Mental Representations and the Dynamic Theory of Mind

Minds and Machines, 1997

has recently spearheaded a movement to challenge the dominance of connectionist and classicist models in cognitive science. The dynamical conception of cognition is van Gelder's replacement for the computation bound paradigms provided by connectionism and classicism. He relies on the Watt governor to fulfill the role of a dynamicist Turing machine and claims that the Motivational Oscillatory Theory (MOT) provides a sound empirical basis for dynamicism. In other words, the Watt governor is to be the theoretical exemplar of the class of systems necessary for cognition and MOT is an empirical instantiation of that class. However, I shall argue that neither the Watt governor nor MOT successfully fulfill these prescribed roles. This failure, along with van Gelder's peculiar use of the concept of computation and his struggle with representationalism, prevent him from providing a convincing alternative to current cognitive theories.

2007

Approaches to cognitive science have been socially divided into dynamical and computational camps. We break down the dynamical approach into finer components, suggesting a new taxonomy of dynamical approaches to cognition and questioning the logical unity of the dynamical school. We dispel some confusions surrounding the concepts of dynamical systems, computation, and the relation between the two. We introduce and argue for the notion of "cognition as it could be" and show its value in analysing the dynamicists' account of time.

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 1982

d s represent the world. To have a mind is to possess a capacity for representing states of affairs which actually obtain and others which might be brought about. Minds are internally active, and much of their activity consists in processes or operations on internal representations. Thus any adequate theory of mind must provide an account of what the mind can and does represent and of the representations and processes which underlie its rep* resentational powers. Since the seventeenth century there has been little good reason to deny any of these claims which lie at the core of the representational theory of mind. With the decline of behaviorism, philosophers of mind and cognitive psychologists alike have returned their attention to the representational nature of mind. Despite this emerging consensus, the central notion of mental representation remains far from clear, and a lively interdisciplinary discussion has arisen concerning basic conceptual issues. ' The present essay is offered as a philisophical contribution to that debate. In keeping with the generally functionalist view of mind which has become the new orthodoxy among anlaytic philosophers, I will sketch how one plausible version of functionalism might be used to untangle a few puzzles about mental representation. I will approach the issues from an admittedly phil osophical perspective, but if I can establish some philosophical results, I hope that they may also be of interest to those working in other disciplines concerned with the nature of mind. The term "mental representation" is ambiguous in a theoretically significant way. On one hand, it can be used to refer to the general capacity of minds for representing actual and potential states of affairs. When one has a belief or acquires information through a sensory organ, one represents the world as being in some particular way. In this general sense any organism with a capacity to adapt its behavior to the conditions of its environment would be engaged in mental representation. In other contexts mental representations are clearly to be undcrsUxxi as formal or syntactic structures which function as internal symbols (as " fonnulae in the language of thought"). The distinction can be sharpened by noting that there are two quite distinct classes of psychological items which can be described as having content: con

2003

Cognitive Science, 1998

Advocates of dynamical systems theory (DST) sometimes employ revolutionary rhetoric. In an attempt to clarify how DST models differ from others in cognitive science, I focus on two issues raised by DST: the role for representations in mental models and the conception of ...

One of the principal tasks confronting cognitive science is to explain how cognitive systems are capable of representing their environment. It is a commonplace in the philosophy of mind that a theory of mental representation must be naturalistic, in the sense that it must explain mental representation without appealing to properties that are either non-physical or already representational. What is not quite so commonplace is the further injunction that such a theory must explain mental representation in a fashion consistent with its casual role in shaping behaviour. We call this the "causal constraint" on a theory of mental representation. Remarkably, even though the well-known causal, functional, and teleosemantic theories of mental representation are all naturalistic, they all violate the causal constraint. Despite their internal differences, these theories ultimately ground mental content in the behaviour of cognitive systems. And any theory that grounds mental content in behaviour is in principle unable to explain how mental representation is causally responsible for such behaviour. The task we undertake in this paper is to sketch the outlines of a naturalistic theory of mental representation that satisfies the causal constraint. We call this a structuralist theory of mental representation for reasons that will become apparent as we proceed.

Discrete Dynamics in Nature and Society, 1999

The language of nonlinear dynamical systems and ergodic theory is used to present a theoretical framework for the study of mind. The basic spaceXconsists of the collection of all brain images (clusters of activated neurons) that are relevant to consciousness. The dynamics of the brain is modelled by means of a discrete time transformationTwhich takes a cluster of activated brain cells into another cluster of activated brain cells. The spaceXis partitioned into subcollections of brain images, namely those generated by the five senses and by other processes that produce brain images relevant to consciousness. It is argued thatTis a Markov transformation with respect to this partition ofX. This leads to the existence of an objectμ, referred to as an SRB measure which possesses properties that make it a candidate for mind:μis ‘aware’ of the brain images in its support;μis time-invariant and acts as an attractor into which all orbits of (conscious) brain images settle. Furthermore, the d...

This paper tries to explore the nature of cognition in general by focusing on the origin of internal representations and their relation to cognitive behavior. It introduces dynamical systems as an attractive alternative to traditional approaches in the computational theory of mind and investigates whether Minimal Robust Representationalism (Clark & Grush, 1999) can serve as a fundamental basis of cognition.

2011

Dynamical Systems Theory (DST) claims to be an epistemological weapon particularly broad and rich in providing a fair explanatory account of the operations of our mind. However, the very features that this DST espouses as reasons for having an edge over Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), are the ones that are causing trouble in the philosophy of science speculation, especially regarding issues of Explanation. This paper aims to suggest some possible problems that could arise from the application of DST’s characteristically abstract mathematical framework to the study of the mind. As I have not found anything that suggests something like this, my aim is to at least show the reasonability of a possibility.

Computer-Based Diagnostics and Systematic Analysis of Knowledge, 2009