A Theory of Immediate Awareness: Self-Organization and Adaptation in Natural Intelligence

This book presents a realist, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary theory of immediate awareness showing it is the most primitive cognitive network underlying all our natural intelligence. Including preattentive and attention processes, as well as primitive relations of the senses, imagination and memory, immediate awareness is a kind of knowing deeply embedded and interwoven throughout our multiple kinds of natural intelligence. It permits as well as drives our knowing how, our bodily intelligence. Against the Cartesian mind-body split found in earlier and current theories, the author shows how immediate awareness permits emergent properties of mind in multilayered primitive relations of touching and moving in bodily kinesthetic intelligence. Contrary to existing theories, she argues that sensation is not cognitively "neutral", nor does it require a "representation" in order to be accessible to cognitive processes.