Excerpt: In this chapter, I will consider the prospects for a positive Heideggerian approach to cognitive science and artificial intelligence (AI). Hubert Dreyfus and others have of course developed and refined a highly effective Heideggerian critique of cognitive science over a number of years. However, this critique addresses the limitations of a particular way of doing cognitive science rather than cognitive science per se. The orthodox cognitive science of the 1960s and 1970s, aspects of which still linger on today, is charged by Dreyfus with misconstruing the nature of human intelligence in several interrelated ways. For instance, he argues that symbol manipulation cannot facilitate the pervasive practical know-how that is implicated in most, if not all, human thought and activity. Furthermore, classical AI fails to explain how human cognition succeeds in organising a vast, holistic body of knowledge so as to facilitate a grasp of relevance. Somehow, we manage to identify information that is relevant to our negotiation of novel and open-ended situations without running through absolutely everything we know in order to determine what is applicable and what is not. Dreyfus and his brother, Stuart Dreyfus, have also formulated a model of skill acquisition which challenges assumptions that are central to classical AI. According to their account, although we might begin to learn a new skill by employing an explicit rule, skill maturation does not consist in that rule gradually becoming implicit. Instead, explicit rules operate as a kind of scaffolding that is ultimately discarded and replaced by practical, bodily know-how. So possessing a skill is not, first and foremost, a matter of being able to explicitly or implicitly manipulate rules. Associated with this account of skill-learning is an emphasis on the role || of the body in cognition. Much that we accomplish is not a matter of internal computation but of bodily activities embedded in appropriate kinds of environment.

Excerpt: This paper addresses the view, currently and historically popular in phenomenological psychopathology, that schizophrenia involves disturbance of a person’s most basic sense of self, the minimal self. The concept of “minimal self” is to be understood in wholly phenomenological terms. Zahavi (2014) offers what is perhaps the most detailed characterization to date. All our experiences, he maintains, have a “first-personal character”; their structure incorporates a sense of mineness, of their originating in a singular locus of experience. So the minimal self is neither an object of experience/thought nor an experience of subjectivity that is separate from one’s various experiences. Rather, it pertains to “the distinct manner, or how, of experiencing” (Zahavi 2014, 22). Those who subscribe to this view do not insist that minimal self is the only kind of self. As Zahavi acknowledges, “self” may legitimately refer to a range of different phenomena, all of which need to be carefully distinguished from one another. But the minimal self is the most fundamental of these, a condition for the integrity of experience that all other kinds of self-experience presuppose.