Cognitive science

In its broadest and most ambitious goal, the academic discipline of cognitive science aims to explain the physiological activity of thinking and feeling, of speaking and other kinds of symbol processing, of imagining and remembering, of learning and knowing, of experiencing events of reality consciously, non-consciously and unconsciously, of reasoning and problem-solving, of dreaming, and a host of other physiological activities that we associate with an aspect of our living system that we refer to as mind.

The University of California at Berkeley offers an undergraduate degree-granting major in ‘Cognitive Science’, and ‘explains the discipline as follows:

Cognitive Science is an interdisciplinary field that has arisen during the past decade at the intersection of a number of existing disciplines, including psychology, linguistics, computer science, philosophy, and physiology. The shared interest that has produced this coalition is understanding the nature of the mind. This quest is an old one, dating back to antiquity in the case of philosophy, but new ideas are emerging from the fresh approach of Cognitive Science. Previously, each discipline sought to understand the mind from its own perspective, benefiting little from progress in other fields because of different methods employed. With the advent of Cognitive Science, however, common interests and theoretical ideas have overcome methodological differences, and interdisciplinary interaction has become the hallmark of this field.

Notably, though the “….shared interest that has produced this coalition is understanding the nature of the mind”, the complete webpage purporting to answer the question, “What is Cognitive Science?”, seems to assume has comprehension of the word (or concept of) “mind”.

Harvard University offers a webpage promoting a book by cognitive scientist, Phillip Johnson-Laird that states:

The mind, he says, depends on the brain in the same way as the execution of a program of symbolic instructions depends on a computer, and can thus be understood by anyone willing to start with basic principles of computation and follow his step-by-step explanations.

Margaret Boden’s 2006 book, “Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science views the mind as a machine, though a special one.

If special, perhaps because mind “emerged” from the interaction of subsystems. Noam Chomsky has stated that “…the evolution of language may involve " 'emergence' -- the appearance of a qualitatively different phenomenon at a specific stage of complexity of organization."

If so, [Chomsky continues] it would be an interesting, but by no means novel, case of evolution. A similar view is widely held by evolutionary biologists and paleoanthropologists, for example, Ian Tattersall, who suggests more generally that human intelligence is an "emergent quality, the result of a chance combination of factors, rather than a product of Nature's patient and gradual engineering over the eons" [29]. Still more generally, neuroscientist Vernon Mountcastle, introducing an American Academy of Arts and Sciences collection of essays on the state of the art at the conclusion of "the decade of the brain" that ended the last century, formulates the leading principle of these contributions as the thesis that "Things mental, indeed minds, are emergent properties of brains [my emphasis], . . . produced by principles . . . we do not yet understand" -- and that might derive from laws of nature [24].