The Phenomenological Mind: Foregrounding Experience Through Cognitive Anti-realism and Quantum Cognition
- Pamela Hoyte, School of Information Systems, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Qld, Australia
- Peter Bruza, School of Information Systems, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
- Greg Thompson, Faculty of Education , Queensland University of Technology , Brisbane, Qld, Australia
AbstractTwo perspectives on human cognition are contrasted: the computational mind and the phenomenological mind. The computational mind derives from the cognitivist hypothesis and is based on representation, computation and realism. While useful for cognitive modelling, it is limited as it cannot cater for a cognitive agent’s experience. The phenomenological mind foregrounds experience by drawing on the concept of the enactive mind. The phenomenological mind refers to a view of cognition that is not predicated on the pre-existing mental representation of an objective world, and so is cognitively anti-realist and non-representational. Quantum cognition offers the prospect for cognitive modelers to step out of the computational mind but still have tools to rigorously and formally explore the anti-realism inherent to the phenomenological mind. The concept of contextuality from quantum cognition is proposed as a signature of experience in the phenomenological mind.