A Theory of Immediate Awareness
Self-Organization and Adaptation in Natural Intelligence

This book presents a realist, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary theory of immediate awareness showing it is the most primitive cognitive network underlying all our natural intelligence. Including preattentive and attention processes, as well as primitive relations of the senses, imagination and memory, immediate awareness is a kind of knowing deeply embedded and interwoven throughout our multiple kinds of natural intelligence. It permits as well as drives our knowing how, our bodily intelligence. Against the Cartesian mind-body split found in earlier and current theories, the author shows how immediate awareness permits emergent properties of mind in multilayered primitive relations of touching and moving in bodily kinesthetic intelligence. Contrary to existing theories, she argues that sensation is not cognitively "neutral", nor does it require a "representation" in order to be accessible to cognitive processes.

Dedication. Contents. List Of Figures. Preface. Acknowledgements. Introduction. 1: The Problem of Immediate Awareness. 1.1. The Influence of Nominalism, Idealism, and Behaviorism. 1.2. A Place for Ontological Questions. 1.3. Historical Background of the Problem: The Dualist Legacy of Descartes' Crooked Question. 1.4. From The Linguistic Turn to the Cognitive Naturalistic Turn. 1.5. The Knowing That and Knowing How Distinction: Manner of a Performance and Multiple Intelligences. 1.6. The Limits of Representation (Classification): The Role of Indexicals and Unique Objects Present. 1.7. Analyze This. 1.8. The Indexical Operator, Unlike Any Other: Sui Generis Objects. 1.9. The Basic Computational Idea and Argument. 2: The Primitive Relations of Knowledge by Acquaintance. 2.1. A Realist Theory of Immediate Awareness. 2.2. Analysis of Experience: Russell's Knowledge by Acquaintance. 2.3. Acquaintance with Mathematical Objects: Problems with Unnameables, Nameability and the Berry Paradox. 2.4. The Primitive Relations. 2.5. The Concept of Image. 2.6. Imagination and Sensation Defined. 2.7. Primitive Acquaintance with Relations Themselves. 2.8. Summary. 3: Arguments Against Immediate Awareness: The Case of Naturalism. 3.1. Definitions of Certain Terms. 3.2. Non-Inferential Beliefs: Self-Evident Beliefs and a Vox Populi Theory of Knowledge. 3.3. Indeterminacy of Translation and Other Problems. 3.4. Are There Immaculate Sensations? 3.5. Matching Up Stimulations. 3.6. Are Meaning Structures Equivalent to Neural Structures? 3.7. Critique of Naturalist Theory of Knowledge. 3.8. Summary. 4: What Does the Evidence Show. 4.1. Problems with Subjective Definitions of Awareness. 4.2. Neurophysical Experiments. 4.3. Cortical Information, the Preattentive and Attentive Phases. 4.4. The Primitives of the Preattentive Phase. 4.5. Evidence for Cognitive Immediate Awareness. 4.6. Where Do We Enter the Circle of Cognition? 4.7. Learning All Over the Nervous System: Multiple Intelligences. 4.8. Bodily Kinaesthetic Intelligence. 4.9. Classification of Performances. 4.10. The Hierarchy of Primitive Relations of Immediate Awareness. 4.11. Primitive Relations of Preattending, Attending and the Problem with Paying Attention. 4.12. Multiple Spaces of Primitive Immediate Awareness. 4.13. The Primitive Relation of Imagining; Hierarchy of the Senses, Touching, Moving, Probing and Their Spaces. 4.14. Summary. 5: Boundary Set S: At the Core of Multiple Intelligences. 5.1. Kinds of Knowing in Boundary Set S. 5.2. A Framework for Thinking About Boundary Set S: Dynamical Systems Theory and Kauffman's Random Boolean Nets for a Geometry of Knowing. 5.3. The Formal and Geometric Structure of the Knowing Universe. 5.4. Digraph Theory of Knowing Relations. 5.5. Properties of Relations: Natural and Artificial Intelligence Systems. 5.6. Information-Theoretic (H) Measures of the Universal Epistemic Set. 5.7. Mechanism or Organicism. 5.8. Poincaré Map and Random Graphs of Primitive Knowing Relations: From a Symbol-Based View to a Geometric View. 5.9. A Toy Model of a Random Graph: Kauffman's Buttons and Threads for a Tapestry of Knowing. 5.10. Autocatalysis of Knowing: Some Law-Like Properties of Immediate Awareness and the Binding Problem: Rule-Boundedness. 5.11. A Random Boolean Network of Knowing: The Emergence Of Order. 5.12. The Boundary of Epistemic Boundary Set S. 5.13. Parameter Space and Rugged Landscape of Boundary Set S. 5.14. Summary. 6: Can Neural Networks Simulate Boundary Set S? 6.1. The Cocktailparty Problem. 6.2. Kinds of Knowing at the Party. 6.3. Artificial Neural Networks. 6.4. Learning Algorithms. 6.5. Multilayered Synchronous Networks and Self-Organization of Boundary Sets. 6.6. Self-Organizing Neural Networks. 6.7. Adaptivity. 6.8. Critique of Artificial Neural Network Models. 6.9. Natural Language Semantics and Indexical Reference: More Limits of Computation. 6.10. The Conflation of Grammatical and Indexical Meaning with Mathematical Functions. 6.11. Summary. 7: Computability of Boundary Set S. 7.1. Computation and Complex Epistemic Domains: Problems with the Classical Computational Approach to Boundary Sets. 7.2. The Decidability of the Epistemic Boundary Set S: Issues From the Moral Universe. 7.3. Kinds of Knowing Found in the Moral Universe. 7.4. Recursively Enumerable but Non-Recursive Moral Sets: Is the Set of Moral Considerations a Countable Set? 7.5. The Epistemic Universe as Complex Numbers, C, or the Real Plane, R2 and the Undecidability of Epistemic Boundary Set S. 7.6. Summary. 8: Summary and Conclusions. 8.1. What the Facts of Natural Intelligence Show. 8.2. Themes. 8.3. Comments on Some Contrasting Views. 8.4. Conclusion. Appendix. References. Index.