Cognition could be described as the process of acquiring knowledge from the environment by sensory processes, or the system of language and memory. It could also be described as the subject that cognitive scientists study, but this would be wrong. It is the subject that cognitive scientists study around.
Staggeringly, there is no serious scientific, evidence-based theory of the basic process of cognition. In his 2017 survey-based analysis, a valiant Oscar Vilarroya tried to confront this gaping abyss:
“…we still lack a clear, universal and widely accepted view on what it means for a nervous system to represent something, on what makes neural activity a representation, and on what is represented.”
Dietrich (2007) puts it baldly:
“No scientist knows how representations represent”.
The varied and often reluctant response to Vilarroya’s genteel survey of scientists’ views on what the central process of cognition actually is points to a greater problem. Scientists eschew the very kernel of all cognitive science as variously:- somehow irrelevant (Block 1995, Block et al 1997); insoluble (e.g., Chalmers 1977; Shear 1997); the stuff of another discipline such as Philosophy (e.g.,Tart 1992); understood by some other unnamed and unlooked-for expert; or simply taboo. It is none of these: it is everything.
Cognitive Science is in deep, entrenched denial. It is predicated not upon a falsifiable, evidence-based hypothesis but on a mantra that cognition “takes place in the brain” or that neural profusion and interconnectedness “somehow” account for memory, language, perception, and so on, with blithe sanguinity over the fact that no-one is asking what science is here to ask: how does this happen? It is not just the unfounded belief that cognition occurs in neurons that is most damaging, but the baffling assumption that this catchphrase is sufficient to explain it.
Myriad offshoots, variations and correlates of the cognitive process are examined in infinite detail whilst the central mechanism itself is avoided in existential panic. Researchers are hurried down narrow paths without first establishing whether or not they are going in the right general direction. Instead of starting with a general theory and then refining into specialisms, cognitive science has bypassed the first step. The result is that we are forging down radiating rivulets away from the source we set out to find .
Because of the universality of specialists, few are aware of the absence of generalists: there is a widespread sentiment that someone else, somewhere, must know. Those in other disciplines assume that the process of cognition is understood by cognitive scientists or neurophysiologists, while these latter assume that others in their field must command this esoteric knowledge. We are trapped in a form of ghastly self-perpetuating ignorance from which no forward motion is possible.
The catastrophic licence that has been given to cognitive science to selectively opt out of empiricism has led to decades-long investigations based on elaborate fantasies that defy experimental reality. The most pervasive of these is the notion that the existence of an untransmitted code is sufficient to convey information – and then without a decoder (https://www.danfreeman.co.uk/post/neurons-cannot-transmit-information).
Hypotheses that contravene basic physics are entertained unchallenged and unsupported, then expanded upon and cited as support for further Wily Coyote cliff-runs. We have skated far over thin ice, and no-one wants to stop or turn back for fear of falling through.
As there is no evidence to cite, the core of Cognitive Science has become a revealed and monolithic truth, a religious and magical mystery that must never be assailed. It is never to be interrogated, and can never be defended in detail, only globally, with the zeal of religious fundamentalism. Witness Nobel Prize-winner Francis Crick encapsulate this orthodoxy, restate it over the course of a book – The Astonishing Hypothesis - and never once cite evidence to back it up:
“A person's mental activities are entirely due to the behaviour of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them.” (Crick, 1994)
This is indeed astonishing, but it is not a hypothesis: it is the cardinal precept of a religion that looks like science because its followers are scientists. Like most religions, its followers chant the commandments - falsifiability, observation, etc., without following them.
Crick's edict is neither falsifiable nor specific. It is an ad hoc belief that is nevertheless held without evidence by most of the scientific community. In truth, we have absolutely no clue as to what a person’s mental activities are, or what they are “entirely due to”. Even if Crick’s blanket statement is true, we need to know how these structures produce mental activities at a granular level, and we can’t do that without specifics.
What is the stuff of cognition? How, where and why does cognition happen? This is not the preserve of Philosophy but the very first, the only question that should be asked in cognitive science. In a reality that is based in post-Copenhagen physics where cognition is an essential and possibly causal agent in all physical systems (e.g., Bohr, Heisenberg 1925-27), this must be one of, if not the most important question to be addressed by any science.
Cognitive science is dead, and it should be. We must rebuild it from the foundations rather than the finials, and the new science should be just that: falsifiable and evidence-based.
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