名古屋で開催された第24回「注意と認知」研究会（2026年3月8日〜10日）で、「認知過程における情報の分散と統合の反復モデル」と題して、発表を行いました。発表予稿は下のURLからアクセスできます。
この発表では、当日プリントしたハンドアウトを配布しました。そのハンドアウトを以下に公開します。
本ハンドアウトは暫定的なものです。
English Summary
This handout was prepared for a presentation at the workshop on Attention and Cognition (Nagoya, March 9, 2026).
It is provisional and reflects my current line of thought.
The presentation addresses the problem of how a unified “subject” (first-person perspective) emerges from distributed information processing in the brain, a question that remains unresolved within standard parallel distributed processing (PDP) models.
I propose to reinterpret cognitive processes as a dynamic repetition of dispersion and integration of information, and to formalize this process using the concept of a meta-attractor. While conventional attractors account for convergence toward specific representations (e.g., recognizing an object), they cannot explain the persistent form of “being experienced by me.”
The meta-attractor is not a convergence point toward a particular content, but a higher-order dynamical stability that sustains the iterative process itself. It provides a global structure within which dispersion and integration can continue without collapsing into chaos, thereby generating a stable first-person structure.
Within this framework, distributed processing corresponds to a predicative (second-person-like) phase of receptivity, while integration corresponds to the emergence of subjectivity. The subject is not presupposed but arises retrospectively as a structural center of this dynamic process.
This model also suggests a new dynamical perspective on psychopathology, where disturbances of selfhood may be understood as instabilities in the formation or maintenance of the meta-attractor.
Philosophically, the model resonates with Quine’s holism and offers a naturalized account of transcendental subjectivity, describing the “conditions of possibility” of experience in dynamical and cognitive-scientific terms.
(This handout is provisional and is shared here for further development and discussion.)