These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
The Performatory Mind The US psychologist Richard
Carlson thinks that mental representations must have a
"performatory" character, they must have to do with our body, they
must be about performing an action in the environment. Most cognitive skills are
not conscious, or non-conscious (e.g., understanding language). Most cognitive
activity is routine. Consciousness is necessary only when learning the skill.
After it has been learned, it quickly becomes routine, unconscious routine.
Introspection is actually difficult for experts, who often cannot explain why
they do what they do. Most of our cognitive activity comes from a specific kind
of learning: skill acquisition. Consciousness has to do with acquiring cognitive
skills, which in turn depend on experiencing the world. Cognition is embodied and
situated: it is always about our body and/or our environment. Symbols and the
mental processes that operate on them are grounded in sensory-motor activity. There is continuity between
symbolic awareness and perceptual-enactive awareness because symbolic
representation is “performatory”: it is useful precisely because it is about
action; because symbols are grounded in action. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Ecological Realism: The Embodied Mind" | Back to the index of all chapters |