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Harnad, S. (2003b) Categorical Perception . Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science . Nature Publishing Group. Macmillan. http://www.youtube.com...
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(10a. Comment Overflow) (50+)
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Psychology PSYC 538, Winter 2018: Categorization, Communication and Consciousness Time : Tuesdays 2:35-5:25 Place : STBIO S3/3 ...
In the section on Spatial and Causal Disjointness the authors discuss fungi that span thousands of acres and have multiple fruiting bodies, which are all indirectly connected. They then brought up other organisms, and asked how far we can push this boundary, for example would coral colonies or ant colonies count as a single organism? In response to this question, I think that the coral colonies would count as one organism, assuming that they were all touching, so that there was no actual break in between each individual piece of coral within one colony. However, for the case of ants things become much more complicated - first of all they are clearly distinct, which already breaks the rule I have generated. Furthermore, the ants would all be able to sense pain and other feelings independently from one another. For this reason, they are individuals, and there cannot be a shared consciousness such that one ant could feel the pain that of another ant when it gets hurt. I like this section of the article and it made think a lot about this within the context of the readings from week 10, but regardless I don’t see how there could be a shared consciousness.
ReplyDelete“The reason we would never dream of saying that Siamese twins are one single distributed organism is that they have two different minds.”
ReplyDeleteJust as we would always make the distinction between two Siamese twins and their two different minds, we should make the distinction between cognizer and environment. We must maintain the distinction between user and tool. The objects in our environment offer a certain projectivity - that is we can do things with them. We often use these tools to offload part of our cognitive burden, like a calculator or piece of paper which we can use to expand our working memory. Even the cognitive tasks which have been encoded on a piece of paper can be retrieved and implemented by someone other than original encoder. This suggests that our environment is a key part of cognition, but not necessarily just our own. This shows us that our environment is indeed a cognitive tool, but we use it in a way that is hardware independent, and therefore it is not part of our individual cognitive system. Although the Siamese twin sibling is connected, their minds are entirely distinguishable and unique, just as the universally accessible cognitive tool is from the inaccessible mind of the cognizer.