Cognitive Neuroscience Meets the Community of Knowledge

Abstract

Cognitive neuroscience seeks to discover the biological foundations of the human mind. One goal is to explain how mental operations are generated by the information processing architecture of the human brain. Our aim is to assess whether this is a well-defined objective. Our contention will be that it is not because the information processing of any given individual is not contained entirely within that individual’s brain. Rather, it typically includes components situated in the heads of others, in addition to being distributed across parts of the individual’s body and physical environment. Our focus here will be on cognition distributed across individuals, or on what we call the “community of knowledge,” the challenge that poses for reduction of cognition to neurobiology and the contribution of cognitive neuroscience to the study of communal processes.

Cognitive Science of Augmented Intelligence

“…A top‐down approach involves systematizing what we already know about individual cognition and identifying its most fundamental properties. Possible top‐down criteria include adaptation as a result of competition, selection, coordination (e.g., Galesic et al., 2022), the emergence of specialized modules for information processing (Goldstone, 2019; Goldstone & Theiner, 2017), non‐ or near‐decomposability of a system's functionality to smaller units (Simon, 1962; e.g., cognitive function is not reducible to one brain area; collective action is not reducible to individual actions), or the specific mechanisms (e.g., memory and perception) or contents that ostensibly constitute individual cognition (e.g., Sloman, Patterson, & Barbey, 2021). The bottom‐up approach to reengineering the “cognitive system” starts by postulating certain systems as cognitive (e.g., individual humans, teams and corporations, human–machine collaborations, and AI systems), and studying the properties that they share.…”

Интуиция: Опыт Формального Исследования

“…В своих рассуждениях, представлениях и принятии решений люди (незримо) зависят от других. Когнитивная нейробиология не способна пролить свет на этот аспект когнитивной обработки [399] (значительная часть обработки вынесена за «мозг» -распределена в «теле» и социокогнитивной сети; суть концепции «расширенного Разума», включая «И-паутину субъекта»). Задача состоит в том, чтобы научиться фиксировать появление и наличие знаний не только в мозге отдельного человека, а и в ходе аутсорсинга познания и исполнительных механизмов в социо-когнитивные сети.…”

“…Примечание. В октябре 2021 года группа известных американских ученых-когитивистов (Steven A. Sloman, Richard Patterson и Aron K. Barbey) обратилась к мировому сообществу когнитивных нейробиологов и исследователей ИИ с призывоммеморандумом «о смене курса» [399]. Авторы «меморандума» утверждают, что обработка информации какого-либо отдельного человека обычно включает в себя компоненты, расположенные в головах других, в дополнение к тому, что они распределены по частям тела человека и физической среде ("Community of knowledge").…”

How Do We Believe?

“…Keil (2005) has been investigating how people develop cultural knowledge in a way that mirrors how knowledge is institutionalized. Thinking about knowledge this way has implications for how to understand the role of cognitive neuroscience (Sloman, Patterson, Barbey, 2021). If thinking is a collective process, then it does not go on entirely in any individual brain; it goes on in networks of brains (and also—as work on situated cognition has taught us—in machines and on whiteboards).…”