PurposeThis study aims to develop and validate a stigma scale for Chinese patients with breast cancer.MethodsPatients admitted to the Affiliated Cancer Hospital of Xiangya School of Medicine, Central South University, for breast cancer treatment participated in this study. Development of the Breast Cancer Stigma Scale involved the following procedures: literature review, interview, and applying a theoretical model to generate items; the Breast Cancer Stigma Scale’s content validity was assessed by a Delphi study and feedback from patients with breast cancer ; (...) exploratory factor analysis was used to assess the construct validity; convergent validity was assessed with the Social Impact Scale ; internal consistency Cronbach’s α, split-half reliability, and test–retest reliability were used to identify the reliability of the scale.ResultsThe final version of the Breast Cancer Stigma Scale consisted of 15 items and showed positive correlations with the Social Impact Scale. Exploratory factor analysis revealed four components of the Breast Cancer Stigma Scale: self-image impairment, social isolation, discrimination, and internalized stigma, which were strongly related to our perceived breast cancer stigma model and accounted for 69.443% of the total variance. Cronbach’s α for the total scale was 0.86, and each subscale was 0.75–0.882. The test–retest reliability with intra-class correlation coefficients of the total scale was 0.947, and split-half reliability with intra-class correlation coefficients of the total scale was 0.911. The content validity index was 0.73–1.0.ConclusionThe newly developed Breast Cancer Stigma Scale offers a valid and reliable instrument for assessing the perceived stigma of patients with breast cancer in clinical and research settings. It may be helpful for stigma prevention in China. (shrink)

ObjectiveCancer and its treatments affect patients’ fertility potential. This study examined the prevalence of reproductive concerns and their relationship with metacognitions among Chinese young adult female cancer survivors.MethodsA total of 318 YAFCS completed an online survey from March to December 2021. Participants reported sociodemographic characteristics, reproductive concerns and metacognitions. Reproductive concerns were measured using the Reproductive Concerns after Cancer scale, and metacognitions were measured by the Short Form of Metacognitions Questionnaire. We used Pearson correlation analysis to examine associations between metacognitions (...) and reproductive concerns across multiple domains and multivariable linear regression to determine the influencing factors of reproductive concerns.ResultsThe mean score of reproductive concern among YAFCS was 49.97 ± 12.52. A total of 57.9% of participants reported a high level of concern regarding at least one dimension of reproductive concerns, and they were most concerned about their child’s health and least concerned about partner disclosure of fertility status. We also found a moderate association between RCAC and MCQ-30 scores. In multivariate analyses, metacognitions, especially negative metacognitive beliefs had an impact on reproductive concerns among YAFCS.ConclusionHigher reproductive concerns were associated with higher metacognitions among YAFCS, especially with negative metacognitive beliefs. Oncology professionals should pay attention to assessing reproductive concerns in patients who want to have children or who have no children. Moreover, metacognitive beliefs may be an intervention target for alleviating reproductive concerns among YAFCS. (shrink)

IntroductionNew nurses struggled with time management, which was a prominent theme in safety care for patients. However, the transition training of time management for new nurses was complicated and ignored by clinical managers. The purpose of this study was to understand the level of new nurses’ TMD from a nationwide perspective and detect the influencing factors of the TMD.Materials and methodsA cross-sectional study design with a stratified sampling method was sampled in China. Six hundred and seventy new nurses within the (...) first year of employment were recruited. New nurses’ time management disposition, job stressors, self-efficacy, clinical communication competence, and safety behavior were measured by corresponding scales.ResultsNew nurses showed the best sense of time’s value, followed by the sense of time efficacy and time monitoring view for time management disposition. The related factors of time management disposition were communication skills, safety behavior, job stressors, and being without a preceptor. New nurses’ time management disposition was at a moderate level and they performed worse in time allocation. The highest education, with or without a preceptor, the experience of part-time jobs, and class cadre were significantly influencing the time management disposition of new nurses.ConclusionNursing managers should pay attention to new nurses’ time management disposition. Reducing the job stressors, improving communication ability, and safe behavior were important measures to improve the time management disposition. (shrink)

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third position. We advocate a very different (...) sort of externalism: an _active externalism_, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes. (shrink)

Brains, it has recently been argued, are essentially prediction machines. They are bundles of cells that support perception and action by constantly attempting to match incoming sensory inputs with top-down expectations or predictions. This is achieved using a hierarchical generative model that aims to minimize prediction error within a bidirectional cascade of cortical processing. Such accounts offer a unifying model of perception and action, illuminate the functional role of attention, and may neatly capture the special contribution of cortical processing to (...) adaptive success. This target article critically examines this approach, concluding that it offers the best clue yet to the shape of a unified science of mind and action. Sections 1 and 2 lay out the key elements and implications of the approach. Section 3 explores a variety of pitfalls and challenges, spanning the evidential, the methodological, and the more properly conceptual. The paper ends (sections 4 and 5) by asking how such approaches might impact our more general vision of mind, experience, and agency. (shrink)

As Ruben notes, the macrostrategy can allow that the distinction may also be drawn at some micro level, but it insists that descent to the micro level is ...

Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science invites readers to join in up-to-the-minute conceptual discussions of the fundamental issues, problems, and opportunities in cognitive science. Written by one of the most renowned scholars in the field, this vivid and engaging introductory text relates the story of the search for a cognitive scientific understanding of mind. This search is presented as a no-holds-barred journey from early work in artificial intelligence, through connectionist (artificial neural network) counter-visions, and on to neuroscience, (...) artificial life, dynamics, and robotics. The journey ends with some wide-ranging and provocative speculation about the complex coadaptive dance between mind, culture, and technology. Each chapter opens with a brief sketch of a major research tradition or perspective, followed by short yet substantial critical discussions dealing with key topics and problems. Ranging across both standard philosophical territory and the landscape of cutting-edge cognitive science, Clark highlights challenging issues in an effort to engage readers in active debate. Topics covered include mental causation; machine intelligence; the nature and status of folk psychology; the hardware/software distinction; emergence; relations between life and mind; the nature of perception, cognition, and action; and the continuity (or otherwise) of high-level human intelligence with other forms of adaptive response. Numerous illustrations, text boxes, and extensive suggestions for further reading enhance the text's utility. Helpful appendices provide background information on dualism, behaviorism, identity theory, consciousness, and more. An exceptional text for introductory and more advanced courses in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, Mindware is also essential reading for anyone interested in these fascinating and ever-changing fields. (shrink)

1. The Situation in Cognition 2. Situated Cognition: A Potted Recent History 3. Extensions in Biology, Computation, and Cognition 4. Articulating the Idea of Cognitive Extension 5. Are Some Resources Intrinsically Non-Cognitive? 6. Is Cognition Extended or Only Embedded? 7. Letting Nature Take Its Course.

Parallel distributed processing is transforming the field of cognitive science. Microcognition provides a clear, readable guide to this emerging paradigm from a cognitive philosopher's point of view. It explains and explores the biological basis of PDP, its psychological importance, and its philosophical relevance.

This edited collection opens up new intellectual territories and articulates the ways in which academics are theorising and practicing new forms of research in ‘wild’ contexts. Many researchers are choosing to leave the familiarity of their laboratory-based settings in order to pursue in-situ studies ‘in the wild’ that can help them to better understand the implications of their work in real-world settings. This has naturally led to ethical, philosophical and practical reappraisals with regard to the taken for granted lab-based modus (...) operandi of scientific, cultural and design-based ways of working. This evolving movement has led to a series of critical debates opening up around the nature of research in the wild, but up until now these debates have not been drawn together in a coherent way that could be useful in an academic context. The book brings together applied, methodological and theoretical perspectives relating to this subject area, and provides a platform and a source of reference material for researchers, students and academics to base their work on. Cutting across multiple disciplines relating to philosophy, sociology, ethnography, design, human–computer interaction, science, history and critical theory, this timely collection appeals to a broad range of academics in varying fields of research. (shrink)

This paper reports on-going work in the eSCAPE Project (Esprit Long Term Research Project 25377) directed to the research and development of electronic landscapes for public use. Our concern here is to elucidate a sociologically informed approach towards the design of electronic landscapes or virtual worlds. We suggest — and demonstrate through ethnographic studies of virtual technologies at a multimedia art museum and information technology trade show — that members sense of space is produced through social practices tied to the (...) accomplishment of activities occurring within the locations their actions are situated. Space, in other words, is socially constructed and shaped through members’ practices for accomplishing situated activities. We explicate, by practical examples, an approach to discovering social practices in and through which a sense of space is constructed and outline how such understandings may be used to formulate requirements for the design of electronic landscapes. In explicating our ethnographically informed approach, we outline how future technologies may bedeveloped through the situated evaluation of experimental prototypes in public use. (shrink)

Hohwy (Hohwy 2016, Hohwy 2017) argues there is a tension between the free energy principle and leading depictions of mind as embodied, enactive, and extended (so-called ‘EEE1 cognition’). The tension is traced to the importance, in free energy formulations, of a conception of mind and agency that depends upon the presence of a ‘Markov blanket’ demarcating the agent from the surrounding world. In what follows I show that the Markov blanket considerations do not, in fact, lead to the kinds of (...) tension that Hohwy depicts. On the contrary, they actively favour the EEE story. This is because the Markov property, as exemplified in biological agents, picks out neither a unique nor a stationary boundary. It is this multiplicity and mutability– rather than the absence of agent-environment boundaries as such - that EEE cognition celebrates. (shrink)

Recent work in computational and cognitive neuroscience depicts the brain as an ever‐active prediction machine: an inner engine continuously striving to anticipate the incoming sensory barrage. I briefly introduce this class of models before contrasting two ways of understanding the implied vision of mind. One way (Conservative Predictive Processing) depicts the predictive mind as an insulated inner arena populated by representations so rich and reconstructive as to enable the organism to ‘throw away the world’. The other (Radical Predictive Processing) stresses (...) the use of fast and frugal, action‐involving solutions of the kind highlighted by much work in robotics and embodied cognition. But it goes further, by showing how predictive schemes can combine frugal and more knowledge‐intensive strategies, switching between them fluently and continuously as task and context dictate. I end by exploring some parallels with work in enactivism, and by noting a certain ambivalence concerning internal representations and their role in the predictive mind. (shrink)

Is consciousness all in the head, or might the minimal physical substrate for some forms of conscious experience include the goings on in the (rest of the) body and the world? Such a view might be dubbed (by analogy with Clark and Chalmers’s ( 1998 ) claims concerning ‘the extended mind’) ‘the extended conscious mind’. In this article, I review a variety of arguments for the extended conscious mind, and find them flawed. Arguments for extended cognition, I conclude, do not (...) generalize to arguments for an extended conscious mind. (shrink)

Biological brains are increasingly cast as ‘prediction machines’: evolved organs whose core operating principle is to learn about the world by trying to predict their own patterns of sensory stimulation. This, some argue, should lead us to embrace a brain-bound ‘neurocentric’ vision of the mind. The mind, such views suggest, consists entirely in the skull-bound activity of the predictive brain. In this paper I reject the inference from predictive brains to skull-bound minds. Predictive brains, I hope to show, can be (...) apt participants in larger cognitive circuits. The path is thus cleared for a new synthesis in which predictive brains act as entry-points for ‘extended minds’, and embodiment and action contribute constitutively to knowing contact with the world. (shrink)

‘Predictive Processing’ is an emerging paradigm in cognitive neuroscience that depicts the human mind as an uncertainty management system that constructs probabilistic predictions of sensory s...

A suitable project for the new Millenium is to radically reconfigure our image of human rationality. Such a project is already underway, within the Cognitive Sciences, under the umbrellas of work in Situated Cognition, Distributed and De-centralized Cogition, Real-world Robotics and Artificial Life1. Such approaches, however, are often criticized for giving certain aspects of rationality too wide a berth. They focus their attention on on such superficially poor cousins as.

How should we characterize the functional role of conscious visual experience? In particular, how do the conscious contents of visual experience guide, bear upon, or otherwise inform our ongoing motor activities? According to an intuitive and (I shall argue) philosophically influential conception, the links are often quite direct. The contents of conscious visual experience, according to this conception, are typically active in the control and guidance of our fine-tuned, real-time engagements with the surrounding three-dimensional world. But this idea (which I (...) shall call the Assumption of Experience-Based Control) is hostage to empirical fortune. It is a hostage, moreover, whose safety is in serious doubt. Thus Milner and Goodale (1995) argue for a deep and abiding dissociation between the contents of conscious seeing, on the one hand, and the resources used for the on-line guidance of visuo-motor action, on the other. This ‘dual visual systems’ hypothesis, which finds many echoes in various other bodies of cognitive scientific research, poses a prima facie challenge to the Assumption of Experience-Based Control. More importantly, it provides (I shall argue) fuel for an alternative and philosophically suggestive account of the functional role of conscious visual experience. (shrink)

Recent work in cognitive and computational neuroscience depicts human brains as devices that minimize prediction error signals: signals that encode the difference between actual and expected sensory stimulations. This raises a series of puzzles whose common theme concerns a potential misfit between this bedrock informationtheoretic vision and familiar facts about the attractions of the unexpected. We humans often seem to actively seek out surprising events, deliberately harvesting novel and exciting streams of sensory stimulation. Conversely, we often experience some wellexpected sensations (...) as unpleasant and to-be-avoided. In this paper, I explore several core and variant forms of this puzzle, using them to display multiple interacting elements that together deliver a satisfying solution. That solution requires us to go beyond the discussion of simple information-theoretic imperatives and to recognize the essential role of species-specific prestructuring, epistemic foraging, and cultural practices in shaping the restless, curious, novelty-seeking human mind. (shrink)

Recent work in cognitive and computational neuroscience depicts the human brain as a complex, multi-layer prediction engine. This family of models has had great success in accounting for a wide variety of phenomena involving perception, action, and attention. But despite their clear promise as accounts of the neurocomputational origins of perceptual experience, they have not yet been leveraged so as to shed light on the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness—the problem of explaining why and how the world is subjectively experienced (...) at all, and why those experiences seem just the way they do. To address this issue, I motivate and defend a picture of conscious experience as flowing from “generative entanglements” that mix predictions about the world, the body, and our own reactive dispositions. (shrink)

Mind, it is increasingly fashionable to assert, is an intrinsically embodied and environmentally embedded phenomenon. But there is a potential tension between two strands of thought prominent in this recent literature. One of those strands depicts the body as special, and the fine details of a creature’s embodiment as a major constraint on the nature of its mind: a kind of new-wave body-centrism. The other depicts the body as just one element in a kind of equal-partners dance between brain, body (...) and world, with the nature of the mind fixed by the overall balance thus achieved: a kind of extended functionalism (now with an even broader canvas for multiple realizability than ever before). The present paper displays the tension, scouts the space of possible responses, and ends by attempting to specify what the body actually needs to be, given its complex role in these recent debates. (shrink)

Arguments for the ‘extended mind’ seem to suggest the possibility of ‘extended knowers’—agents whose specifically epistemic virtues may depend on systems whose boundaries are not those of the brain or the biological organism. Recent discussions of this possibility invoke insights from virtue epistemology, according to which knowledge is the result of the application of some kind of cognitive skill or ability on the part of the agent. In this paper, I argue that there is a fundamental tension in these appeals (...) to cognitive virtue. The tension centers on the presence of a tool or technology as an object of awareness, hence something apt for epistemically virtuous engagement on the part of the agent. I highlight a dilemma: the better something looks as a non-biological element of the machinery of mind, the worse it looks as a potential object of any specifically epistemic skill or ability on the part of the agent. The tension is resolved, I argue, by thinking about sub-personal forms of epistemic hygiene. I examine one such form , and show how it sits neatly with the vision of the extended mind. I end by asking what we can still reasonably expect, given this more complex sub-personal story, by way of agent-level cognitive hygiene. (shrink)

There is a definite challenge in the air regarding the pivotal notion of internal representation. This challenge is explicit in, e.g., van Gelder, 1995; Beer, 1995; Thelen & Smith, 1994; Wheeler, 1994; and elsewhere. We think it is a challenge that can be met and that (importantly) can be met by arguing from within a general framework that accepts many of the basic premises of the work (in new robotics and in dynamical systems theory) that motivates such scepticism in the (...) first place. Our strategy will be as follows. We begin (Section 1) by offering an account (an example and something close to a definition) of what we shall term Minimal Robust Representationalism (MRR). Sections 2 & 3 address some likely worries and questions about this notion. We end (Section 4) by making explicit the conditions under which, on our account, a science (e.g., robot- ics) may claim to be addressing cognitive phenomena. (shrink)

The target article sketched and explored a mechanism (action-oriented predictive processing) most plausibly associated with core forms of cortical processing. In assessing the attractions and pitfalls of the proposal we should keep that element distinct from larger, though interlocking, issues concerning the nature of adaptive organization in general.

We show that a popular class of connectionist models (which we label 'first order connectionism') looks unlikely to provide the kind of resources required by the hypothesis. We examine some alternative hybrid models that seem more promising. Finally, we raise a more purely philosophical issue concerning the conditions under which a being can count as a genuine believer or cognizer.".

Recent work in cognitive and computational neuroscience depicts the brain as in some sense implementing probabilistic inference. This suggests a puzzle. If the processing that enables perceptual experience involves representing or approximating probability distributions, why does experience itself appear univocal and determinate, apparently bearing no traces of those probabilistic roots? In this paper, I canvass a range of responses, including the denial of univocality and determinacy itself. I argue that there is reason to think that it is our conception of (...) perception itself that is flawed. Once we see perception aright, as the slave of action, the puzzlement recedes. Perceptual determinacy reflects only the mundane fact that we are embodied, active, agents who must constantly engage the world they perceptually encounter. (shrink)

How should we characterize the functional role of conscious visual experience? In particular, how do the conscious contents of visual experience guide, bear upon, or otherwise inform our ongoing motor activities? According to an intuitive and philosophically influential conception, the links are often quite direct. The contents of conscious visual experience, according to this conception, are typically active in the control and guidance of our fine-tuned, real-time engagements with the surrounding three-dimensional world. But this idea is hostage to empirical fortune. (...) It is a hostage, moreover, whose safety is in serious doubt. Thus Milner and Goodale argue for a deep and abiding dissociation between the contents of conscious seeing, on the one hand, and the resources used for the on-line guidance of visuo-motor action, on the other. This ‘dual visual systems’ hypothesis, which finds many echoes in various other bodies of cognitive scientific research, poses a prima facie challenge to the Assumption of Experience-Based Control. More importantly, it provides fuel for an alternative and philosophically suggestive account of the functional role of conscious visual experience. (shrink)

Recent advances in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience open up new vistas for human enhancement. Central to much of this work is the idea of new human-machine interfaces (in general) and new brain-machine interfaces (in particular). But despite the increasing prominence of such ideas, the very idea of such an interface remains surprisingly under-explored. In particular, the notion of human enhancement suggests an image of the embodied and reasoning agent as literally extended or augmented, rather than the more conservative image (...) of a standard (non-enhanced) agent using a tool via some new interface. In this essay, I explore this difference, and attempt to lay out some of the conditions under which the more radical reading (positing brand new integrated agents or systemic wholes) becomes justified. I adduce some empirical evidence suggesting that the radical result is well within our scientific reach. The main reason why this is so has less to do with the advancement of our science (though that certainly helps) than with our native biological plasticity. We humans, I shall try to show, are biologically disposed towards literal (and repeated) episodes of sensory re-calibration, of bodily re-configuration and of mental extension. Such potential for literal and repeated re-configuration is the mark of what I shall call "profoundly embodied agency," contrasting it with a variety of weaker (less philosophically and scientifically interesting) understandings of the nature and importance of embodiment for minds and persons. The article ends by relating the image of profound embodiment to some questions (and fears) concerning converging technologies for improving human performance. (shrink)

Recent studies such as Thelen and Smith, Kelso, Van Gelder, Beer, and others have presented a forceful case for a dynamical systems approach to understanding cognition and adaptive behavior. These studies call into question some foundational assumptions concerning the nature of cognitive scientific explanation and the role of notions such as internal representation and computation. These are exciting and important challenges. But they must be handled with care. It is all to easy in this debate to lose sight of the (...) explanatorily important issues and to talk at cross purposes, courtesy of the various ways in which different theorists often concieve key terms. (shrink)

Some regularities enjoy only an attenuated existence in a body of training data. These are regularities whose statistical visibility depends on some systematic recoding of the data. The space of possible recodings is, however, infinitely large – it is the space of applicable Turing machines. As a result, mappings that pivot on such attenuated regularities cannot, in general, be found by brute-force search. The class of problems that present such mappings we call the class of “type-2 problems.” Type-1 problems, by (...) contrast, present tractable problems of search insofar as the relevant regularities can be found by sampling the input data as originally coded. Type-2 problems, we suggest, present neither rare nor pathological cases. They are rife in biologically realistic settings and in domains ranging from simple animat behaviors to language acquisition. Not only are such problems rife – they are standardly solved! This presents a puzzle. How, given the statistical intractability of these type-2 cases, does nature turn the trick? One answer, which we do not pursue, is to suppose that evolution gifts us with exactly the right set of recoding biases so as to reduce specific type-2 problems to type-1 mappings. Such a heavy-duty nativism is no doubt sometimes plausible. But we believe there are other, more general mechanisms also at work. Such mechanisms provide general strategies for managing problems of type-2 complexity. Several such mechanisms are investigated. At the heart of each is a fundamental ploy – namely, the maximal exploitation of states of representation already achieved by prior, simpler learning so as to reduce the amount of subsequent computational search. Such exploitation both characterizes and helps make unitary sense of a diverse range of mechanisms. These include simple incremental learning, modular connectionism, and the developmental hypothesis of “representational redescription”. In addition, the most distinctive features of human cognition – language and culture – may themselves be viewed as adaptations enabling this representation/computation trade-off to be pursued on an even grander scale. (shrink)

What is the role of conscious visual experience in the control and guidance of human behaviour? According to some recent treatments, the role is surprisingly indirect. Conscious visual experience, on these accounts, serves the formation of plans and the selection of action types and targets, while the control of 'online' visually guided action proceeds via a quasi-independent non-conscious route. In response to such claims, critics such as (Wallhagen [2007], pp. 539-61) have suggested that the notions of control and guidance invoked (...) are unacceptably vague, and that that the image of 'zombie systems' guiding action fails to take account of the possibility that there is genuine but unconceptualized, unnoticed, and/or unreportable experience taking place and guiding or controlling the actions. I address both sets of concerns. I try to show that refining and clarifying the key notions of control and guidance leaves the original argument intact, as does the appeal to unconceptualized, unnoticed, or unreportable experiences. The exercise serves, however, to highlight an important complex of considerations concerning the relations between control, agency, and experience. Better understanding these relations is, I suggest, an important source of insights concerning the nature of phenomenal experience. (shrink)

Advanced biological brains are by nature open-ended opportunistic controllers. Such controllers compute, pretty much on a moment-to-moment basis, what problem-solving resources are readily available and recruit them into temporary problem-solving wholes. Neural plasticity, exaggerated in our own species, makes it possible for such resources to become factored deep into both our cognitive and physical problem-solving routines. One way to think about this is to depict the biological brain as a master of what I shall dub ‘ecological control’. Ecological control is (...) the kind of top-level control that does not micro-manage every detail, but rather encourages substantial devolvement of power and responsibility. This kind of control allows much of our skill at walking to reside in the linkages and elastic properties of muscles and tendons. And it allows much of our prowess at thought and reason to depend upon the robust and reliable operation, often in dense brain-involving loops, of a variety of non-biological problem-solving resources spread throughout our social and technological surround. Are the complex distributed systems that result in some sense ‘out of control’, beyond the reach of useful governance? I shall argue that they are not, although understanding them requires us to re-think some key ideas about control and the nature of the self. To make this case, I shall first examine some strategies for efficient, external opportunity exploiting control in simple systems. I shall then argue that many of the same lessons apply to the case of higher-level human problem-solving. (shrink)

Advanced biological brains are by nature open-ended opportunistic controllers. Such controllers compute, pretty much on a moment-to-moment basis, what problem-solving resources are readily available and recruit them into temporary problem-solving wholes. Neural plasticity, exaggerated in our own species, makes it possible for such resources to become factored deep into both our cognitive and physical problem-solving routines. One way to think about this is to depict the biological brain as a master of what I shall dub ‘ecological control’. Ecological control is (...) the kind of top-level control that does not micro-manage every detail, but rather encourages substantial devolvement of power and responsibility. This kind of control allows much of our skill at walking to reside in the linkages and elastic properties of muscles and tendons. And it allows much of our prowess at thought and reason to depend upon the robust and reliable operation, often in dense brain-involving loops, of a variety of non-biological problem-solving resources spread throughout our social and technological surround. Are the complex distributed systems that result in some sense ‘out of control’, beyond the reach of useful governance? I shall argue that they are not, although understanding them requires us to re-think some key ideas about control and the nature of the self. To make this case, I shall first examine some strategies for efficient, external opportunity exploiting control in simple systems. I shall then argue that many of the same lessons apply to the case of higher-level human problem-solving. (shrink)

How does language (spoken or written) impact thought? One useful way to approach this important but elusive question may be to consider language itself as a cognition-enhancing animal-built structure. To take this perspective is to view language as a kind of self-constructed cognitive niche. These self-constructed cognitive niches play, I suggest, three distinct but deeply interlocking roles in human thought and reason. Working together, these three interlocking routines radically transform the human mind, and mark a genuine discontinuity in the space (...) of anitnal minds. (shrink)

How does language impact thought? One useful way to approach this important but elusive question may be to consider language itself as a cognition-enhancing animal-built structure. To take this perspective is to view language as a kind of self-constructed cognitive niche.

Recent work in cognitive science highlights the importance of exem- plar-based know-how in supporting human expertise. Influenced by this model, certain accounts of moral knowledge now stress exemplar- based, non-sentential know-how at the expense of rule-and-principle based accounts. I shall argue, however, that moral thought and reason cannot be understood by reference to either of these roles alone. Moral cognition – like other forms of ‘advanced’ cognition – depends crucially on the subtle interplay and interaction of multiple factors and forces (...) and especially (or so I argue) between the use of linguistic tools and formulations and more biologically basic forms of thought and reason. (shrink)

The use of forward models is well established in cognitive and computational neuroscience. We compare and contrast two recent, but interestingly divergent, accounts of the place of forward models in the human cognitive architecture. On the Auxiliary Forward Model account, forward models are special-purpose prediction mechanisms implemented by additional circuitry distinct from core mechanisms of perception and action. On the Integral Forward Model account, forward models lie at the heart of all forms of perception and action. We compare these neighbouring (...) but importantly different visions and consider their implications for the cognitive sciences. We end by asking what kinds of empirical research might offer evidence favouring one or the other of these approaches. (shrink)

What do linguistic symbols do for minds like ours, and how (if at all) can basic embodied, dynamical and situated approaches do justice to high-level human thought and reason? These two questions are best addressed together, since our answers to the first may inform the second. The key move in ‘scaling-up’ simple embodied cognitive science is, I argue, to take very seriously the potent role of human-built structures in transforming the spaces of human learning and reason. In particular, in this (...) paper I look at a range of cases involving what I dub ‘surrogate situations’. Here, we actively create restricted artificial environments that allow us to deploy basic perception-action- reason routines in the absence of their proper objects. Examples include the use of real-world models, diagrams and other concrete external symbols to support dense looping interactions with a variety of stable external structures that stand in for the absent states of affairs. (shrink)

In _Action in Perception _Alva No develops and presents a sensorimotor account of vision and of visual consciousness. According to such an account seeing (and indeed perceiving more generally) is analysed as a kind of skilful bodily activity. Such a view is consistent with the emerging emphasis, in both philosophy and cognitive science, on the critical role of embodiment in the construction of intelligent agency. I shall argue, however, that the full sensorimotor model faces three important challenges. The first is (...) to negotiate a path between two prima facie unsatisfactory readings of the central claim that conscious perceptual experience is constituted by knowledge of patterns of sensorimotor dependence. The second is to convince us that the sensorimotor contribution, in such cases, is actually constitutive of perceptual experience rather than merely causally implicated in the origination of such experience.² And the third is to respond to the important challenge raised by what I will dub 'sensorimotor summarizing' models of the relation between conscious experience and richly detailed sensorimotor routines. According to such models³ conscious perceptual experience only rather indirectly reflects the rich detail of our actual sensorimotor engagements, which are instead lightly sampled as a coarse guide, optimized for planning and reasoning, and geared and filtered according to current needs and purposes. (shrink)

Fodor’s theory makes thinking prior to doing. It allows for an inactive agent or pure reflector, and for agents whose actions in various ways seem to float free of their own conceptual repertoires. We show that naturally evolved creatures are not like that. In the real world, thinking is always and everywhere about doing. The point of having a brain is to guide the actions of embodied beings in a complex material world. Some of those actions are, to be sure, (...) more recondite than others. But in every case the contents of thoughts still look to depend, in some non-unique but vitally important way, on the kinds of doings they support. (shrink)

Mind, it has recently been argued1, is a thoroughly temporal phenomenon: so temporal, indeed, as to defy description and analysis using the traditional computational tools of cognitive scientific understanding. The proper explanatory tools, so the suggestion goes, are instead the geometric constructs and differential equations of Dynamical Systems Theory. I consider various aspects of the putative temporal challenge to computational understanding, and show that the root problem turns on the presence of a certain kind of causal web: a web that (...) involves multiple components (both inner and outer) linked by chains of continuous and reciprocal causal influence. There is, however, no compelling route from such facts about causal and temporal complexity to the radical anti- computationalist conclusion. This is because, interactive complexities notwithstanding, the computational approach provides a kind of explanatory understanding that cannot (I suggest) be recreated using the alternative resources of pure Dynamical Systems Theory. In particular, it provides a means of mapping information flow onto causal structure -- a mapping that is crucial to understanding the distinctive kinds of flexibility and control characteristic of truly mindful engagements with the world. Where we confront especially complex interactive causal webs, however, it does indeed become harder to isolate the syntactic vehicles required by the computational approach. Dynamical Systems Theory, I conclude, may play a vital role in recovering such vehicles from the burgeoning mass of real-time interactive complexity. (shrink)

Recent work in "embodied, embedded" cognitive science links mental contents to large-scale distributed effects: dynamic patterns implicating elements of (what are traditionally seen as) sensing, reasoning and acting. Central to this approach is an idea of biological cognition as profoundly "action-oriented" - geared not to the creation of rich, passive inner models of the world, but to the cheap and efficient production of real-world action in real-world context. A case in point is Hurley's (1998) account of the profound role of (...) motor output in fixing the contents of conscious visual awareness - an account that also emphasizes distributed vehicles and long-range dynamical loops. Such stories can seem dramatically opposed to accounts, such as Milner and Goodale (1995), that stress relatively local mechanisms and that posit firm divisions between processes of visual awareness and of visuomotor action. But such accounts, I argue, can be deeply complimentary and together illustrate an important lesson. The lesson is that cognition may be embodied and action-oriented in two distinct - but complimentary - ways. There is a way of being embodied and action-oriented that implies being closely geared to the fine-grained control of low level effectors (hands, arms, legs and so on). And there is a way of being embodied and action-oriented that implies being closely geared to gross motor intentions, current goals, and schematic motor plans. Human cognition, I suggest, is embodied and action-oriented in both these ways. But the neural systems involved, and the size and scope of the key dynamic loops, may be quite different in each case. (shrink)

Objectives: To study the attitudes of both medical and non-medical students towards the do-not-resuscitate decision in a university in Hong Kong, and the factors affecting their attitudes.Methods: A questionnaire-based survey conducted in the campus of a university in Hong Kong. Preferences and priorities of participants on cardiopulmonary resuscitation in various situations and case scenarios, experience of death and dying, prior knowledge of DNR and basic demographic data were evaluated.Results: A total of 766 students participated in the study. There were statistically (...) significant differences in their DNR decisions in various situations between medical and non-medical students, clinical and preclinical students, and between students who had previously experienced death and dying and those who had not. A prior knowledge of DNR significantly affected DNR decision, although 66.4% of non-medical students and 18.7% of medical students had never heard of DNR. 74% of participants from both medical and non-medical fields considered the patient’s own wish as the most important factor that the healthcare team should consider when making DNR decisions. Family wishes might not be decisive on the choice of DNR.Conclusions: Students in medical and non-medical fields held different views on DNR. A majority of participants considered the patient’s own wish as most important in DNR decisions. Family wishes were considered less important than the patient’s own wishes. (shrink)