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We experience the world as a coherent, complete and seamless whole, despite the impoverished character of our representations of the world. Vision scientists study our perception of a stable three-dimensional world in the presence of fleeting two-dimensional stimuli; I believe that the problem of coherence and stability extends far beyond the domain of vision to the study of the mind as a whole. This chapter is an exploration of the "whole world" experience through the lens of cognitive science; I claim that neither traditional computational approaches nor the more recent embodied approaches to the mind account for the wholeness of the world. Instead, I argue that the whole world experience points to the existence of the self as an organizer that structures experience and makes it whole. If so, the self has a much larger role to play in the mind sciences than is currently acknowledged, and the study of the self is a bridge between traditional concerns of metaphysics and the modern cognitive sciences.

DOI: 10.1007/978-81-322-1587-5_5

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