"If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it."

This group deals with questions addressed by the cognitive sciences broadly construed.
Group membership requires at least basic knowledge of some central issues associated with at least one of the contributing branches.
In case you consider joining this group, make sure you actually feel like exchanging ideas, which somehow entails that you contribute something once in a while.

So what is this about?
Well, I take Cognitive Science to be something like a joint-forces attempt to approach questions addressed traditionally by the philosophy of mind. But this might already be too narrow a conception. In fact, ever since the very beginnings of cognitive science the understanding of what 'cognition' is and what 'cognitive science' should be about has changed considerably, thereby constantly changing the relative importance of the associated disciplines. Starting mainly from a trio consisting of psychology, neuroscience, and computer science, it didn't take long until other branches made their ways into the discussion: most notably linguistics, anthropology, and philosophy.

Although the question of what the mind is, is of course much older (as usual dating back at least to ancient Greece), one might want to point to a meeting at MIT on September 11, 1956 the symposium on information theory. George Miller, an experimental psychologist, recognizes this day as the day that cognitive science burst from the womb of cybernetics and became a recognizable, interdisciplinary adventure in its own right. At this meeting, Shannon had formulated the idea of information engaged in processing information and had talked about coding theory, Newell and Simon had presented their logic theory machine (which was able to prove theorems of Whiteheads and Russells principia mathematica (some even more elegantly)), Rochester and colleagues presented a computer implementation of Hebbs neurophysiological theory of cell assemblies, Chomsky talked about his idea that linguistic knowledge involves rewrite rules and transformation and Miller himself presented his classic paper about the magical number 7 - suggesting that memory is a limited-capacity information storage system that forces us to use hierarchical encodings of information. Various speaker found that they shared the conception of the mind as an information processing system and saw that different disciplines could contribute to understanding it. One might say, cognitive science was born at that time.

In order to give this forum a solid basis, I suggest that we try and come up with a set of assumptions that we take as elementary, discuss their plausibility, and then turn to more detailed questions. To give you an example of why I believe this is mandatory:

The scientific community that formed cognitive science in the 50ies were sharing a certain way of thinking about cognition: information processing metaphor was (and maybe to some still is) the unifying element. More recently, this metaphor by many is considered inadequate. Some people (Lahav) have pointed out that visually experienced detail/the richness of sensory detail - of, say, an experience of letting one's eyes sweep across a great landscape - is beyond information processing...the conscious and emotional world has a character, a subjective quality, an identity, which cannot be captured by an information processing account. Meanwhile, that subjective quality helps us to respond appropriately to life's contingencies. Others - e.g. advocates of 'dynamical systems theory' (van Gelder) - reject the idea of cognition as information processing for completely different reasons.

Some preliminaries:
I suggest we first collect and then discuss the very basics, i.e. the set of assumptions we start off with. Maybe the most important point that I would like to raise concerning the characteristics of this group, is the maxim of making explicit all crucial assumptions necessary to engage in a sensible discussion. I dont see the value of posting a bundle of wild claims.

As to myself: I am a researcher at FSU Jena, Germany with a background in cognitive psychology, (psycho-) linguistics and philosophy of mind. Since cognitive science as I see it is by necessity interdisciplinary, it comes as no surprise that I am also fascinated by all kinds of neuro-scientific, anthropologic, AI, and sociocultural contributions to the study of mind.


*cognition, cognitive science, AI, attention, memory, analogy, conceptual organization, emotion, consciousness, cognitive development, single neuron electrophysiology, natural language processing, psycholinguistics*