A CREATIVE COGNITION 201Sometimes the diffi culty is expressed with some despair. In the April
2015 issue of the journal Tr e n d s i n C o g n i t i v e S c i e n c e s, Ralph Adolphs has
a paper titled “Th e Unsolved Prob lems of Neuroscience.” Some of these,
he suggests, are “Prob lems we may never solve.” Number 19 is: “How can
cognition be so fl exible and generative?” Th is is the fundamental ques-
tion put by William James in his Princi ples of Psy chol ogy in 1890: “Can
we state more distinctly still the manner in which the mental life seems
to intervene between impressions made from without upon the body, and
reactions of the body upon the outer world again?”^5 We still seem to be
struggling with it.
Prob ably one reason for such pessimism is that investigators are still
not clear about why and how cognitive systems have evolved and be-
come vastly more complex, from invertebrates though mammals and
apes to humans. Th is might also explain why cognitive psychologists
have turned to raking over the brain (and genes) for clues about “what
it really is.”
One major diffi culty, of course, is that cognitive functions seem to ex-
ist somehow separate from, or “above,” the web of neurons and synapses
in brains and the information they pro cess. What is needed is a model
that can describe the necessary powers of abstraction, yet remain fi rmly
grounded in the structure of experience and consistent with the nature
of brain functions. Th at model should provide some clarity both about
how cognition works and how it varies.
Th e purpose of this chapter, then, is to show what cognition really is and
how it forms and varies as an intelligent system. I confi ne the account in
this chapter to a very basic system in a generalized living thing. I fi rst
describe how the most basic cognitive pro cesses of recognition and clas-
sifi cation emerge from neural interactions. I then turn to what are usu-
ally considered to be the “higher” cognitive pro cesses of learning, think-
ing, decision making, motor action, and so on. Fi nally, I discuss the
origins of individual diff erences in cognitive systems, generally. Chap-
ters 8 and 9 expand on the further evolution of such an idealized system
into the spectacular forms we fi nd in humans today.
As with all of science, however, models and theories are based on pre-
suppositions about the entity in question, and much of scientifi c pro gress
depends on identifying and criticizing them.
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