La conscience auto-organisatrice

Abstract

This paper presents a shortened and updated version of a general model that the authors proposed in a target paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2002). In sharp contrast to the standard cognitive framework, the model posits that the only representations people create and manipulate are those which form the momentary phenomenal experience. We propose that the isomorphism generally observed between these representations and the structure of the world is the end-product of a progressive organization that emerges thanks to elementary associative processes that take the conscious representations themselves as the stuff on which they operate, a thesis that we summarize in the concept of Self-Organizing Consciousness (SOC). As an illustration, we show that the SOC framework accounts for the discovery of words from a continuous speech stream, and for seemingly rule-governed