The purpose of these comments is to correct some mischaracterizations of my work with Paul Bahn that Froese et al. make in their latest paper “Are altered states of consciousness detrimental, useful or helpful for the origins of symbolic cognition? A response to Hodgson and Lewis-Williams”. Additionally I discuss neuropsychological errors occurring in that paper.
O’Regan and Noë’s sensorimotor approach rejects the old-fashioned view that perceptual experience in humans depends solely on the activation of internal representations. Reflecting a wealth of empirical work, for example active vision, the approach suggests that perceiving is, instead, a matter of bodily exploration of the outside environment. To this end, the approach says the perceiver must...
Dynamicism has provided cognitive science with important tools to understand some aspects of “how cognitive agents work” but the issue of “what makes something cognitive” has not been sufficiently addressed yet and, we argue, the former will never be complete without the latter. Behavioristic characterizations of cognitive properties are criticized in favor of an organizational approach focused...