Centro de Filosofia das Ciências

According to Enactivism, cognition should be understood as an organism's interaction with its environment. Radical Enactivism adds that basic minds do not entertain representations and hence that cognition should not be cashed out in representational terms. Some claim, getting rid of representations amounts to a  revolutionary alternative to standard ways of thinking about cognition. To emphasize the impact, proponents claim that this 'radicalization' may be applied to all enactivist friendly views, including predictive processing. In this paper, we will show that this is not the case. After introducing the problem (section 1), we will argue (section 2) that radicalizing predictive processing does not add value to this view. After this (section 3), we will analyze whether or not radical Enactivism can count as a revolution within cognitive science and conclude that it cannot. Finally, in section 4 we will claim that cognitive science is better off when embracing heterogeneity.

We invite chapter contributions for the volume " The Mind-Technology Problem – Investigating Minds, Selves and 21st Century Artifacts " forthcoming in the book series Studies in Brain and Mind (Springer). This book explores the relation between philosophy of mind and emerging technologies. Technologies that only recently seemed to be science fiction are becoming part of everyday life. Our life is increasingly saturated with 'smart' artifacts. The ubiquitous and mobile Internet amounts to a radically new epistemic and cognitive environment which we already inhabit. This smart environment is saturated with artificial intelligence systems that not only guide us to information on the Internet, but are transforming the way we inhabit the non-virtual realm: the home, the urban environment and beyond. In the process, these technologies may be viewed as a form of rapidly evolving cognitive enhancement (Schneider, 2016, Heersmink, 2015). They may also be radically changing the human cognitive profile (Schneider and Mandik, 2016, Clowes, 2015; Clark, 2007) including the possibility of mind uploading (Corabi and Schneider, 2012). Some see these trends as deeply worrying, undermining a raft of our cognitive and social capacities (Carr, 2010; Turkle, 2011). Others see the relationship as a more of a continuum with the long history of artifactually led, cognitive evolution of human beings (Malafouris, 2013; Clark, 2003).

(Please see the full CFP attached)

We especially encourage researchers who are women and/or from underrepresented minorities or social classes to submit.

Please send your contributions to hipolito.ines@gmail.com.

Deadline: 31st of January, 2018

In recent years we have seen the rise of a new framework within the study of the mind, namely Predictive Processing (PP). This framework essentially holds that the brain is a prediction machine constantly postulating perceptual models which are tested against incoming (sensory) information. At the same time, the notion of the minimal or core self has become very influential as a way of explaining, or explaining away, pre-reflective self-awareness. The four most widely discussed alternatives for thinking through the metaphysical implications the pre-reflective sense of self are the standard phenomenological view, the substance view, the no-self view and by now the relational view.
In this paper, it is our objective to rethink the notion of the sense of self in the context of PP. Now, PP is often held to be a unifying framework that offers a new integrated account of perception, cognition, imagination, and indeed the pre-reflective sense of self. We will show, however, that PP has been taken to endorse rather too many different metaphysical accounts of self: that is, views about how we should regard the ultimate nature of self. What we need to do, if possible, is to use PP to constrain the theories on offer. Here we focus upon two central constraints that we think PP implies. These are, the mutability constraint and the multi-layereredness constraint. We argue that self-views laid out in terms of the PP framework are usually – to some degree – located within the four standard metaphysical accounts of self. However, we think that realist versions of self-accounts seem to have more trouble in respecting the PP constraints or requirements. The reason, or so we believe, is PP’s mutability constraint. This does not have to be the case and we, therefore, propose an alternative realist view – namely the pre-reflective situational self view – which is more adequate to fit the PP framework.