Abstract
We experience the world as a coherent, complete and seamless whole, despite the impoverished character of our representations of the world. Vision scientists study our perception of a stable three-dimensional world in the presence of fleeting two-dimensional stimuli; I believe that the problem of coherence and stability extends far beyond the domain of vision to the study of the mind as a whole. This chapter is an exploration of the “whole world” experience through the lens of cognitive science; I claim that neither traditional computational approaches nor the more recent embodied approaches to the mind account for the wholeness of the world. Instead, I argue that the whole world experience points to the existence of the self as an organizer that structures experience and makes it whole. If so, the self has a much larger role to play in the mind sciences than is currently acknowledged, and the study of the self is a bridge between traditional concerns of metaphysics and the modern cognitive sciences.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
I use the term “register” as a placeholder for sensation, perception, representation, etc., so that I have a way of talking about information flow without getting into debates about the reality of sense data or representations.
- 2.
I do not mean the instability of the sensory stimulus, but the instability of individual views. As I move around a boulder, a different face is exposed to me, but the world consists of that exposed face along with the amodally presented invisible surfaces.
References
Browning, R., & Cook, T. (1994). The works of Robert Browning. Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd.
Chomsky, N. (2005). Rules and representations. New York: Columbia University Press.
Damasio, A. (2010). Self comes to mind: Constructing the conscious mind. New York: Pantheon Books.
Dennett, D. C. (1998). Brainchildren: Essays on designing minds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Edelman, S., Fekete, T., & Zach, N. (2012). Being in time: Dynamical models of phenomenal experience. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Fauconnier, G. (1997). Mappings in thought and language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ganeri, J. (2007). The concealed art of the soul: Theories of self and practices of truth in Indian ethics and epistemology. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gibson, J. J. (1986). The ecological approach to visual perception. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum.
James, W. (1890). Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kanizsa, G., & Kanizsa, G. (1979). Organization in vision: Essays on Gestalt perception. New York: Praeger. Retrieved from http://www.getcited.org/pub/101963872
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. New York: Basic Books.
Mach, E. (1897). Contributions to the analysis of sensations. La Salle: Open Court.
Mach, E. (1959). The analysis of sensations, and the relation of the physical to the psychical. New York: Dover Publications Inc.
Marr, D. (1982). Vision: A computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman.
Metzinger, T. (2004). Being no one: The self-model theory of subjectivity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Metzinger, T. (2010). The ego tunnel: The science of the mind and the myth of the self. New York: Basic Books.
Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435–450.
Noe, A. (2004). Action in perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pinker, S. (1995). The language instinct (Vol. 1st Harper Perennial). New York: Harper Perennial.
Rensink, R. A. (2002). Change detection. Annual Review of Psychology, 53(1), 245–277. doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.53.100901.135125.
Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception-London, 28(9), 1059–1074.
Sorabji, R. (2006). Self: Ancient and modern insights about individuality, life, and death. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in life: Biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Tippett, K., Metzinger, T., Thompson, E., & van Lommel, P. (2011). To be or not to be: The self as illusion. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1234(1), 5–18. doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06181.x.
Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
von Uexküll, J. (1957). A stroll through the worlds of animals and men: A picture book of invisible worlds. In C. H. Schiller (Ed. & Trans.), Instinctive behavior: The development of a modern concept (pp. 5–80). New York: International Universities Press, Inc.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer India
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kasturirangan, R. (2014). The Self as Organizer. In: Menon, S., Sinha, A., Sreekantan, B. (eds) Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Consciousness and the Self. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-1587-5_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-1587-5_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, New Delhi
Print ISBN: 978-81-322-1586-8
Online ISBN: 978-81-322-1587-5
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)