The talk is based on a paper that offers a new reading of Sellars’ naturalist philosophy of mind, but in my talk I will focus on the systematic ideas rather than the exegetical points, using Sellars’ philosophy as a foil to explore basic ideas for a process-based philosophy of mind.  Sellars’ core insight was that an item's content (i.e., normative conceptual and linguistic content) can be equated with the function of that item.  I read this thesis as follows: the content of an item is its functioning, i.e., a specificmode of occurrence.   Other such modes of occurrence are, for example, causal information in mechanisms and sensory information. I sketch the outline of a process monism where such modes of occurrence can be identified and distinguished as different forms of dynamic architecture.  Different dynamicarchitectures create different degrees and types of internal dependencies (regulatory feedback, complexity phenomena)  which belong to a scale of 'configuring-constrainings'; normativity is on the ‘high’ end of that scale and mechanistic causation on the ‘low’end.  Aligned with dynamic architectures along this scale are our familiar (and ever more complex) forms of mental processing:sensing, map-making, navigating, being aware of, being aware of as, imaging, thinking, and languaging.

Organized by the Research Unit for analytical epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of cognition