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Cognitive assembly: towards a diachronic conception of composition

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Abstract

In this paper, I focus on a recent debate in extended cognition known as “cognitive assembly” and how cognitive assembly shares a certain kinship with the special composition question advanced in analytical metaphysics. Both the debate about cognitive assembly and the special composition question ask about the circumstances under which entities (broadly construed) compose or assemble another entity. The paper argues for two points. The first point is that insofar as the metaphysics of composition presupposes that composition is a synchronic relation of dependence, then that presupposition is inconsistent with the temporal dynamics inherent in the process of cognitive assembly. The second point is that by developing a diachronic or temporally dynamic ontology for understanding the phenomenon of cognitive assembly, this lends support for a third wave of extended cognition.

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Notes

  1. What I do not claim is that arguments for the process of CA assume a synchronic conception of composition or assembly. It is the usual accounts of composition in analytical metaphysics that presuppose that composition holds in a synchronic manner. What I do claim is that scrutinizing the meaning of “now” both in the debate over the process of CA and in analytical metaphysics may shed light on how (a) to understand the meaning of “now” in debates concerning composition, and (b) to further develop the project of establishing a framework for a third-wave of EC.

  2. Some readers may find it a controversial claim to state that Clark privileges bodily and neural processes when explaining the process of CA. However, in his most recent book, Supersizing the Mind (2008), Clark endorses the following position when discussing the process of CA: “Human cognitive processing (sometimes) literally extends into the environment surrounding the organism. But the organism (and within the organism, the brain/CNS) remains the core and currently most active element. Cognition is organism centered even when it is not organism bound.” (Clark 2008, p. 139) Or, as Clark puts the point a few pages earlier: “It is indeed primarily (though not solely) the biological organism that, courtesy especially of its potent neural apparatus, spins and maintains (or more minimally selects and exploits) the webs of additional structure that then form parts of the machinery that accomplishes its own cognizing.” (2008, p. 123) These two quotes are indicative of Clark’s Hypothesis of Organism Centered Cognition, and is what I mean by the claim that Clark privileges bodily and neural processes when addressing the process of CA. But, of course, this does not imply that the Hypothesis of Organism Centered Cognition is inconsistent with EC. Indeed, Clark’s position on the product of CA is precisely that certain systems are distributed across neural, bodily, and environmental resources.

  3. I should point out the duration of “now” is also discussed in the philosophy of time consciousness under the heading of the specious present.

  4. As Spivey mentions: “Real time does not function like a digital computer’s clock. It does not move forward and then stop to be counted, and then move forward again only to stop again. At the level of human behavior, real time does not have an objective functional unit.” (2007, p. 30)

  5. But these conceptual distinctions may not apply objectively. As Smart (1963), for instance, argues against the A-theory of time, according to which “past”, “present” and “future” are understood to objectively apply to the universe, Smart argues that this way of carving up time is an entirely anthropocentric account of time. That is, distinctions of past, present, and future are distinctions made from a particular (human) point of view (Smart 1963, p. 132; see also Sider 2001; for an overview of the A-theory of time, see e.g., Mellor 1998)

  6. One might object to my claim that dynamical cognitive science is incompatible with tenseless accounts of time, in that, you can account for change in tenseless terms as Russell famously showed. Briefly, what it is for an entity E to undergo change is for E to have a property X at t and a property Y at t 1 rather than X at t 1. But, notice, if we want to understand (i) the evolvement of the system from t to t 1, and (b) how that particular temporal evolvement gives rise to a property difference in E from t to t 1, then a synchronic explanation comes up short.

  7. The actual case study is due to Beach (1988).

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Michael D. Kirchhoff

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Kirchhoff, M.D. Cognitive assembly: towards a diachronic conception of composition. Phenom Cogn Sci 14, 33–53 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9338-7

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