Authors:	Gutknecht, Aaron
Title:	The “bottom-up” approach to mental life : a commentary on Holk Cruse & Malte Schilling
Online publication date:	28-Nov-2016
Year of first publication:	2015
Language:	english
Abstract:	With their “bottom-up” approach, Holk Cruse and Malte Schilling present a highly intriguing perspective on those mental phenomena that have fascinated humankind since ancient times. Among them are those aspects of our inner lives that are at the same time most salient and yet most elusive: we are conscious beings with complex emotions, thinking and acting in pursuit of various goals. Starting with, from a biological point of view, very basic abilities, such as the ability to move and navigate in an unpredictable environment, Cruse %26 Schilling have developed, step-by-step, a robotic system with the ability to plan future actions and, to a limited extent, to verbally report on its own internal states. The authors then offer a compelling argument that their system exhibits aspects of various higher-level mental phenomena such as emotion, attention, intention, volition, and even consciousness. the scientific investigation of the mind is faced with intricate problems at a very fundamental, methodological level. not only is there a good deal of conceptual vagueness and uncertainty as to what the explananda precisely are, but it is also unclear what the best strategy might be for addressing the phenomena of interest. cruse & schilling’s bio-robotic “bottom-up” approach is designed to provide answers to such questions. in this commentary, i begin, in the first section, by presenting the main ideas behind this approach as i understand them. in the second section, i turn to an examination of its scope and limits. specifically, i will suggest a set of constraints on good explanations based on the bottom-up approach. what criteria do such explanations have to meet in order to be of real scientific value? i maintain that there are essentially three such criteria: biological plausibility, adequate matching criteria, and transparency. finally, in the third section, i offer directions for future research, as cruse & schilling’s bottom-up approach is well suited to provide new insights in the domain of social cognition and to explain its relation to phenomena such as language, emotion, and self.
DDC:	100 Philosophie 100 Philosophy
Institution:	Johannes Gutenberg-Universität
Department:	FB 05 Philosophie und Philologie
Place:	Mainz
ROR:	https://ror.org/023b0x485
DOI:	http://doi.org/10.25358/openscience-137
URN:	urn:nbn:de:hebis:77-publ-552865
Version:	Published version
Publication type:	Buchbeitrag
License:	In Copyright
Information on rights of use:	https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Citation:	Open MIND Metzinger, Thomas
Pages or article number:	Kap. 9(C)
Publisher:	MIND Group
Publisher place:	Frankfurt am Main
Issue date:	2015
Publisher URL:	http://dx.doi.org/10.15502/9783958570474
Publisher DOI:	10.15502/9783958570474
Appears in collections:	JGU-Publikationen