Lecture 8 - Ten Lectures on Cognition, Mental Representation, and the Self

This book develops a distinctive account of the structure of the human mind, integrating traditional theoretical tools of cognitive science with results on situated cognition. According to the resulting view, a wide variety of materials co-contribute to the production of virtually all forms of human behavior. The bag of co-contributors is so mixed that we must abandon the commitment to a largely autonomous, isolated mental arena – that of the conscious mind or of the personal level – and instead make sense of ourselves and our behavior as the activity of a more loosely structured collection of mechanisms, including a vast number of representations many of which are redundant in their content, that collaborate in overlapping subsets to produce intelligent behavior.