The Cognitive Synthesis

I am giving a talk at NIAS tomorrow on what I am calling the cognitive synthesis. Cognition and it’s cognates such as mind, thought etc are now among the most important topics of investigation in the sciences and in philosophy. We a learning more and more about the biological and psychological roots of cognition. At the same time, cognition itself is being used to understand a variety of topics from art, religion and economics to mathematics and science. By cognitive synthesis, I mean the emerging view of the role of mind in the world.

My own perspective on the cognitive synthesis is grounded in regularity theory, i.e., that the current hodge-podge of ideas about cognition will be replaced by a more unified account of the role of informational constraints that will give us an understanding of cognition from cells to societies.