TY  - GEN
ID  - cogprints4352
UR  - http://cogprints.org/4352/
A1  - G., Nagarjuna
TI  - Muscularity of Mind: Towards an Explanation of the Transition from Unconscious to Conscious
Y1  - 2005/05//
N2  - The title ?Muscularity of Mind? indicates the point of view that is argued in this essay. I attempt to trace the roots of higher cognitive abilities to the physiological coupling that exists between neuro-sensory and muscular system. Most of the current discourses on the subject base their studies more on the nervous and sensory dimensions, neglecting the most crucial of all, the role of voluntary muscles in shaping the higher cognitive abilities. I make a claim that emancipation of voluntary muscles from the mandatory biological functions to take on the softer habits during the course of evolution played the crucial role in shaping the higher cognitive abilities. I undertake to explain the transition from procedural to declarative representation by hypothesizing that softer operations that are peculiar to higher cognitive agents in the evolutionary order are rooted in the physiological nexus between neuro-sensory and muscular subsystems of the cognitive agent. The objective of this essay is to indicate that the problem cannot be solved without attending to this nexus.
AV  - public
KW  - consciousness
KW  -  cognition
KW  -  declarative knowledge
KW  -  procedural knowledge
KW  -  modularity
KW  -  Piaget
KW  -  developmental psychology
KW  -  representational redescription
KW  -  semantic memory
KW  -  episodic memory
KW  -  chunks
KW  -  generativism
KW  -  thought
KW  -  implicit knowledge
KW  -  explicit knowledge
KW  -  encephalization
KW  -  lateralization
KW  -  serial motor control
KW  -  softer operations
KW  -  harder operations
KW  -  emancipation
KW  -  symmetry
KW  -  cerebral hemespheres
KW  -  neocortex
ER  -

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