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.
Highlights
IntroductionOur contention will be that it is not because the information processing of any given individual is not contained entirely within that individual’s brain
Reviewed by: Robert Turner, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany Brandon Turner, The Ohio State University, United States
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
Summary
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. A central aim of cognitive neuroscience is to explain how people think, elucidating the representations and processes that allow humans to judge, reason, remember, and decide (Barbey et al, 2021). To achieve this goal, cognitive neuroscientific theories have as a rule made certain fundamental assumptions:. Evidence to suggest that knowledge is represented in the brain [assumption (a)] may reflect: (1) correlations with neural activity (e.g., spike trains generated by neurons in V1 correlate with the presence and location of edges in the visual environment), (2) causal effects of knowledge on the operation of neural systems (e.g., spike trains generated by neurons in V1 are used by downstream areas for further processing), and/or (3) neural computations applied to manipulate and process knowledge
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