Abstract
The chapter discusses Antonio Damasio’s understanding of higher-level neurological and psychological functions in Self Comes to Mind (2010) and argues that the distinction he posits between regulatory (homeostatic) physiological structures and non-regulatory higher-level structures such as drives, motivations (and, ultimately, consciousness) presents philosophical and technical problems. The paper suggests that a purely regulatory understanding of drives and motivations (and, consequently, of cognition as well) as higher-order regulations could provide a unified theoretical framework capable of overcoming the old split between cognition and homeostasis that keeps resurfacing, under different guises, in the technical as well as in the non-technical understandings of consciousness and associated concepts.
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Notes
- 1.
In the De natura deorum, for instance, Cicero says of the gods that “they raised men from the ground and made them stand erect so that by looking at the heavens they could get knowledge of the gods” (Qui primum eos humo excitatos celsos et erectos constituit, ut deorum cognitionem caelum intuentes capere possent)” (d.N.D, II, 140, 1933, 56). A similar use of cognitio is in the De officiis (I,43), where Cicero speaks of the “knowledge and contemplation of nature (cognitio contemplatioque naturae)” (1938, 153). The term is very frequent in his works and can be found also in the Tusculan Disputations, the De finibus, etc. The nominal use of the term is standard in the technical Latin of Medieval and Modern philosophy, as attested, for instance, by Aquinas, Spinoza, and Descartes.
- 2.
This is the basis of Aristotle’s definition, for instance, and it is accepted wholeheartedly by the Medieval tradition that refers to him, with the slight modifications necessary to make it fit the Christian view of humans created in God’s image. Early Modern Western philosophy follows in the same vein.
- 3.
1976, 1, my emph. Indeed, contemporary studies in animal cognition adapt Neisser’s definition while inserting an explicit reference to animals in general. See, for instance, Sarah Shettleworth: “Cognition refers to the mechanisms by which animals acquire, process, store, and act on information from the environment. These include perception, learning, memory, and decision-making. The study of comparative cognition is therefore concerned with how animals process information, starting with how information is acquired by the senses” (2009, 4).
- 4.
As Aristotle argues in Eth. Nic. I,7, 1098b1-18.
- 5.
See Eth Nic. X, 6–9, as well as the similar Platonic theory of intellectual pleasure that Socrates develops in Rep. IX, 585b and ff.
- 6.
This use of “dynamic” as a short-hand for a causal explanation of behavior will probably sound rather strange to 21st scientists. As Gordana Dodig Crnkovic noted (personal communication), a physicist, when seeing the word “dynamic” in a scientific context such as Neisser’s, will most likely think of dynamic attractors that lie below cognitive processes and which stand for particular mechanisms and not for motives. In other words, when a physicist points us toward a “dynamic explanation,” she is telling us that we should be looking for a particular class of mechanisms—namely, those governed by dynamic attractors—and not be on the lookout for a further causal level. As I explain below, Neisser’s now outdated usage of the term presupposes psychoanalysis’s own self-description and the contemporary (ultimately, nineteenth century) sub-divisions of classical mechanics.
- 7.
See Franchi (2011b) for a detailed discussion of homeostasis, whose details and fascinating history I am forced to skip over in the present context.
- 8.
See, for instance, the sweeping declaration on the need to ground “pain, pleasure, emotions, and feelings; social behaviors; religions; economies and their markets and financial institutions; moral behaviors; laws and justice; politics; art, technology, and science” in “life regulation” (2010, 63–64).
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
See the papers collected in Ashby (1981).
- 12.
- 13.
- 14.
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Franchi, S. (2016). Cognition as Higher-Order Regulation. In: Müller, V.C. (eds) Computing and Philosophy. Synthese Library, vol 375. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23291-1_11
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