Rob's longest running research interest is in naturalistic theories of mental content. He has a related interest in the connection between theories of mental content and the proper nonsemantic characterization of mental representations. In recent years, he has been writing about extended cognition and the extended mind, about mental causation, and about various metaphysical issues related to the special sciences.
Abstract:
In this paper, I first describe the embodied perspective on cognition. I then argue that research on embodiment has produced a wealth of data that, along with a variety of other results, support a massively representational view of the mind. According to this view, the brain is rife with representations that possess overlapping and redundant content, and many of these represent other mental representations or derive their content from them. Moreover, many behavioral phenomena associated with attention and consciousness are best explained by the coordinated activity of units with redundant content. I finish by arguing that this massively representational picture challenges the reliability of a priori theorizing about consciousness.