive accounts of language, we argue for a non-representational conception of intentions, their formation, and their role in coordinating pre-reflective action. We provide an account for the coordination of our present actions towards a distant goal, a skill we call distal engagement. Rather than positing intentions as an actual cognitive entity in need of explanation, we argue that we take them up in this way as a practice due to linguistically scaffolded attitudes towards language use

Agency From a Radical Embodied Standpoint: An Ecological-Enactive Proposal

Explaining agency is a significant challenge for those who are interested in the sciences of the mind, and non-representationalists are no exception to this. Even though both ecological psychologists and enactivists agree that agency is to be explained by focusing on the relation between the organism and the environment, they have approached it by focusing on different aspects of the organism-environment relation. In this paper, I offer a suggestion for a radical embodied account of agency that combines ecological psychology with recent trends in enactive cognitive science. According to this proposal, while enactivism focuses primarily on describing how our acquired sensorimotor schemes and habits mutually equilibrate, affecting our tendency to act upon some affordances instead of others, ecological psychology focuses on studying how perceptual information contributes to the actualization of the sensorimotor schemes and habits without mediating representations, inferences, and computations. The paper concludes by briefly exploring how this ecological-enactive theory of agency can account for how socio-cultural norms shape human agency

Ecological psychology is radical enough: A reply to radical enactivists

Ecological psychology is one of the most influential theories of perception in the embodied, anti-representational, and situated cognitive sciences. However, radical enactivists claim that Gibsonians tend to describe ecological information and its ‘pick up’ in ways that make ecological psychology close to representational theories of perception and cognition. Motivated by worries about the tenability of classical views of informational content and its processing, these authors claim that ecological psychology needs to be “RECtified” so as to explicitly resist representational readings. In this paper, we argue against this call for RECtification. To do so, we offer a detailed analysis of the notion of perceptual information and other related notions such as specificity and meaning, as they are presented in the specialized ecological literature. We defend that these notions, if properly understood, remain free of any representational commitment. Ecological psychology, we conclude, does not need to be RECtified

Misplacing memories? An enactive approach to the virtual memory palace

In this paper, we evaluate the pragmatic turn towards embodied, enactive thinking in cognitive science, in the context of recent empirical research on the memory palace technique. The memory palace is a powerful method for remembering yet it faces two problems. First, cognitive scientists are currently unable to clarify its efficacy. Second, the technique faces significant practical challenges to its users. Virtual reality devices are sometimes presented as a way to solve these practical challenges, but currently fall short of delivering on that promise. We address both issues in this paper. First, we argue that an embodied, enactive approach to memory can better help us understand the effectiveness of the memory palace. Second, we present design recommendations for a virtual memory palace. Our theoretical proposal and design recommendations contribute to solving both problems and provide reasons for preferring an embodied, enactive account over an information-processing treatment of the memory palace

Plant sentience? Between romanticism and denial: Science

A growing number of non-human animal species are being seriously considered as candidates for sentience, but plants are either forgotten or explicitly excluded from these debates. In our view, this is based on the belief that plant behavior is hardwired and inflexible and on an underestimation of the role of plant electrophysiology. We weigh such assumptions against the evidence to suggest that it is time to take seriously the hypothesis that plants, too, might be sentient. We hope this target article will serve as an invitation to investigate sentience in plants with the same rigor as in non-human animals

Consciousness and cognition in plants

Unlike animal behavior, behavior in plants is traditionally assumed to be completely determined either genetically or environmentally. Under this assumption, plants are usually considered to be noncognitive organisms. This view nonetheless clashes with a growing body of empirical research that shows that many sophisticated cognitive capabilities traditionally assumed to be exclusive to animals are exhibited by plants too. Yet, if plants can be considered cognitive, even in a minimal sense, can they also be considered conscious? Some authors defend that the quest for plant consciousness is worth pursuing, under the premise that sentience can play a role in facilitating plant's sophisticated behavior. The goal of this article is not to provide a positive argument for plant cognition and consciousness, but to invite a constructive, empirically informed debate about it. After reviewing the empirical literature concerning plant cognition, we introduce the reader to the emerging field of plant neurobiology. Research on plant electrical and chemical signaling can help shed light into the biological bases for plant sentience. To conclude, we shall present a series of approaches to scientifically investigate plant consciousness. In sum, we invite the reader to consider the idea that if consciousness boils down to some form of biological adaptation, we should not exclude a priori the possibility that plants have evolved their own phenomenal experience of the world. Cognitive Biology > Evolutionary Roots of Cognition Philosophy > Consciousness Neuroscience > Cognition

Situated self-awareness in expert performance: a situated normativity account of riken no ken

We explore the nature of expert minds in skilled performance by examining classic Japanese dramatist Zeami’s account of skilled expertise in Noh drama. Zeami characterizes expert minds by the co-existence of mushin and riken no ken. Mushin (“no-mind”) is an empty state of mind devoid of mental contents. Riken no ken (“seeing with a separate seeing”) is a distinctive form of self-awareness, where the actor embodies a common perspective with the audience upon one’s own performance. Conventional accounts of riken no ken present it as a form of imagination: expert actors deliver their performance by imagining what it looks like from an external point of view. These imagination-based accounts, however, do not square well with the claim that riken no ken co-exists with mushin. We propose an alternative perception-based account that better accounts for this co-existence, drawing on the concept of “situated normativity” from embodied-ecological theories of cognition. The situated normativity account characterizes riken no ken as a form of “direct affective perception” in which actors are aware of their performance’s quality of attunement with the performative situation. Expert Noh actors realise a common perspective with the audience not by imagining an external point of view, but by perceiving the situation that encompasses their own performance from an aesthetic perspective cultivated and shared within the Noh community

Similarity-based cognition: radical enactivism meets cognitive neuroscience

2019, Springer Nature B.V. Similarity-based cognition is commonplace. It occurs whenever an agent or system exploits the similarities that hold between two or more items-e.g., events, processes, objects, and so on-in order to perform some cognitive task. This kind of cognition is of special interest to cognitive neuroscientists. This paper explicates how similarity-based cognition can be understood through the lens of radical enactivism and why doing so has advantages over its representationalist rival, which posits the existence of structural representations or S-representations. Specifically, it is argued that there are problems both with accounting for the content of S-representations and with understanding how neurally-based structural similarities can work as representations (even if contentless) in guiding intelligent behavior. Finally, with these clarifications in place, it is revealed how radical enactivism can commit to an account of similarity-based cognition in its understanding of neurodynamics