The Brains blog is excited about the next Neural Mechanisms webinar this Friday. It is free. Find information about how and when to join the webinar below.
Similarity-Based Cognition: Radical Enactivism meets Cognitive Neuroscience
Miguel Segundo Ortin & Daniel Hutto (University of Wollongong)
5 April 2019
h 8-10 – Greenwich Mean Time
(Convert to your local time here)
Abstract. Similarity-based cognition is apparently commonplace. It occurs whenever an agent or system exploits the similarities that holding between two or more items — e.g. events, processes, objects, and so on— in order to perform cognitive tasks. This kind of cognition is of special interest to cognitive neuroscience. This presentation explicates how similarity-based cognition can be understood through the lens of radical enactivism and why doing so have advantages over its representationalist rival which posit the existence of structural representations or S-representations. Specifically, it is argued that there are problems accounting for the content of S-representations and in understanding how that putative content of such representations makes a casual difference in guiding intelligent behavior. Finally, it is clarified in which respect adopting a radically enactive account of similarity-based cognition commits to an eliminativist take on neurodynamics and which respect it does not.
Join the session (up to 10 minutes before it begins) | Read the paper
