Cognition, Emotion and Other Inescapable Dimensions of Human Experience

Abstract

There is an Aristotelic tradition in cognitive psychology, information design and artificial intelligence, to understand human information processing as a mechanism, that is, as a complicated system, ultimately explainable on the basis of the understanding of every one of its multiple components and their interactions. Instead of looking at human information processing as a complicated system, I propose to look at it as a complex system, distinguishing for this paper the complicated from the complex; the first being composed by a high number of discrete parts with many interconnections — as in a computer circuit — the second being an integrated system where everything affects everything — as in the relation between two people. Since I have chosen as my theme the contextualization of cognition with other human factors, I will be dealing with the complex and I will therefore not attempt to enumerate parts and connections. I will instead concentrate on certain insights about field interactions that I hope will reposition our understanding of mental processes, moving it from an analysis of logical steps to the exploration of the influence that contexts have on human cognitive performance.