A Theory of Immediate Awareness: Self-Organization and Adaptation in Natural Intelligence (Dickens Studies Annual)

This book is multi- and interdisciplinary in both scope and content. It draws upon philosophy, the neurosciences, psychology, computer science, and engineering in efforts to resolve fundamental issues about the nature of immediate awareness. Approximately the first half of the book is addressed to historical approaches to the question whether or not there is such a thing as immediate awareness, and if so, what it might be. This involves reviewing arguments that one way or another have been offered as answers to the question or ways of avoiding it. It also includes detailed discussions of some complex questions about the part immediate awareness plays in our over-all natural intelligence. The second half of the book addresses intricate and complex issues involved in the computability of immediate awareness as it is found in simple, ordinary things human beings know how to do, as weIl as in some highly extraordinary things some know how to do. Over the past 2,500 years, human culture has discovered, created, and built very powerful tools for recognizing, classifying, and utilizing patterns found in the natural world. The most powerful of those tools is mathematics, the language of nature. The natural phenomenon of human knowing, of natural intelligence generally, is a very richly textured set of patterns that are highly complex, dynamic, self-organizing, and adaptive. This book presents a realist, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary theory of immediate awareness showing it is the most primitive cognitive network underlying all our natural intelligence. Including preattentive and attention processes, as well as primitive relations of the senses, imagination and memory, immediate awareness is a kind of knowing deeply embedded and interwoven throughout our multiple kinds of natural intelligence. It permits as well as drives our knowing how, our bodily intelligence. Against the Cartesian mind-body split found in earlier and current theories, the author shows how immediate awareness permits emergent properties of mind in multilayered primitive relations of touching and moving in bodily kinesthetic intelligence. Contrary to existing theories, she argues that sensation is not cognitively "neutral", nor does it require a "representation" in order to be accessible to cognitive processes Front Matter....Pages i-xxvii The Problem of Immediate Awareness....Pages 1-32 The Primitive Relations of Knowledge by Acquaintance....Pages 33-74 Arguments Against Immediate Awareness: The Case of Naturalism....Pages 75-108 What does the Evidence Show?....Pages 109-158 Boundary Set S : At the Core of Multiple Intelligences....Pages 159-216 Can Neural Networks Simulate Boundary Set S ?....Pages 217-254 Computability of Boundary Set S ....Pages 255-277 Summary and Conclusions....Pages 279-289 Back Matter....Pages 291-316