A Theory of Immediate Awareness

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.

Contenu

Dedication. Contents. List Of Figures. Preface. Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1: The Problem of Immediate Awareness. 1.1. The Influence of Nominalism, Idealism, and Behaviorism. 1.2. A Place for Ontological Questions. 1.3. Historical Background of the Problem: The Dualist Legacy of Descartes' Crooked Question. 1.4. From The Linguistic Turn to the Cognitive Naturalistic Turn. 1.5. The Knowing That and Knowing How Distinction: Manner of a Performance and Multiple Intelligences. 1.6. The Limits of Representation (Classification): The Role of Indexicals and Unique Objects Present. 1.7. Analyze This. 1.8. The Indexical Operator, Unlike Any Other: Sui Generis Objects. 1.9. The Basic Computational Idea and Argument. 2: The Primitive Relations of Knowledge by Acquaintance. 2.1. A Realist Theory of Immediate Awareness. 2.2. Analysis of Experience: Russell's Knowledge by Acquaintance. 2.3. Acquaintance with Mathematical Objects: Problems with Unnameables, Nameability and the Berry Paradox. 2.4. The Primitive Relations. 2.5. The Concept of Image. 2.6. Imagination and Sensation Defined. 2.7. Primitive Acquaintance with Relations Themselves. 2.8. Summary. 3: Arguments Against Immediate Awareness: The Case of Naturalism. 3.1. Definitions of Certain Terms. 3.2. Non-Inferential Beliefs: Self-Evident Beliefs and a Vox Populi Theory of Knowledge. 3.3. Indeterminacy of Translation and Other Problems. 3.4. Are There Immaculate Sensations? 3.5. Matching Up Stimulations. 3.6. Are Meaning Structures Equivalent to Neural Structures? 3.7. Critique of Naturalist Theory of Knowledge. 3.8. Summary. 4: What Does the Evidence Show. 4.1. Problems with Subjective Definitions of Awareness. 4.2. Neurophysical Experiments. 4.3. Cortical Information, the Preattentive and Attentive Phases. 4.4. The Primitives of the Preattentive Phase. 4.5. Evidence for Cognitive Immediate Awareness. 4.6. Where Do We Enter the Circle of Cognition? 4.7. Learning All Over the Nervous System: Multiple Intelligences. 4.8. Bodily Kinaesthetic Intelligence. 4.9. Classification of Performances. 4.10. The Hierarchy of Primitive Relations of Immediate Awareness. 4.11. Primitive Relations of Preattending, Attending and the Problem with Paying Attention. 4.12. Multiple Spaces of Primitive Immediate Awareness. 4.13. The Primitive Relation of Imagining; Hierarchy of the Senses, Touching, Moving, Probing and Their Spaces. 4.14. Summary. 5: Boundary Set S: At the Core of Multiple Intelligences. 5.1. Kinds of Knowing in Boundary Set S. 5.2. A Framework for Thinking About Boundary Set S: Dynamical Systems Theory and Kauffman's Random Boolean Nets for a Geometry of Knowing. 5.3. The Formal and Geometric Structure of the Knowing Universe. 5.4. Digraph Theory of Knowing Relations. 5.5. Properties of Relations: Natural and Artificial Intelligence Systems. 5.6. Information-Theoretic (H) Measures of the Universal Epistemic Set. 5.7. Mechanism or Organicism. 5.8. Poincaré Map and Random Graphs of Primitive Knowing Relations: From a Symbol-Based View to a Geometric View. 5.9. A Toy Model of a Random