Introduction

Abstract

The research group “Interdisciplinary Cognition Research” which organized the International Symposium “Perceptual Multistability and Semantic Ambiguity” at the University of Bremen tries to bring together a number of disciplines including experimental and theoretical neurobiology and neural network theory, cognitive psychology, learning research and didactics, computer science and robotics. It is very appropriate that this symposium is focused on the central topic of our work, namely the development of a naturalistic theory of meaning, i.e. the origin of semantics in the brain. Until very recently, such an endeavor was seen by almost every scientist and philosopher as vain from the very beginning. The brain was viewed by neurophysiologists and neurochemists as a purely physicochemical system and the processes going on inside the brain as nothing but electrochemical events. What can be measured are action potentials and transmitter release, but no meaning. The behaviorist dogma was that this was sufficient to explain behavior and cognitive acts. On the other hand, psychologists, philosophers and computer scientists believed and to a large extent still believe that meaning or “information” constitutes a domain in itself, with its own laws and phenomena that can be described and understood independently of brain processes.