Tao representation

H. Kopp-Delaney, Surreal Dimension

The revision of the central notion of representation for cognitive systems starts from considering that these are characterized by their operational closure, wherein to outline where the represented external environment (the world) ends and where the internal processes of the cognitive system, which represent it, begin is hardly to define. Such systems do not operate by representation but instead of representing an independent world they enact a world as a domain of distinctions that is inseparable from the structure embodied by the cognitive system:

Steps to a Middle Way

The Cartesian Anxiety

Representation Revisited

In the discussion of cognitivism we distinguished between two senses of representation, which we now need to recall. On the one hand, there is the relatively uncontroversial notion of representation as construal: cognition always consists in construing or representing the world a certain way. On the other hand, there is the much stronger notion that this feature of cognition is to be explained by the hypothesis that a system acts on the basis of internal representations. Since it might seem that these two ideas amount to the same thing, we need to refine our distinction somewhat.

We can begin by noting a relatively weak and uncontroversial sense of representation. This sense is purely semantic: It refers to anything that can be interpreted as being about something. This is the sense of representation as construal, since nothing is about something else without construing it as being some way. A map, for example, is about some geographical area; it represents certain features of the terrain and so construes that terrain as being a certain way. Similarly, words on a page represent sentences in a language, which may in tum represent or be about still other things. This sense of representation can be made even more precise. If, for example, our concern happens to be with languages in a more formal setting, we can say that the statements of a language represent their conditions of satisfaction. For example, the statement "snow is white"-taken literally is satisfied if snow is white; the statement "pick up your shoes"again, taken literally - is satisfied if the shoes are picked up by the person being addressed.

This sense of representation is weak because it need not carry any strong epistemological or ontological commitments. Thus it is perfectly acceptable to speak of a map representing the terrain without worrying about such things as how maps get their meaning. It is also perfectly acceptable to think of a statement as representing some set of conditions without making further assumptions about whether language as a whole works this way or whether there really are facts in the world separate from language that can then be re-presented by the sentences of the language. Or we can even talk about experiential representations, such as the image I have of my brother, without making any further assumptions about how this image arose in the first place. In other words, this weak sense of representation is pragmatic; we use it all the time without worry.

The obviousness of such an idea, however, is quickly transformed into a much stronger sense of representation that does carry quite heavy ontological and epistemological commitments. This strong sense arises when we generalize on the basis of the weaker idea to construct a full-fledged theory of how perception, language, or cognition in general must work. The ontological and epistemological commitments are basically twofold: We assume that the world is pregiven, that its features can be specified prior to any cognitive activity. Then to explain the relation between this cognitive activity and a pregiven world, we hypothesize the existence of mental representations inside the cognitive system (whether these be images, symbols, or subsymbolic patterns of activity distributed across a network does not matter for the moment). We then have a full-fledged theory that says (1) the world is pregiven; (2) our cognition is of this world-even if only to a partial extent, and (3) the way in which we cognize this pregiven world is to represent its features and then act on the basis of these representations.

We must, then, return to our earlier metaphor, the idea of a cognitive agent that is parachuted into a pregiven world. This agent will survive only to the extent that it is endowed with a map and learns to act on the basis of this map. In the cognitivist version of this story, the map is an innately specified system of representations-sometimes called a "language of thought" -whereas learning to employ this map is the task of ontogeny.

Many cognitive scientists will object that we have presented a caricature. Are we not presupposing a static conception of representation, one that overlooks the rich detail of the inner structure of a cognitive system and unjustifiably construes a representation as merely a mirror? Is it not well known, for example, that visual perception is considered to be a result of mapping the physical patterns of energy that stimulate the retina into representations of the visual scene, which are then used to make inferences and eventually to produce a perceptual judgment? Perception is seen as an active process of hypothesis formation, not as the simple mirroring of a pregiven environment.

This objection, though somewhat fair, misses the point. Our point is not to caricature a sophisticated research program but simply to render explicit some tacit epistemological assumptions in as clear a fashion as possible. Thus although everyone agrees that representation is a complex process, it is nonetheless conceived to be one of recovering or reconstructing extrinsic, independent environmental features. Thus in vision research, for example, one speaks of "recovering shape from shading" or "color from brightness." Here the latter features are considered to be extrinsic properties of the environment that provide the information needed to recover "higher-order" properties of the visual scene, such as shape and color. The basic idea of a world with pregiven features remains.

The complaint that we have presented a caricature would, however, be justified were we not to acknowledge the subtlety and sophistication of cognitive realism in relation to the classical opposition between realism and idealism in philosophy. In the hands of cognitive realism, the notion of representation does undergo something of a mutation. The power of this mutation is that it seems to offer a way out of the classical opposition between realism and idealism.

This opposition is based in the traditional notion of representation as a "veil of ideas" that stands between us and the world. On the one hand, the realist naturally thinks that there is a distinction between our ideas or concepts and that which they represent, namely, the world. The ultimate court of appeal for judging the validity of our representations is this independent world. Of course, each of our representations must cohere with many others, but the point of such internal features is to increase the probability that globally our representations will have some measure of correspondence or degree of fit with an outer and independent world.

The idealist, on the other hand, quickly points out that we have no access to such an independent world except through our representations. We cannot stand outside of ourselves to behold the degree of fit that our representations might have with the world. In fact, we simply have no idea of what the outside world is except that it is the presumed object of our representations. Taking this point to the extreme, the idealist argues that the very idea of a world independent of representations is itself only another of our representations – a second-order or metarepresentation. Our sense of an outer ground thus slips away, and we are left grasping for our internal representations, as if these could provide a sure and stable reference point.

At first sight, contemporary cognitive science seems to offer a way out of this traditional philosophical impasse. Largely because of cognitive science, philosophical discussion has shifted from concern with a priori representations (representations that might provide some noncontingent foundation for our knowledge of the world) to concern with a posteriori representations (representations whose contents are ultimately derived from causal interactions with the environment). This naturalized conception of representation does not invite the skeptical questions that motivate traditional epistemology. In fact, to shift one's concern to organism-environment relations in this way is largely to abandon the task of traditional a priori epistemology in favor of the naturalized projects of psychology and cognitive science. By taking up such a naturalized stance, cognitive science avoids the antinomies that lurk in transcendental or metaphysical realism, without embracing the solipsism or subjectivism that constantly threatens idealism. 'The cognitive scientist is thus able to remain a staunch realist about the empirical world while making the details of mind and cognition the subject of his investigations.

Cognitive science thus seems to provide a way of talking about representation without being burdened by the traditional philosophical image of the mind as a mirror of nature. But this appearance is misleading. It is true, as Richard Rorty remarks, that there is no way to raise the traditional skeptical questions of epistemology in cognitive science. Global skepticism about the possibility of cognition or knowledge is simply not to the point in the practice of science. But it does not follow, as Rorty seems to think, that the current naturalized conception of representation has nothing to do with the traditional image of the mind as a mirror of nature. On the contrary, a crucial feature of this image remains alive in contemporary cognitive science - the idea of a world or environment with extrinsic, pregiven features that are recovered through a process of representation. In some ways cognitivism is the strongest statement yet of the representational view of the mind inaugurated by Descartes and Locke. Indeed, Jerry Fodor, one of cognitivism's leading and most eloquent exponents, goes so far as to say that the only respect in which cognitivism is a major advance over eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representationism is in its use of the computer as a model of mind.

As we have seen, however, cognitivism is only one variety of cognitive realism. In both the emergence and society of mind approaches (and in the schools of basic elements analysis for the experiential pole of our investigation), the notion of representation becomes more and more problematical. We did not explicitly question this notion in our discussion of the varieties of cognitive realism, but if we look back on our journey, we can see that we have slowly drifted away from the idea of mind as an input-output device that processes information. The role of the environment has quietly moved from being the preeminent reference point to receding more and more into the background, while the idea of mind as an emergent and autonomous network of relationships has gained a central place. It is time, then, to raise the question, What is it about such networks, if anything, that is representational?

To make this question somewhat more accessible, consider once again Minsky's discussion toward the end of Society of Mind. There he writes, "Whenever we speak about a mind, we're speaking of the processes .that carry our brains from state to state ... concerns about minds are really concerns with relationships between states - and this has virtually nothing to do with the natures of the states themselves." How, then, are we to understand these relationships? What is it about them that makes them mindlike?

The answer that is usually given to this question is, of course, that these relationships must be seen as embodying or supporting representations of the environment. Notice, however, that if we claim that the function of these processes is to represent an independent environment, then we are committed to construing these processes as belonging to the class of systems that are driven from the outside, that are defined in terms of external mechanisms of control (a hetero-nomous system). Thus we will consider information to be a prespecified quantity, one that exists independently in the world and can act as the input to a cognitive system. This input provides the initial premises upon which the system computes a behavior-the output. But how are we to specify inputs and outputs for highly cooperative, self-organizing systems such as brains? There is, of course, a back-and-forth flow of energy, but where does information end and behavior begin? Minsky puts his finger on the problem, and his remarks are worth quoting at length:

Why are processes so hard to classify? In earlier times, we could usually judge machines and processes by how they transformed raw materials into finished products. But it makes no sense to speak of brains as though they manufacture thoughts the way factories make cars. The difference is that brains use processes that change themselves-and this means we cannot separate such processes from the products they produce. In particular, brains make memories, which change the ways we'll subsequently think. The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves. Because the whole idea of self-modifying processes is new to our experience, we cannot yet trust our commonsense judgement about such matters.

What is remarkable about this passage is the absence of any notion of representation. Minsky does not say that the principal activity of brains is to represent the external world; he says that it is to make continuous self-modifications. What has happened to the notion of representation?

In fact, an important and pervasive shift is beginning to take place in cognitive science under the very influence of its own research. This shift requires that we move away from the idea of the world as independent and extrinsic to the idea of a world as inseparable from the structure of these processes of self-modification. This change in stance does not express a mere philosophical preference; it reflects the necessity of understanding cognitive systems not on the basis of their input and output relationships but by their operational closure.

A system that has operational closure is one in which the results of its processes are those processes themselves. The notion of operational closure is thus a way of specifying classes of processes that, in their very operation, tum back upon themselves to form autonomous networks. Such networks do not fall into the class of systems defined by external mechanisms of control (heteronomy) but rather into the class of systems defined by internal mechanisms of self-organization (autonomy). The key point is that such systems do not operate by representation. Instead of representing an independent world, they enact a world as a domain of distinctions that is inseparable from the structure embodied by the cognitive system.

We wish to evoke the point that when we begin to take such a conception of mind seriously, we must call into question the idea that the world is pregiven and that cognition is representation. In cognitive science, this means that we must call into question the idea that information exists ready-made in the world and that it is extracted by a cognitive system, as the cognitivist notion of an informavore vividly implies.

But before we go any further, we need to ask ourselves why the idea of a world with pregiven features or ready-made information seems so unquestionable. Why are we unable to imagine giving up this idea without falling into some sort of subjectivism, idealism, or cognitive nihilism? What is the source of this apparent dilemma? We must examine directly the feeling that arises when we sense that we can no longer trust the world as a fixed and stable reference point.

meta-Tao holons

The next metapattern discussed by Tyler Volk and Jeff Bloom are holons, a term intruced by Arthur Koestler in The Ghost in the Machine of 1967, and later in Janus: A Summing Up of 1978. In the original definition of Koestler:

1. The holon

1.1 The organism in its structural aspect is not an aggregation of elementary parts, and in its functional aspects not a chain of elementary units of behaviour.

1.2 The organism is to be regarded as a multi-levelled hierarchy of semi-autonomous sub-wholes, branching into sub-wholes of a lower order, and so on. Sub-wholes on any level of the hierarchy are referred to as holons.

1.3 Parts and wholes in an absolute sense do not exist in the domains of life. The concept of the holon is intended to reconcile the atomistic and holistic approaches.

1.4 Biological holons are self-regulating open systems which display both the autonomous properties of wholes and the dependent properties of parts. This dichotomy is present on every level of every type of hierarchic organization, and is referred to as the "Janus phenomenon".

1.5 More generally, the term "holon" may be applied to any stable biological or social sub-whole which displays rule-governed behaviour and/or structural Gestalt-constancy. Thus organelles and homologous organs are evolutionary holons; morphogenetic fields are ontogenetic holons; the ethologist's "fixed action-patterns" and the sub-routines of acquired skills are behavioural holons; phonemes, morphemes, words, phrases are linguistic holons; individuals, families, tribes, nations are social holons.

Holons are therefore - like clonons - intrinsic parts, composed of other subsystems - generally other holons -, of a holarchy of a complex system, at the same time parts (components) and wholes (levels) of the system. They differ from clonons since functionally and structurally distinguishable among them. The typical example are atoms, distinct holons made by three fundamental types (protons, neutrons ed electrons) of clonons particles. Another example from the point of view of organised structures are holons levels which progressively lead from the individual level to the global one:

Background

Holon, as mentioned previously, refers to a whole, which is often comprised of clonon parts or sets of clonon parts. Holons themselves can become clonons of even greater wholes. The idea of holons (in contrast to indistinguishable clonons) is that holons are functionally and structurally distinct parts on the level of a holarchy. Holons are like organs, on different scales of wholes. Thus the body’s holons are heart, lungs, brain, and so forth, which themselves are composed of many clonons, the relatively indistinguishable heart cells, liver cells, and so forth.

Examples

• In science: a planet, a solar system (made of holons-planets that become clonons of the solar system), an atom is a holon of three fundamental types of clonon particles, atoms become clonons of larger holon molecules, etc.
• In architecture and design: buildings, a community, etc.
• In art: subjects, figures formed from points or strokes, a sculpture, etc
• In social sciences: a concept, a community or society, an action holon of component clonon actions, a family, a class of students, etc.
• In other senses: a wall or fence, an archway made of stone clonons, a gang or clique, etc.

Metapatterns

The Pattern Underground

chromastrobic Tao

British artist, physicist, and all-around science enthusiast Paul Friedlander produces kinetic light sculptures that provide a colorful feast for the eyes. Each piece in his body of work offers a visual medley of light and motion by rapidly rotating a piece of string through white light. The vibrating rope becomes invisible to the human eye, but colors from the light (which would normally be invisible to the naked eye) are revealed in rapid succession.

The scientific artist gives insight into the history of his career shift into the arts and explains the science in it all: "I decided to focus on kinetic art: a subject in which I could bring together my divided background and combine my knowledge of physics with my love of light. In 1983, at London's ICA, I exhibited the first sculptures to use chromastrobic light, a discovery I had made the previous year. Chromastrobic light changes color faster than the eye can see, causing the appearance of rapidly moving forms to mutate in the most remarkable ways."

Origin of String Theory

Paul Friedlander
Kinetic light sculptor: scientific artist

Tao subsystems - III

Close-up picture of a detail of Salvador Dalì, The Persistence of Memory, 1931

The third subsystem for a system model of consciousness discussed by C.T. Tart, after extero-interoception and input processing, is memory:

Subsystems

Memory

The Memory subsystem is concerned with information storage, with containing residues of past experiences that are drawn upon in the present. Memory is thus a large number of semipermanent changes caused by past experience. We can think of memory as structures, presumably in the brain (but perhaps also in the body structure), which, when activated, produce certain kinds of information. And we should not assume that there is just one Memory; there is probably a special kind of memory for almost every subsystem.

Conventional psychological views of Memory also often divide memory functioning into short-term or immediate memory, medium-term memory, and long-term memory. Short-term memory is the special memory process that holds information about sensory input and internal processes for a few seconds at the most. Unless it is transferred to a longer-term memory, this information is apparently lost. Thus, as you look at a crowd, searching for a friend's face for a short time, you may remember a lot of details about the crowd. Then you find your friend's face, and the details about the crowd are lost. There is no point in storing them forever. This short-term memory is probably an electrical activity within the brain structure that dies out after a few seconds: no long-term structural changes occur. Once the electrical activity dies out, the information stored in the pattern or in the electrical activity is gone forever.

Medium-term memory is storage of from minutes to a day or so. It probably involves partial structural changes as well as patterns of energy circulation. You can probably recall what you had for breakfast yesterday morning, but in a few days you will not remember the contents of that meal.

Long-term memory involves semipermanent structural changes that allow you to recall things experienced and learned a long time ago.

This division into short-, medium-, and long-term memory is of interest because these kinds of memories may be differentially affected during d-ASCs. At high levels of marijuana intoxication, for example, short-term memory is clearly affected, although long-term memory may not be. Thus, a marijuana user often reports forgetting the beginning of a conversation he is engaged in, but he continues to speak English. There is little more we can say about differential effects of various d-ASCs on these three kinds of memory, as they have not yet been adequately studied. They offer a fruitful field for research.

A most important aspect of Memory subsystem functioning in various d-ASCs is the phenomenon of state-specific memory. In a number of studies, subjects learned various materials while in d-ASCs, usually drug-induced, and were tested for retention of these materials in a subsequent ordinary d-SoC. Generally, retention was poor. The researchers concluded that things were not stored well in Memory in various d-ASCs. it is now clear that these studies must be reevaluated. Memory is specific. The way in which information is stored, or the kind of Memory it is stored in, is specific to the d-SoC the material was learned in. The material may be stored, but may not transfer to another state. If material is learned in a d-ASC and its retention tested in another d-SoC and found to be poor, the nonretention may indicate either an actual lack of storage of the information or a state-specific memory and lack of transfer. The proper way to test is to reinduce the d-ASC in which the material was learned and see how much material is retained in that state. State-specific memory has been repeatedly demonstrated in animals, although the criterion for the existence of a "state" in such studies is simply that the animals were drugged to a known degree, a criterion not very useful with humans, as explained later.

There is now experimental evidence that for high levels of alcohol intoxication there is definite state-specific memory in humans. It is an experimental demonstration of the old folk idea that if you lose something while very drunk and cannot find it the next day, you may be able to find it if you get very drunk again and then search. Experiential data collected in my study of marijuana users also indicate the existence of state-specific memory, and I have recently received verbal reports that laboratory studies are finding state-specific memory for marijuana intoxication. There also seems to be state-specific memory for the conditions induced by major psychedelic drugs.

State-specific memory can be readily constructed for hypnosis that is, state-specific memory may not occur naturally for hypnosis, but it can be made to occur. If you tell a hypnotized subject he will remember everything that happened in hypnosis when he comes back to his ordinary state such will be his experience. On the other hand, if you tell a deeply hypnotized subject he will remember nothing of what went on during hypnosis or that he will remember certain aspects of the experience but not others, this will also be the case when he returns to his ordinary state. In any event he will recall the experiences the next time he is hypnotized. This is not a pure case of state-specific memory, however, because amnesia for hypnotic experiences in the waking state can be eliminated by a prearranged cue as well as by reinducing the hypnosis.

Another excellent example of state-specific memory is that occurring in spiritualist mediums. A medium enters a d-ASC in which his ordinary consciousness and sense of identity appear to blank out for a time. He may report wandering in what may be loosely called a dreaming state. Meanwhile, an alleged spirit entity ostensibly possesses him and acts as if it has full consciousness. Upon returning to a normal state, the medium usually has total amnesia regarding the events of the d-ASC. The alleged spirit communicator, however, usually shows perfect continuity of memory from state to state.

I suspect that state-specific Memory subsystems will be discovered for many or most d-ASCs, but the necessary research has not been done. The kinds of state-specific memories may vary in completeness. The ones we know of now—from marijuana intoxication, for example—are characterized by transfer of some information to the ordinary d-SoC but nontransfer of other information, the latter often being the most essential and important aspects of the d-ASC experience.

Ordinarily, when we think of Memory we think of information becoming accessible to awareness, becoming part of consciousness, but we should note that we "remember" many things even though we have no awareness of them. Your current behavior is affected by a multitude of things you have learned in the past but which you are not aware of as memories. You walk across the room and your motion is determined by a variety of memories, even though you do not think of them as memories.

Note also that you can remember things you were not initially aware of. When you scan a crowd looking for a friend's face, you may be consciously aware of hardly any details of other faces, being sensitive only to your friend's. A minute later, when asked to recall something about the crowd, however, you may be able to recall a lot of information about it. For this reason, Figure 8-1 shows a direct information flow arrow from Input-Processing to Memory.

We store in Memory not only things that have been in awareness, but also things that were never much in awareness to begin with.

An interesting quality of information retrieved from Memory is that we generally know, at least implicitly, that we are retrieving memories. We do not confuse these with sensations or thoughts. Some kind of operating signal or extra informational quality seems to be attached to the memory information itself that says "This is a memory." There is an intriguing analogy for this. In the early days of radio, when a newscast tuned you in to a foreign correspondent, there was an obvious change in the quality of the audio signal, a change that you associated with a foreign correspondent broadcasting over a long distance on short wave. The sound was tinny, the volume faded in and out, there were hisses and crackles. This was a noninformational extra that became so associated in listeners' minds with hearing a real foreign correspondent that many radio stations resorted to the trick of deliberately adding this kind of distortion years later when communication technology had improved so much that the foreign correspondent's voice sounded as if he was actually in the studio. The added distortions made the listeners feel they were indeed hearing a faraway reporter and made the broadcast seem more genuine. Similarly, memory information is usually accompanied by a quality that identifies it as memory. The quality may be implicit: if you are searching actively for various things in your Memory, you need not remind yourself that you are looking at memories.

This extra informational quality of memory can sometimes be detached from memory operation per se. It is possible to have a fantasy, for example, with the "this is a memory" quality attached, in which you mistakenly believe you are remembering something instead of just fantasizing it. Or, the quality may be attached in a d-ASC to an incoming sensory perception, triggering the experience of déjà vu, the feeling that you have seen this before. Thus you may be touring in a city you have never visited and it all looks very familiar; you are convinced you remember what it is like because of the presence of the "this is a memory" quality.

When information is actually drawn from Memory without the quality "this is a memory" attached, interesting things can happen in various d-ASC. Hallucinations, for example, are information drawn from memory without the memory quality attached, but with the quality "This is a perception" attached.

Much of the functioning of the Sense of Identity subsystem (discussed later) occurs via the Memory subsystem. You sense of who you are is closely related to the possession of certain memories. If the "this is a memory" quality is eliminated from those memories so that they become just data, you sense of identity can be strongly affected.

Other variations of Memory subsystem functioning occur in various d-ASCs. The ease with which desired information can be retrieved from memory varies so that in some d-ASCs it seems hard to remember what you want, in others it seems easier than usual. The richness of the information retrieved varies in different d-ASCs, so that sometimes you remember only sketchily, and at other times in great detail. The search pattern for retrieving memories also varies. If you have to go through a fairly complex research procedure to find a particular memory, you may end up with the wrong memories or associated memories rather than what you were looking for. If you want to remember an old friend's name, for example, you may fail to recall the name but remember his birthday.
Finally, we should note that a great many things are stored in Memory but not available in the ordinary d-SoC. The emotional charge connected with those memories makes them unacceptable in the ordinary d-SoC, and so defense mechanisms repress or distort our recall of such information. In various d-ASCs the nature of the defense mechanisms may change or their intensity of functioning may alter, allowing the memories to become more or less available.

Tao subsystems - II

that Tao within me

St. Mary Magdalene Church, Hucknall Torkard, Nottinghamshire, England

a legacy for Tao - IV

Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Aken called Hieronymus Bosch, the Master of Hertogenbosch
Ship of Fools
oil on wood, 1494
Musée du Louvre, Paris

Angels Fear Revisited:
Gregory Bateson’s Cybernetic Theory of Mind
Applied to Religion-Science Debates

Mary Catherine Bateson

Bateson and Religion

Gregory used to quote Kipling’s lines, “There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And—every—single—one—of—them—is—right.”. That is, I think, a fairly interesting way of talking about religion: to say that there is something that human religions are trying to get at that matters. And they get at some of it in many different ways which include vast amounts of nonsense, much of it dangerous, but we perhaps do not yet have a better way of getting at it, whatever it is. For Gregory, that something could be approached by describing mind in cybernetic terms and recognized aesthetically in the similarities of living systems, the pattern that connects.

Gregory was profoundly ambivalent about what we generally call religion, but deeply concerned with the alienation created by the Cartesian mind–body partition that has been so liberating for science and yet leads to a whole series of isomorphic dualisms separating the sacred from the secular and our species from the rest of nature . He said that he “had always hated muddle-headedness and always thought it was a necessary condition for religion”. He grew up exposed to religious texts, reading the Bible in order – it was hoped – to avoid “empty-headed atheism”, and exposed to the art that surrounds religion, great master drawings and above all the works of William Blake collected by his father. There was an extraordinary Blake water color of “Satan Exulting over Eve” hanging in the dining room in his childhood (now in the Tate Gallery in London).

According to David Lipset, William Bateson, the pioneering geneticist who was Gregory’s father, was not a great student of the prophetic books of Blake – but Gregory went on to read them and other religious texts and poetry, puzzling over the content as well as the aesthetic value. Gregory grew up in a family that sturdily insisted that orthodox religion was nonsense, and at the same time he was stimulated by exposure to religious images, metaphors and poetry that demanded a different kind of understanding.

Gregory planned the book that became Angels Fear to discuss religion and aesthetics as ways of knowing that might prove to be indispensable to human survival and to that recognition of the larger interactive system of the biosphere he called wisdom. “The sacred (whatever that means) is surely related (somehow) to the beautiful (whatever that means)”. For him, as a scientist, to begin to talk about religion and aesthetics was to step onto dangerous ground – Where Angels Fear to Tread – places he felt it was essential to venture, but where he was going to get into trouble with his colleagues, and he knew it. Yet the exclusion of certain ideas – the Cartesian partition of ways of knowing – seemed to him damaging.

- detail -

a legacy for Tao - III

steps to a middle Tao

The sense of dissatisfaction which comes from the separation of the cognitivist and emergent approaches to cognition from direct experience lays the basis for a refounding of the heart of theories and models of the cognition sciences: the concept of "representation":

Steps to a Middle Way

The Cartesian Anxiety

A Sense of Dissatisfaction

Why should it be threatening to question the idea that the world has pregiven properties that we represent? Why do we become nervous when we call into question the idea that there is some way that the world is “out there," independent of our cognition, and that cognition is a re-presentation of that independent world?

Our spontaneous and unreflective common sense would deny that these questions are scientific, perhaps by thinking, “How else could the mind and the world be related?” The realist in us claims that our questions are simply “phiiosophical"-a polite way of making them seem interesting, yet also irrelevant. It is true. that they are partly philosophical, but we can also rephrase them as questions in cognitive science. What actually is the scientific basis for the idea that the mind is some kind of information-processing device that responds selectively to pregiven features of the environment? Why do we assume that cognitive science cannot call into question these notions of representation and information processing not just philosophically but in its day-to-day research?

To think that we cannot raise such issues is a blindness in contemporary common sense, deeply entrenched in our Western tradition and recently reinforced by cognitivism. Thus even when the very ideas of representation and information processing change considerably, as they do in the study of connectionist networks, self-organization, and emergent properties, some form of the realist assumption remains. In cognitivism, the realism is at least explicit and defended; in the emergence approach, however, it often becomes simply tacit and unquestioned. This unreflective stance is one of the greatest dangers facing the field of cognitive science; it limits the range of theories and ideas and so prevents a broader vision and future for the field.

A growing number of researchers in all areas of cognitive science have expressed dissatisfaction with the varieties of cognitive realism. This dissatisfaction derives from a deeper source than the search for alternatives to symbol processing or even mixed "society of mind" theories: it is a dissatisfaction with the very notion of a representational system. This notion obscures many essential dimensions of cognition not just in human experience but when we try to explain cognition scientifically. These dimensions include the understanding of perception and language, as well as the study of evolution and life itself.

Our discussion so far has focused on linking the two poles of science and human experience. This part will continue this task, but by developing a nonrepresentationist alternative from within the heart of cognitive science. We now need to pause and reflect on the scientific and philosophical roots of the very idea of representation. We are thinking not merely of the current notions in cognitive science of computation and information processing but of the entire philosophical tendency to view the mind as a "mirror of nature."