Over the summer, I submitted a reworked version of my PACT conference paper to a fairly well-respected journal in the fields of philosophy, phenomenology, and cognitive science. When I received the paper’s rejection letter, I wasn’t too surprised, nor was I too discouraged by the news. I knew going into the submission process that the journal has a pretty high rejection rate, and that it’s a bit above my current pay grade as graduate student. Still, I found the comments that I received from both reviewers to be quite helpful and generous, and I’ll be working on updating the paper in the coming months to take advantage of that helpful feedback. Right now my attention is focused on preparing for an upcoming comprehensive exam on the work of Pierre Hadot, and it’ll be some time before I can return to this paper and its future iterations. So, for now, I’m sharing the paper below, and I’m uploading a pdf here. Continue reading
Cognitive science
Andy Clark on Perceiving as Predicting
Andy Clark’s work in the philosophy of mind has long had a strong influence on my thinking. I’ll have a bit to say about how his extended mind thesis figures into philosophical practice in my upcoming talk for the Media Ecology Assocation, but in this post I want to explore his work on predictive processing and perception, as he’s converging on similar conclusions to my own about the nature of perception, understanding, imagination, and action—namely, that they all arrive together in the co-construction of experience.
His tools and models for making this claim are different from my own, and so what most interests me in this context is how his (more advanced) resources—including a computational theory of the brain, coupled with extended and embodied notions of cognition, hierarchical predictive processing models, and Bayesian accounts of inference—match up with what I’ll shorthand as the transcendental–phenomenological resources of philosophy that I’ve been using in my recent posts. Clark is not strictly speaking a cognitive scientist, but he’s definitely closer to the “neuro” in “neurophenomenology” than I am. What’s at stake for me here is the following question, How accurate and useful are these transcendental–phenomenological resources in the face of cognitive science?
Spaces of Freedom
It’s been just over a year since I posted anything new here, but that’s not for lack of study or engagement on my part. Work—both intellectual and vocational—continues apace. Readers may be interested to know that I’ve started pursuit of a PhD here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Below I’m sharing a short description of my plans for the dissertation. Things may change a bit here and there as I complete various sections of the dissertation, but I expect to follow pretty closely the below summary. I’m not sure what will become of Knowledge Ecology at this point. I may start afresh with a new blog. I may continue blogging here. I might abandon the Internet all together. Who knows.
The thing about blogging—both positive and negative—is that it puts on offer a continuous stream of output, an ongoing account of one’s thinking and development. This has the double effect of providing greater context for one’s writing but also makes it difficult, at least psychologically for me, to separate oneself from earlier work in the way that writing books or articles naturally provides. The Internet tends toward a pathological amount of continuity and interconnectivity that I think many of us writing in this medium would be wise to rail against. In any case, enjoy the PhD ruminations.
Blind Brain Theory and Enactivism: In Dialogue With R. Scott Bakker
[Image: Hannah Imlach]
Last week I posted a short essay on the question of meaning, style, and aesthetics in the ecological theories of Alva Noë and Jacob von Uexküll. The post resulted in a long and in-depth discussion with science fiction novelist and central architect of the Blind Brain Theory (BBT) of cognition, R. Scott Bakker. Our conversation waded through multiple topics including phenomenology, the limits of transcendental arguments, enactivism, eliminativism, meaning, aesthetics, pluralism, intentionality, first-person experience, and more. So impressed was I with Bakker’s adept ability to wade through the issues — across disciplines, perspectives, and controversies — despite my protests that I felt it worth excerpting our dialogue as a record of the exchange and as a resource for others interested in these debates. Whatever your views on the philosophy of mind, Bakker’s unique position is one you should familiarize yourself with — if only, like me, so that you can find better ways to dispute its unsettling consequences. To provide a little context to the dialogue I am re-stating my central claim and concluding paragraph from the earlier post: Continue reading
Knowledge Ecology 