Shimon Edelman’s
Riddle of Representation
•
two humans, a monkey, and a robot
are looking at a piece of cheese;
•
what is common to the representational
processes in their visual systems?
1
Answer:
The cheese, of course
2
mainstream (Gwen/CogPO) view
[methodological solipsism (the brain we study
could equally well be a brain in a vat)]
forgets the cheese
When neuroscientists see an elephant
they see only the calcium phosphate
chemistry of the tusk
• “The mind is a black box”
• “Mental processes cannot be observed
(except via advanced neuroimaging
instruments)”
Where we agree
Knowledge of brain structure can and should
inform our understanding of mental function
We should not waste time on the mind-body
problem
Where we disagree
Gwen:
for science: “every mental process has to be a brain
process”
Therefore the only way to study the mind is to
study the brain
BS: we should ensure that we use all the data we
can to do good science
Communicating about emotions
Affect, feeling, emotion,
mood, passion, sentiment
Anger, astonishment, awe, bliss, despair, disgust,
embarrassment, fear, happiness, hate, joy,
love, pride, regret, resentment, satisfaction,
scorn, shame, sympathy, terror
Image credit: notarivs (flickr)
7
Gwen (CogPO) view
• cripples our empirical work on mental
functioning
• nearly all our data in social interaction, emotional
experience, mental health, … literature …, DSM,
will be dismissed as unscientific
• enforcing reduction to mappings between
sensory inputs and motor outputs would cripple
science
Pro Gwen view
• ‘mental = neural’ gives a framework for
comparative studies – animal models
• because animal brains are very like human
brains
the mainstream view
• would also make cross-organism comparisons
difficult, since the kinds of mappings from
sensory inputs to external environments differ
vastly between, say, spiders and humans
Cognitive Paradigm Ontology
Jessica
“The mental function experimenters claim to be
studying is not as important as the methods for
studying it”
Compare: doing biology is not as important as
building the Ontology for Biomedical
Investigations