Interactivist Summer Institute

July 22 - 26, 2003

Copenhagen

Themes

Mark H. Bickhard

The interactivist model opens up multiple kinds of architectural principles and dynamic processes as being relevant to cognition. Themes are a crucial example. Themes are functional relationships among dynamic processes that specify aspects or properties of interactions and representations, rather than actions or subactions, or representations or subrepresentations, per se. Themes are essential to modeling higher cognition, and yet can be found in the architectural and dynamic principles of cockroaches. As usual, there is no natural place for themes in standard models.