Book Review

Sunny Y. Auyang, Mind in Everyday Life and Cognitive Science, Cambridge, MA:The MIT Press, 2000, viii + 529 pp., $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-26201-181-6.

In the middle years of the twentieth century with the Chomskian revolution in lin-guistics and the cognitive revolution in psychology, the study of mind was broughtback under scientific auspices. What was clearly understood is that no serioushuman psychology can offer a coherent explanation of behavior by ignoring con-tentful mental states. This attempt to grant amnesty to the mental from the excom-munication with which it has been sentenced by behaviorists prior to the 1960sresulted in the revival of the representational theory of mind and mind/brain iden-tity theories. Different forms of representationalism and reductionism continue tobe prevailing theories of mind fifty years later. Auyang’s book Mind in EverydayLife and Cognitive Science is the attempt to challenge these theories as well asto offer a plausible alternative that will incorporate the findings of cognitive sci-ence but avoid shortcomings of the theories of mind that are usually embraced bycognitive scientists.

In the first chapter of her book, Auyang introduces the problem suffered byall representational theories of mind framed within Cartesian tradition. Within thisframework there is a sharp distinction between mental/inner realm and outer world.The mind has access only to mental representations but not to the physical ob-jects. Regardless of whether these mental representations are understood as senseimpressions in Lockean terms or as symbols that are being manipulated in com-putationalists’ terms, the process by which the mind gets to know the meanings ofthese mental representations, i.e. the process by which the mind gets to know thatmental representations are caused by things, remains mysterious. Auyang calls alltheories that offer this picture of mind “closed mind” theories and she argues thatin order to account for meanings closed mind theories need to introduce agentsexternal to the mind (mind designers) whose job is to establish the connectionbetween mental representations and objects in the world.

According to Auyang the models of the closed mind controlled by mind de-signers are unacceptable because they cannot give a satisfactory account for ourbasic abilities that we entertain in daily practices, e.g. our ability to find the worldthat we live in meaningful. However, by rejecting these theories, Auyang is notrejecting cognitive science altogether but only a specific tendency that philosophersand cognitive scientists are prone to make, namely the tendency to reduce mindto underlying unconscious processes. The source of this tendency lies in the factthat most disciplines in cognitive science are not concerned with actual conscious

Minds and Machines 14: 397–402, 2004.

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experiences but with underlying neural processes. Auyang argues that this is alegitimate approach as long as we keep in mind that our conscious mental life isnot the same and cannot be reduced to these processes. Accordingly, the model ofmind that she proposes consists of two levels: (a) a mental level which is the levelof the mind open to the world; this is the mind that we are familiar with in everydaylife, and (b) an infrastructural level consisting of unconscious processes that are thesubject matter of cognitive science. In addition, her model includes as a third partthe concept of emergence. This concept is to establish the relation between thelevels. By proposing this model of mind Auyang lays out the main problem thatcognitive science is yet to solve, namely the problem of how to relate our everydayexperiences with scientific knowledge of mental infrastructures without reducingthe first to the second. What she is going to argue in the rest of the book is thatthis problem can be approached in the most appropriate way if the theories of theclosed mind are abandoned and if the model of the open mind is taken seriously.

In Chapter 2 Auyang surveys major theories of mind and explains why mostof them belong to the category of closed mind theories. All three major models ofmind offered in 20th century are attempts to reduce mind either to behavior, compu-tational processes, or brain states. With the cognitive revolution the last two becamethe most attractive so Auyang devotes the first part of the second chapter to them.

According to the computational theory of mind (Auyang refers to it as sym-bolism in order to distinguish it from connectionism) cognition is computationand computation is symbol manipulation. Old fashioned impressions or ideas arereplaced with symbols. However, the problem of how the system can give semanticinterpretation to its symbols remains unsolved. If the computational metaphor forthe mind is taken too seriously, it is usually overlooked that strings of 0s and 1sthat play the major role in the processing do not mean anything for the computer,but for its users. If the mind is nothing but a computer it is not clear how the mindassigns interpretations to its representations when this ability goes beyond the abil-ity of a computer. Connectionism, as a theory of mind, was inspired with the samecomputer metaphor and although it differs from symbolism as far as the explana-tion of mental representations goes, it faces the same problem. Representations inconnectionist networks are not discrete. They are often called activation vectors orparallel distributed processing. However, how the activation vectors are going tobe interpreted depends on the user of the network. If the human mind worked inthis way it would need external mind designers to interpret its processing. Finally,if mind is understood as nothing but the brain, i.e. if all mental states are identifiedwith brain states, the situation does not change a lot. Mental representations takethe form of electrode stimuli and the mind/brain cannot reach the meanings of thesestimuli. Mind remains closed to the world.

In the second part of Chapter 2 Auyang focuses on various forms of behav-iorism. In order to avoid the problems that Cartesian theories of mind face, be-haviorists proclaimed that the sufficient condition for one to have a mind is toreact to stimuli appropriately. Although behaviorism became outdated after it had

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been attacked in the cognitive revolution, it survived in some forms. Unlike tradi-tional behaviorism which aimed to explain the behavior of the system in isolation,modern versions of behaviorism (e.g. Gibson’s ecological approach) focus on thesystems that interact with the environment. However, Auyang argues that in bothcases the reduction of the mind to systems’ behaviors prevents these systems fromachieving the understanding of their own behaviors which the human mind is ableto do.

The final section of the chapter introduces several theories of mind that escapepitfalls of reduction. They reject the dichotomy between mind and the world and,in this sense, they cannot be classified as Cartesian pictures of the mind. Themain one among these theories is existential phenomenology developed withinthe continental tradition. Since Auyang in her model of the mind utilizes the ideaof the mind-open-to-the-world borrowed from phenomenology, this section is theintroduction to Chapter 3 where Auyang turns to the explication of her model ofthe mind.

In the first section of the third chapter Auyang explicitly states the criterion thata theory of mind needs to satisfy in order to be explanatorily adequate. She callsit the criterion of self-consistency and according to it, the theory of mind is self-consistent only if it applies to the theoreticians who made it. In other words, thetheory of mind cannot be explanatorily adequate if it cannot account for the varietyof activities that the human mind is able to engage in. Theories of closed mind donot fulfill this criterion simply because the mind, according to these theories, dealsonly with mental representations and can never reach the world outside of it. In thisway mental representations cannot have the meanings for the mind but only for the“mind designers” that are external to it.

In the attempt to develop the theory of mind that will satisfy the self-consistencycriterion, Auyang starts with several premises that are to serve as a general con-ceptual framework. Firstly, mind has to be understood as a dynamic property ofcomplex physical entities that emerges from the self-organization of its infrastruc-tures, namely its underlying (unconscious) processes. Secondly, the main featureof the mind is its openness to the world. It is of crucial importance to notice that,according to Auyang, the infrastructural level and the level of the mind-open-to-the-world are two ontologically distinct levels, not just one ontological level thatallows for multiple theoretical descriptions. The entities that comprise the levelof the mind-open-to-the-world are persons with their beliefs, desires, and hopes.They are capable of understanding and they find the world in which they are situ-ated meaningful. The underlying infrastructural processes do not believe or desire,so accordingly, for their theoretical representation we need to employ not mentalbut neural or physiological concepts. In other words, these two ontological levelsrequire two distinct descriptive levels. However, if we want to gain insight into therelation between these levels we need to employ synthetic analysis that deals withboth. The goal of the analysis is not just to break down our experiences into theirinfrastructural parts/processes but also to explain how these processes self-organize

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into the conscious mind of our everyday life, or to put it the other way around, howconscious mind emerges from its infrastructural parts.

In the second part of the third chapter Auyang clarifies the notions of syntheticanalysis and emergent properties by examples from fluid and chaotic dynamics.Auyang’s main goal is to make a clear distinction between emergent and resultantproperties where mind as a dynamic property needs to be understood as emergent,not resultant. The property is resultant if it can be analyzable in its constituent partsand if it can be explained as a sum or the average of the properties of its constitu-ents. It should be noticed that resultant properties are determined by constituentparts in a way that if some of the properties of its constituents change, the propertychanges. However, the causation cannot go in the opposite direction, i.e. from theresultant property to its constituents. What resultant property is, is exhausted byits constituents and their properties. The peculiarity of emergent properties is thatthey are qualitatively different from the properties of their parts. Accordingly, theycannot be explained as a sum or the average of the constitutive properties. Theother peculiarity of emergent properties is that they can influence the behaviors oftheir parts. In other words, emergent properties as properties of complex systems,impose constraints on the behavior of their constituents. This is the crucial stepfor the explanation of mental causation, e.g. for the explanation of how the simpleswitch of attention can effect the infrastructural perceptual processes. By allowingtop-down causation from the mind, whose basic characteristic is its openness to theworld, to the functions of mind’s infrastructures Auyang reveals how important thecareful study of the mind-world relation is. Without proper understanding of thisrelation we cannot gain proper understanding of the processes underlying mind.This concluding remark of the third chapter introduces the topic of the final chapterof the book.

However, before she turns to the exploration of the mind-world relation, Auyangspends some time examining four major areas of cognitive science: language, per-ception, memory, and emotion. Chapters 4–7 deal with these mental faculties andthe findings on the mental infrastructures from which they emerge. Auyang’s goalhere is twofold. First, she wants to introduce the reader with the results of empiricalresearch obtained within different disciplines of cognitive science. Second, shewants to emphasize the importance of the conceptual interpretation of these results.That is, if the findings on, e.g. perceptual pathways in the brain are interpreted asthe analysis of our mental faculty in the sense that there is nothing more to ourfaculty of perception but perceptual pathways in the brain, then our interpretationis reductivist and our model of mind falls under closed mind models.

Having introduced individual mental faculties and their infrastructural process-es, the final chapter in the book deals with the mental level as a whole and focuseson the central feature of the mind: its openness to the world. The main question thatAuyang is concerned with is what minimal mental structures allow us to live in aworld that is intelligible to us. She begins the analysis by making four points abouthuman experiences: (a) Mind deals with the world without any intermediaries, i.e.

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mind is capable of reaching out to the objects in the world, not just mental repre-sentations. In doing so, the mind makes the world intelligible by utilizing generalconcepts of objects, time, causality and purposes. (b) Human experiences necessar-ily involve physical and intellectual perspectives. (c) Intersubjective understandingpresupposes the objective world. Full understanding of subjectivity presupposesboth: intersubjective understanding and the objective world. (d) Finally, there isno inner self that exists as a separate entity that can be subjected to introspection.Subject exists only in its activities. These points require some unpacking.

Firstly, when Auyang argues that the mind perceives the world directly, shedoes not claim that there are no causal processes that connect objects in the worldwith our perception, but that these processes take place on a lower ontologicallevel. Secondly, general concepts of the world that mind uses in making the worldintelligible are understood as mental abilities, not entities that appear in the beliefor desire box in one’s head. Accordingly, Auyang argues that to have the conceptof, e.g. cause, is not to have an entity “cause” somewhere in the head but to havethe ability to recognize certain regularities in the courses of events. Furthermore,the basic mental ability to break free from what is presently given and to imaginepossibilities underlies all concepts. This means that the possibility to take differentperspectives toward the same objects is the main feature of the way human beingsgrasp the world. There are different kinds of perspectives. They can be spatial,temporal, linguistic, or cultural. In everyday life we are always in a certain frameof mind, and we are always taking a certain perspective toward things; however,at the same time we are aware of other possible perspectives that we can take. Byemphasizing this basic ability of mind (to change perspectives and to be aware ofthe change), Auyang introduces the next question: what are the mental propertiesthat constitute a self or a subject. The criterion for presonhood that she offers is asfollows. If an entity is to be counted as a person or a subject it needs to be able todistinguish itself from others. Also, it has to be able to ascribe first-person views toothers and to allow a third-person view for itself. Since subjectivity can be achievedonly through the relations with others, intersubjectivity becomes its requirement.Finally, when subject is defined by its relations to the world and other subjects, theassumption that the brain in the vat can have the same experiences as embodiedpersons no longer makes sense. The mind that is abstracted from the body, theworld, and other subjects cannot have mental properties that are necessary for it tobe counted as the subject.

Auyang’s book offers not just a comprehensive survey of prevailing theoriesof mind but also a great number of insights into the variety of problems that thescience of mind inevitably faces. What is particularly remarkable about Auyang’sapproach is that in dealing with the robust findings of cognitive science she neverloses from her sight our ordinary understanding of mind and the requirement toaccount for it. Similarly, when she elaborates the shortcomings of cognitive sci-ence she is not tempted to abandon its method altogether. However, although hermodel of mind with its constitutive parts aims to avoid the major pitfalls of rep-

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resentational theories of mind and to save the subject matter of cognitive science,the introduction of three ontological levels (mental, infrastructural and physiolo-gical) with the three corresponding descriptive levels may look unjustified. WhileAuyang’s argument against the reduction of mental to infrastructural is compelling,she does not make an equally strong argument for the similar ontological distinc-tion between the infrastructural and physiological level. It would be worthwhileto examine whether her model of mind can work without this intermediate level.For, the way it stands now, her model might appear as a theory of modular mind indisguise.

LJILJANA RADENOVICDepartment of Philosophy

York UniversityToronto, ON, Canada, M3J 1P3

E-mail: ljilja@yorku.ca