Apr 1, 2015 03:08 AM
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...ore-156362
EXCERPT: [...] It can be argued that cognitive scientists tend to ignore the importance of what many consider to be essential features of human existence, preferring to see us as information processors rather than full-blooded human beings immersed in worlds of significance. In general, their intent is to explain human activity and life as we experience it on the basis of physical and physiological processes, the implicit assumption being that this is the domain of what is ultimately real. Since virtually everything that matters to us as human beings can be traced back to life as it is experienced, such thinking is bound to be unsettling.
For instance, an article in The Times last year by Michael S. A. Graziano, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton, about whether we humans are “really conscious,” argued, among other things, that “we don’t actually have inner feelings in the way most of us think we do.”
One feature of this line of thought that may strike us as particularly strange is that rather than being in direct contact with people and things, we are said to process bits of information that go to form representations of the world that are the basis for any relations that we have with our fellows. That would appear to be quite different from the way we actually experience things, but we are told to trust that science is more reliable because experience is often misleading in this regard.
This is not to say that all cognitive scientists see things this way; in fact there is a burgeoning school of thought referred to as the “4 E’s” (embedded, embodied, extended and enactive), inspired in part by Heidegger and like-minded philosophers, that seeks to develop a richer view of life than is found in the cognitive science mainstream. But for now, I would like to focus on how Heidegger treats a topic of considerable importance in cognitive science, which is the phenomenon of attention.
On this basis I will show that, for Heidegger, not only are we in direct contact with the people and things of this world, but also that our presence matters for how they are made manifest — how they come into presence — in the full potential that is associated with the sort of beings that they are...
EXCERPT: [...] It can be argued that cognitive scientists tend to ignore the importance of what many consider to be essential features of human existence, preferring to see us as information processors rather than full-blooded human beings immersed in worlds of significance. In general, their intent is to explain human activity and life as we experience it on the basis of physical and physiological processes, the implicit assumption being that this is the domain of what is ultimately real. Since virtually everything that matters to us as human beings can be traced back to life as it is experienced, such thinking is bound to be unsettling.
For instance, an article in The Times last year by Michael S. A. Graziano, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton, about whether we humans are “really conscious,” argued, among other things, that “we don’t actually have inner feelings in the way most of us think we do.”
One feature of this line of thought that may strike us as particularly strange is that rather than being in direct contact with people and things, we are said to process bits of information that go to form representations of the world that are the basis for any relations that we have with our fellows. That would appear to be quite different from the way we actually experience things, but we are told to trust that science is more reliable because experience is often misleading in this regard.
This is not to say that all cognitive scientists see things this way; in fact there is a burgeoning school of thought referred to as the “4 E’s” (embedded, embodied, extended and enactive), inspired in part by Heidegger and like-minded philosophers, that seeks to develop a richer view of life than is found in the cognitive science mainstream. But for now, I would like to focus on how Heidegger treats a topic of considerable importance in cognitive science, which is the phenomenon of attention.
On this basis I will show that, for Heidegger, not only are we in direct contact with the people and things of this world, but also that our presence matters for how they are made manifest — how they come into presence — in the full potential that is associated with the sort of beings that they are...