Distributed processes, distributed cognizers and collaborative cognition

[Journal (Paginated)] (in Press) 13 (3):01-514 (2005)
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Abstract

Cognition is thinking; it feels like something to think, and only those who can feel can think. There are also things that thinkers can do. We know neither how thinkers can think nor how they are able do what they can do. We are waiting for cognitive science to discover how. Cognitive science does this by testing hypotheses about what processes can generate what doing (“know-how”) This is called the Turing Test. It cannot test whether a process can generate feeling, hence thinking -- only whether it can generate doing. The processes that generate thinking and know-how are “distributed” within the heads of thinkers, but not across thinkers’ heads. Hence there is no such thing as distributed cognition, only collaborative cognition. Email and the Web have spawned a new form of collaborative cognition that draws upon individual brains’ real-time interactive potential in ways that were not possible in oral, written or print interactions.

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Stevan Harnad
McGill University

Citations of this work

How to share a mind: Reconsidering the group mind thesis.Thomas Szanto - 2014 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 13 (1):99-120.
Distributed language and dynamics.Stephen J. Cowley - 2009 - Pragmatics and Cognition 17 (3):495-508.
Thinking in action.Stephen Cowley & Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau - 2010 - AI and Society 25 (4):469-475.

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References found in this work

Computing machinery and intelligence.Alan M. Turing - 1950 - Mind 59 (October):433-60.
Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?David Premack & G. Woodruff - 1978 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (4):515-629.
Can a machine be conscious? How?Stevan Harnad - 2003 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 10 (4-5):67-75.

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