This books is a must for anyone interested in consciousness research and the latest ideas in the forthcoming technology of mind.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious: The Vital Depths of Experience by Bethany HenningPentti MäättänenBethany Henning Dewey and the Aesthetic Unconscious: The Vital Depths of Experience London: Lexington Books, 2022. 182 pp. incl. indexBethany Henning examines Dewey's conception of aesthetic experience by looking for connections to several trends and traditions. Henning relates pragmatism to Freudian psychoanalysis, feminism, wisdom from esoteric sources, erotic drive, and religion. "In the American thought (...) that we have surveyed thus far, the aesthetic, the religious, and the ethical stand as completions and realizations of one another" (p. 25). This variety of viewpoints is no doubt interesting and potentially fruitful, but there is a danger that the result may remain somewhat sporadic.One of the traditional problems and tasks in philosophy is to explain how the world is experienced as an organized, bounded whole. How are the various sensations and ideas of them related to each other? On what ground can we experience these relations between ideas? Henning refers to William James and says that these relations are directly experienced, we feel them (p. 46). According to Henning there is a unique force responsible for this, and it "can only be a kind of noncognitive, preverbal awareness, and for Dewey, it can only be the qualitative immediacy that is known to us only in aesthetic experience" (p. 25). How can we experience these relations? Here Henning appeals to Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) who provided his own view of habits, which account for "the relations between ideas by relating them through their spatiotemporal contiguity, causality, or through resemblances" (p. 21; italics in the original). This is how the American mind was firmly set on a theoretical path that distinguishes it from "the European conception" (ibid.).This is a surprising claim, indeed. Here is what David Hume has to say about the connexion or association of ideas: "The qualities, from [End Page 369] which this association arises, and by which the mind is after this manner convey'd from one idea to another, are three, viz. RESEMBLANCE, CONTIGUITY in time or place, and CAUSE and EFFECT."1 It is quite inconceivable how this simple relabeling of Hume's principles of association as habits might have any effect on any theoretical path, especially on the emergence of pragmatism. Edwards wrote decades before Charles Peirce entered the scene. Edwards' habit is just a new name for old European ideas. It is obvious that Hume's principles of association, which deal with internal mental processes, have not much to do with Peircean habits of action, which are about overt bodily action in the world where we meet also hard facts involving brute force, muscular effort, and resistance.The starting point of Henning's analysis is immediate qualitative experience, affective sensual awareness, which also prefigures and is the ground of signification (p. 107). Qualitative immediacy is felt, had, and undergone. There is a need to experience the world as meaningful, to move from that world as had and undergone to the world as known. Knowledge about this immediate experience becomes possible with the emergence of mind, when "situations, in their qualitative tone, are also socially significant so that interactions are aided by the mediation of symbols" (p. 88). We can give names to qualitatively different feelings. This knowledge is different from qualitative immediacy in that it is discursive, cognitive, and syntactical (p. 38). But how does this kind of knowledge emerge? What is the origin of names and symbols? What is the notion of meaning applied here? According to Henning, meaning "must be felt, had and undergone, in a way that is primarily qualitative rather than primarily cognitive" (p. 107). There is also "erotic need for meaningful connection" (p. 113). Further, Henning appeals to Julia Kristeva's semiotic theory, but Peirce's semiotics is not mentioned. An explicit definition of meaning would be in place here, especially as Peirce and Dewey have one to offer.According to Peirce, "what a thing means is simply what habits it involves" (CP 5.400).2 Note that there are no restrictions on this. If it is a linguistic expression, then we have Ludwig Wittgenstein's language games... (shrink)

According to David Hume values do not belong to the world of facts and cannot be derived from facts. However, Hume’s argument is based on questionable presumptions. His conception of experience as sense perception is erroneous. On contemporary standards it is simply false because sense organs are not channels that passively receive inputs from the world. It is too narrow as it does not take the role of action into account. Further, Hume’s argument is based on the dichotomy between external (...) and internal. Mind is strictly separated from the external world of facts. This entails that experiences, perceptions and ideas do not belong to the world of facts. Causality and values cannot be literally perceived. Therefore they are beyond the scope of empirical knowledge. Hume’s presumptions can be rejected. The consequence is that mind is embodied, and bodies belong to the world of facts. And so do embodied minds. Broadening the notion of experience brings causality and values within the scope of experience. They are experienced on a daily basis in various practices. Values related to vital needs are based on biological facts. More generally, the relation of facts and values can be analyzed if one rejects the hidden causes of perceptions as the object of knowledge. The alternative is the operational conception of knowledge. To know is to know what to do in order to proceed from a problematic situation to future circumstances where the problems are solved. (shrink)

It is argued here that the phenomenon of consciousness is nothing more than a special way of a subjective internal appearance of information. To explain consciousness is to explain how this subjective internal appearance of information can arise in the brain. To create a conscious robot is to create subjective internal appearances of information inside the robot. Other features that are often attributed to the phenomenon of consciousness are related to the contents of consciousness and cognitive functions. The internal conscious (...) appearance of these is caused by the mechanism that gives rise to the internal appearances in the first place. A useful conscious robot must have a variety of cognitive abilities, but these abilities alone, no matter how advanced, will not make the robot conscious; the phenomenal internal appearances must be present as well. The Haikonen Cognitive Architecture (HCA) tries to facilitate both internal appearances and cognitive functions. The experimental robot XCR-1 is the first implementation experiment with the HCA. (shrink)

The development of conscious machines faces a number of difficult issues such as the apparent immateriality of mind, qualia and self-awareness. Also consciousness-related cognitive processes such as perception, imagination, motivation and inner speech are a technical challenge. It is foreseen that the development of machine consciousness would call for a system approach; the developer of conscious machines should consider complete systems that integrate the cognitive processes seamlessly and process information in a transparent way with representational and non-representational information-processing modes. An (...) overview of the main issues is given and some possible solutions are outlined. (shrink)

Pentti O. Haikonen, Int. J. Mach. Conscious., 06, 71 (2014). DOI: 10.1142/S1793843014400125.

The article describes an extension of the original idea of the fifth dimension model to pre-school age. We found out that small schildren are not able to use in their activity the tasks formulated by the adults. Learning tasks inbedded in different narratives were used in 5D environments. Experimental research lead to a hypothesis on the status of narrative learning as ”transitory activity system” between play and school learning. The hypothesis is presented and a transitory model sketched. Examples on children’s (...) sense making and narrative learning in problem situations are are offered at the end of the article. (shrink)

The book questions two key dichotomies: that of the apparent and real, and that of the internal and external. This leads to revised notions of the structure of experience and the object of knowledge. Our world is experienced as possibilities of action, and to know is to know what to do. A further consequence is that the mind is best considered as a property of organisms' interactions with their environment. The unit of analysis is the loop of action and perception, (...) and the central concept is the notion of habit of action, which provides the embodied basis of cognition as the anticipation of action. This holds for non-linguistic tacit meanings as well as for linguistic meanings. Habit of action is a teleological notion and thus opens a possibility for defining intentionality and normativity in terms of the soft naturalism adopted in the book. The mind is embodied, and this embodiment determines our physical perspective on the world. Our sensory organs and other instruments give us instrumental access to the world, and this access is epistemic in character. The distinction between the physical and conceptual viewpoint allows us to define truth as the correspondence with operational fit. This embodied epistemic truth is however not a sign of antirealism, as the instrumentally accessed theoretical objects are precisely those objects that experimental science deals with.. (shrink)

Cognitive function certainly poses the biggest challenge for computational neuroscience. As we argue, past efforts to build neural models of cognition (the target article included) had too narrow a focus on implementing rule-based language processing. The problem with these models is that they sacrifice the advantages of connectionism rather than building on them. Recent and more promising approaches for modeling cognition build on the mathematical properties of distributed neural representations. These approaches truly exploit the key advantages of connectionism, that is, (...) the high representational power of distributed neural codes and similarity-based pattern recognition. The architectures for cognitive computing that emerge from these approaches are neural associative memories endowed with additional mapping operations to handle invariances and to form reduced representations of combinatorial structures. (shrink)