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Chápanie vzťahu medzi pojmom a fenoménom mentálneho (mysle, vedomia) a fyzikálneho (tela, mozgu), na ktorých ambivalentnú povahu som poukázala v predchádzajúcej časti, sa premietlo do celého radu „izmov": dualizmu, monizmu, materializmu, idealizmu, fyzikalizmu, funkcionalizmu, computacionizmu, inštrumentalizmu atď.
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Theory of mind is a social cognition skills demonstrated its importance in the last forty years with psychiatric clinical trials. Theory of mind is seen as an effective and necessary skill in the social functioning of human who is a social creature as the ability to recognize the mental states and emotions of others. In the first six years of life, theory of mind has been associated with many fields. Findings related to many neurobiological bases, such as limbic-paralimbic structures, prefrontal cortex, which start with mirror neurons, help this sense of meaning. Areas associated with theory of mind development provide better understanding of theory of mind skills and deficits, the first psychopathology studies have been carried out in children with autism, and the studies about theory of mind skills in the diagnosis of neurodevelopmental disorders are becoming more and more interesting. In this review, theory of mind development, neurobiological basis and related areas will be explained and the relation of theory of mind with psychopathology will be examined.
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In this paper I defend situated approaches of cognition, and the idea that mind, body and external world are inseparable. In the first section, I present some anti–Cartesian approaches of cognition and discuss the intuition they share that there is a constitutive interaction between mind, body and external environment. In the second section, I present the fallacy of the Cartesian theater of the mind and explain its theoretical premises. In the third section, I present a spatial argument against it, and argue that some case studies could give support to the idea of the mind stretching over the boundaries of the skull. In the fourth section, I present a temporal argument, and argue that even in this case the idea of an interaction between our cognitive life and the external world has at least a very strong intuitive palatability.
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This paper presents the author’s attempt to justify the need for understanding the problem of multilevel mind in artificial intelligence systems. Thus, it is assumed that consciousness and the unconscious are not equal in natural mental processes. The human conscious is supposedly a “superstructure” above the unconscious automatic processes. Nevertheless, it is the unconscious that is the basis for the emotional and volitional manifestations of the human psyche and activity. At the same time, the alleged mental activity of Artificial Intelligence may be devoid of the evolutionary characteristics of the human mind. Several scenarios are proposed for the possible development of a “strong” AI through the prism of creation (or evolution) of the machine unconscious. In addition, we propose two opposite approaches regarding the relationship between the unconscious and the conscious.
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In this article I propose, on the basis of the phenomenological description, a new concept called “virtual living body” and I show its significance for studying the intersubjectivity in the virtual realities. The article consists of three parts. Firstly, I conceptualize “virtual living body” as the sphere of the objects of the world which are used by the functional analogy of our living body. This sphere is accurately distinguished from two other spheres: the living body and not instrumentalized objects of the world. Secondly, I show that the virtual living body is a necessary condition for intersubjectivity and intersubjective communication in a virtual reality, analogously like the living body is a necessary condition for intersubjectivity and intersubjective communication in general. Thirdly, I consider, on the basis of this concept, a specific form of intersubjective communication in a virtual reality called “flame war” and compare it to the master-slave dialectic of Hegel.
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In this paper, I evaluate the prospects and limitations of radical enactivism as recently developed by Hutto and Myin (henceforth, “H&M”) (2013, 2017). According to radical enactivism, cognition does not essentially involve content and admits explanations on a semantic level only as far as cognition is scaffolded with social and linguistic practices. I investigate their claims, focusing on H&M’s criticism of the predictive processing account of cognition (dubbed the bootstrap hell argument) and their own account of the emergence of content (the natural origins of content). I argue that H&M fail on two fronts: unsupervised learning can arrive at contentful representations and H&M’s account of the emergence of content assumes an equivalent bootstrapping. My case is illustrated with Skyrms’ evolutionary game-theoretic account of the emergence of content and recent deep learning research on neural language models. These arguments cast a shadow of doubt on whether radical enactivism is philosophically interesting or empirically plausible.
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In contemporary discussions concerning the relation of the mind to the body, two positions are contrasted with each other: physicalism and dualism. Even if these are not the dominant approaches to the mind-body problem, the fact is that most other positions arise as attempts to find a compromise between these two. This article argues that physicalism and dualism have more in common than is usually assumed. Both accept the key intuition motivating Cartesian dualism, i.e. the view that in the ordinary language we can describe physical and psychological reality in such a way that physical description does not imply anything concerning psychological and vice versa. The argument presented in this paper attempts to show that such descriptions are not possible. This means that there is no sense in talking about two distinct realities: physical and mental. It follows that there is no problem of the mind–body relationship, because the body is a living organism that owes its identity to having the powers and abilities that are the basis for talking about the mind. In addition, the approach proposed here solves the problem of other minds.
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The article dwells upon the need for a thorough philosophical and methodological analysis of the nature and functions of the human’s emotional and sensual sphere in order to identify the possibilities of its implementation by means of artificial intelligence. Computers have become part and parcel of our lives, so full-fledged communication requires empowering them to recognize and express emotions. Due to the result of critical analysis, the authors state that implementation, and not simulation, of emotions in any computing system is currently problematic and, to some extent, impossible. The reason for this is connected both with the blurring in the scientific and philosophical literature of the very concept of ‘emotion’, and the subjective and qualitative nature of the person’s experience of reality, the rootedness of their emotional and sensual sphere in the physical, social and cultural being, the unconditional connection of emotions and the internal personal space of the person.
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In his recent book, Daniel Dennett defends a novel account of semantic information in terms of design worth getting (Dennett, 2017). While this is an interesting proposal in itself, my purpose in this commentary is to challenge several of Dennett’s claims. First, he argues that semantic information can be transferred without encoding and storing it. Second, this lack of encoding is what makes semantic information unmeasurable. However, the argument for both these claims, presented by Dennett as an intuition pump, is invalid.
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Marcin Milkowski provides an insightful overview of work on information theories over the years, from Gabor and Shannon to Wolpert and Kolchinski. He accurately summarizes my work, distilling four claims that I made in BBB, and argues that my arguments in favor of the last two of these are invalid. 3. The amount of semantic information carried or contained in any delimited episode or item is also not usefully measurable in units but roughly comparable in local circumstances. 4. Semantic information need not be encoded to be transmitted or saved (Dennett, 2017, p. 128). […]
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This paper analyzes the notion of recollection in Hans Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur’s thought, in the context of time distance as “obstacles” towards understanding the past. Particular attention is paid to the understanding the phenomenon of “Death” as a time gap between the past and the present. In connection with this problem, we find efforts of philosophical hermeneutics on the one hand and historicism on the other. Differences between historicism and hermeneutics can be outlined in relation to the role that memory plays in the process of understanding in Gadamer and Ricoeur. What does Death mean in terms of understanding for history, and what for hermeneutics? How can we understand temporal distance? Is it possible and necessary to overcome it? What is the role of recollection and how does it participate in understanding? – these are some of the main issues that will be addressed in the text. Finally, the task of the text is to offer the meaning and significance of the hermeneutics of recollection in relation to the mentioned questions, through the interaction of the thoughts of the two authors.
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The aim of the article is to analyse the role that fantasy plays in the philosophy of consciousness. The article distinguishes first 3 conceptual models of the functioning of fantasy: (1) imagination as a weak version of perception; (2) productive imagination as a fundamental faculty; (3) fantasy as an archaic layer of consciousness. After presenting Husserl’s phenomenological theory of imagination and fantasy, the article focuses on three fundamental problems: (1) atmospheric fantasy and day dreaming; (2) fantasy and auto-affection; (3) the origin of phantasma that proves to be the most enigmatic question. The author argues for the possibility of establishing a link between Kantian schematism and Husserlian genetic phenomenology. This link is supposed to explicate the origin of phantasma. That is the way we can work out the concept of schematised affectivity.
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What is the relationship between imagination and affectivity? The hypothesis discussed in this paper is that, far from being a constant basis for our acts of imagination, affectivity rather interrupts and re-orients them toward new directions that cannot be consciously anticipated. Instead of understanding the affectivity of imagination as rooted in direct impression, I propose to understand it in terms of sudden infraction and contingent exposure to something that does not belong to the sphere of our conscious acts. While imagination and affectivity operate at two different levels of our subjective life, my aim is to show that their interference opens new world-perspectives and connects us to a larger human community. By cultivating contradiction in the life of our sensibility, imagination intensifies emotions that reveal the social and the cosmological dimension of our affectivity.
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This article seeks to enlighten the deep connection between three concepts: 1. The phantasia-affection, 2. What Marc Richir called, in his first book (1977) “the beyond of the Copernican reversal” and, finally, 3. Architectonics in its phenomenological effectiveness. Firstly, we introduce the concept of “transcendental misalignment”, thereby underlining the intrinsically hyperbolic structure of acts of representation. Mereology will then allow us to trace the difference between phantasia-affection (as a concrete whole) and the imagination-affect complex (as a fragmentable whole). Finally, it is the force of mereological concrescence that relates affection to its (mereological) exposure to a plurality of worlds. It is with the help of Rainer Maria Rilke and Antonio Machado, that we will illustrate architectonics as the multistratification of experience itself. The subject experiences indeed the irreducibility of registers, i.e., their fundamental non-concrescence.
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Philosophers and scientists refer to the special character of phenomenal consciousness, something supposedly obvious to all conscious persons. However, we had no empirical evidence about the folk view of consciousness until the first studies were carried out in the experimental philosophy of consciousness. According to the leading interpretation of these results, laypersons—people without academic knowledge about consciousness—do not notice the phenomenal aspect of consciousness. The aim of the article is to answer the question of whether we can trust these results. I show that there are serious doubts about the validity of the experimental philosophy of consciousness research. As a result, the leading interpretation should be rejected, and the question about the folk nature of the concept of consciousness must be regarded as open.
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In La Recherche de la vérité, Malebranche succeeds Descartes in entitling the affections of pleasure and pain to a practical role. However, he also speaks of instinct as “knowledge” and “proof”. This vocabulary is all the more surprising as it keeps opposing knowledge, based on ideas, to feeling, which only consists of obscure perceptions. It will thus be about examining the cognitive range that affectivity receives in this philosophy yet known for its rationalism and its intellectualism.
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Inferentialism has brought important insights into the nature of meanings. It breaks with the representationalist tradition that sees meanings as constituted primarily by representing some extra-linguistic reality. Yet the break with tradition should be pursued further. Inferentialists still regard meanings as static, and they still do not entirely abandon the idea of fully determined meaning. Following Davidon’s ideas about meanings as constituted only in the course of a specific conversation, I propose a dynamic account of what meanings are. They are described as entities belonging to the dynamic realm of Henri Bergson’s duration. The inhabitants of this realm live in constant movement and development which is more essential to them than the stages that this development goes through. My account brings about a rejection of the notion of strict literal meaning and therewith also of the contrasting notions such as ambiguity. Meaning is understood as a dynamic entity that is characterized rather by its history than by its nature.
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According to higher order (HO) theories of consciousness, a mental state is conscious when there is a HO state about it. However, some HO states do not seem to be about other existing mental states. It is possible to resolve this problem since targetless HO states resemble HO states that misrepresent but the assumption that HO states always target other existing mental states is at odds with the theory since HO states are not only necessary but also sufficient for phenomenal consciousness according to the theory. Given the sufficiency of the HO states for consciousness, there is a need to understand the emergence of HO states as a non-random phenomenon to avoid the difficulties caused by targetless HO states. I suggest it is possible to develop such an understanding by thinking of HO states as predictive states in accordance with the predictive processing theory of the mind.
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