An inclusive account of mind across spatiotemporal scales of cognition

Abstract

We review a variety of studies in the neural and cognitive sciences that progressively move from the level of neural systems to the level of individual behavior to the level of group behavior. At each step along the way, the evidence suggests that a cognitive process observed at one spatiotemporal scale of analysis is inseparable from the larger subsuming cognitive process observed at the next larger spatiotemporal scale of analysis. Each incremental expansion of the spatiotemporal scale of analysis is a small enough step to seem trivial, and unlikely to serve as a categorical distinction between ''the mind'' and the ''rest of the world''. Such expansions illustrate the necessity for attending to cognitive phenomena that span across two or more spatiotemporal scales. Our analysis suggests that a mind can be observed among the physical processes that connect together a brain, a body, and an environment, and even among the physical processes that connect a group of people together.

Reincarnating the Identity Theory

“…If the cognitive activities of an organism as a whole depend on the ways in which its parts are coordinated on multiple scales, what one does with one’s hands while speaking becomes an integral part of the process of speaking, a thesis that is congruent with recent theorizing on gesture (see Goldin-Meadow and Alibali, 2013 ). And what goes for the body, goes for the environment, in a broad sense, so that it includes not only one’s physical, but also one’s sociocultural context (see Spivey and Spevack, 2017 ) for a maximally inclusive account of cognition).…”

The incommensurability of emergence and modularity in complex systems: A comment on Wastell (2014)

“…There are "pluralists" who utilize both standard (computational and representational) and nonstandard (self-organization and focus on organism-environment systems) theories and methods in cognitive science and psychology (Dale, 2008;Spivey & Spevack, 2017;van Rooij & Favela, 2016). However, the majority of cognitive scientists and psychologists do not utilize both theories, as many of their commitments are diametrically opposed to each other-compare, for example, computational-representational (Edelman, 1999;Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1981;Marr, 1982Marr, /2010 and ecological (Chemero, 2009;Gibson, 1979Gibson, /1986 approaches to vision.…”

Cognitive Science Progresses Toward Interactive Frameworks

“…There should be sufficient interdisciplinary cross‐checking and synthesizing across adjacent levels of analysis to identify reciprocal constraints and convergent methods that help ensure that the theory for how elements at one level cohere is empirically capable of forming one of the elements at the level above (Abney, Dale, Yoshimi, Kello, Tylén, & Fusaroli, 2014; Atmanspacher & beim Graben, 2009; Noelle & Yoshimi, 2022; Silberstein, 2022; Spivey & Spevack, 2017). Essentially, those “puzzle pieces” in Fig.…”