Gualtiero Piccinini

This volume provides a cohesive and comprehensive case that cognitive neuroscience is maturing into an integrated, interdisciplinary science that is transforming our understanding of the mind. The rise of cognitive neuroscience has prompted a rethinking of levels, computation, representation, psychological explanation, and the relation between psychology and neuroscience. Despite these advances, many philosophers and scientists of the mind continue to write as though cognitive neuroscience didn’t exist and psychology remains autonomous from neuroscience or, perhaps, they maintain that cognitive neuroscience has not deepened our understanding of the mind. The chapters in this volume showcase important ways in which cognitive neuroscience makes a profound difference to our understanding of the mind. The contributors address a wide range of topics, including explanation, computation, representation, inference, emotion, language, intention, and thought. Together, they demonstrate the ways in which cognitive neuroscience supersedes traditional cognitive science and supports a unified, integrated, multilevel, mechanistic, neurocomputational account of the mind. Neurocognitive Foundations of Mind is essential reading for scholars and advanced students interested in the foundations of the philosophy of mind and the mind sciences.

I argue that wholes are neither identical to nor distinct from their parts. Instead, wholes are invariants under some transformations in their parts. Similarly, higher-level properties are neither identical to nor distinct from their lower-level realizers. Instead, higher-level properties are aspects of their realizers that are invariant under some transformations in their realizers. Nowhere in this picture is there any ontological hierarchy between levels of composition or realization. Neither wholes nor their parts are more fundamental. Neither is prior. Neither reduces to the other. Neither is eliminated. Ditto for higher-level properties and their lower-level realizers. Instead, wholes and their properties as well as parts and their properties are different yet invariant aspects of reality. The result is an egalitarian account of composition and realization.

Abstract: According to the Veridicality Thesis, information requires truth. On this view, smoke carries information about there being a fire only if there is a fire, the proposition that the earth has two moons carries information about the earth having two moons only if the earth has two moons, and so on. We reject this Veridicality Thesis. We argue that the main notions of information used in cognitive science and computer science allow A to have information about the obtaining of p even when p is false.