Theme introduction
Introduction to Theme I
Cognition becomes harder to confine once non-biological systems can infer regularities, transform symbolic sequences, and adjust responses; these operations are real even when they provide no evidence of a self that experiences them.
Chapter 1 separates cognition from exclusive dependence on an organism. Chapter 2 tests whether reasoning requires a self as its prior condition. Chapter 3 abandons the image of mind as an entity housed in a place and follows cognition across the relations between substrate and operation within an environment.
The theme widens the material description of thought while preserving decisive differences among cognition, subjectivity, and consciousness. Functional success alone does not establish interiority. It does, however, require an account of reasoning capable of describing what systems perform without deciding in advance which material organisation may count as cognitive.
Theme chapters