Jackendoff believes in a hierarchy of levels of mental representation.
The book resumes Jackendoff's claim that phonology and syntax are key to the structure of meaning, then extends the framework developed for language to vision and music (hinting at a possible unification with Marr's theory of vision). Each cognitive function exists at different levels of interpretations and cognitive functions generally interact at intermediary levels. Jackndoff refines and extends Fodor's idea of the modularity of the mind. Consciousness arises from a level of representation which is intermediate between the sense-data and the form of thought. There are the physical brain, the computational mind (cognition) and the phenomenological mind (consciousness). The computational mind is the one that really "thinks", whereas the phenomenological mind only "feels" superficially a subset of the "thoughts". Most of "thinking" is actually unconscious. We are never conscious of the outer world, but only of the shadows of some of the processing that the computational mind does on the outer world. TM, ®, Copyright © 2014 Piero Scaruffi |