I’ve been working on a non-representationalist, non-computationalist, dynamicist account of human cognition for several years. My basic methodology has been to study different areas of empirical psychology and neuroscience and see if I can find any results that look like they won’t fit my account. This generally helps me better understand an area. For the past year I’ve been mostly concentrating on perception and especially vision. I feel like I’ve made as much progress as I can in that area, and have sufficiently convinced myself that I’m on the right track, and am thinking about what to take on next.
Orthodox cognitive science takes cognition to consist of or be best explained in terms of computational processes, generally operating on internal representations, whereas non-representationalism and non-computationalism reject this. I.e., the orthodox account of vision sees it as a process of transforming one representation into another (it starts with the retinal image, performs some operation on it, say, finding edges, to give a new representation, then performs some processing on that, etc, until you have a three-dimensional representation or a symbolic representation of the content of the scene). Dynamicism is the view that cognition is best described in terms of the evolution of systems over time and rejects computationalism (which holds that cognition is best described by algorithms; algorithms have an order but do not evolve in time). Non-representationalism just denies that there are any internal representations involved in cognitive processes.
I’ve been working on a non-representationalist, non-computationalist, dynamicist account of human cognition for several years. My basic methodology has been to study different areas of empirical psychology and neuroscience and see if I can find any results that look like they won’t fit my account. This generally helps me better understand an area. For the past year I’ve been mostly concentrating on perception and especially vision. I feel like I’ve made as much progress as I can in that area, and have sufficiently convinced myself that I’m on the right track, and am thinking about what to take on next.
For us lay people, what does it mean for something to be non-representationalist and non-computationalist?
Orthodox cognitive science takes cognition to consist of or be best explained in terms of computational processes, generally operating on internal representations, whereas non-representationalism and non-computationalism reject this. I.e., the orthodox account of vision sees it as a process of transforming one representation into another (it starts with the retinal image, performs some operation on it, say, finding edges, to give a new representation, then performs some processing on that, etc, until you have a three-dimensional representation or a symbolic representation of the content of the scene). Dynamicism is the view that cognition is best described in terms of the evolution of systems over time and rejects computationalism (which holds that cognition is best described by algorithms; algorithms have an order but do not evolve in time). Non-representationalism just denies that there are any internal representations involved in cognitive processes.