I’m writing this from Zürich airport, on my way back to England after an excellent sojourn at the Dharma Sangha Zen Centre (www.dharma-sangha.de) on the German/Swiss frontier. I was there for a cosy meeting of the Society for Mind-Matter Research (www.mindmatter.de) on the topic of embodiment. My talk gave a brief overviews of six ways in which my research has investigated the role of embodiment in mind and computation. You can view my slides here: prezi.com/view/TLzIVu5YT
The CogPhi reading group resumes next week. CogPhi offers the chance to read through and discuss recent literature in the Philosophy of Artifical Intelligence and Cognitive
Science. Each week a different member of the group leads the others through the chosen reading for that week. This term we’ll be working through Andy Clark’s new book on predictive processing, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action and the Embodied Mind.
CogPhi meets fortnightly, sharing the same time slot and room as E-Intentionality, which meets fortnightly in the alternate weeks. Although CogPhi announcements will be made on the E-Int mailing list, attendance at one seminar series is not required for attendance at the other. CogPhi announcements will also be made here.
Next week, October 20th, from 13:00-13:50 in Freeman G31, Jonny Lee will lead the discussion of the Introduction (“Guessing Games”) and Chapter 1 (“Prediction Machines”). Have your comments and questions ready beforehand. In fact, feel free to post them in advance, here, as comments on this post.
EDIT: Jonny sent out the following message yesterday, the 19th:
It’s been brought to my attention that covering both the introduction and chapter 1 might be too much material for one meeting. As such, let’s say we’ll just stick to the introduction. If you’ve already read chapter 1, apologies, but you’ll be ahead of the game. On the other hand, if the amount of reading was putting you off, you’ve now only got 10 pages to get through!
The next E-Intentionality seminar will be held Wednesday, June 8th from 13:00 to 14:50 in Pevensey 1 1A3. Ron Chrisley will speak on “The Embodied Nature of Computation” as a dry run of his talk at a symposium (“Embodied Cognition: Constructivist and Computationalist Perspectives”) at IACAP 2016 next week:
Although embodiment-based critiques of computation’s role in explaining mind have at times been overstated, there are important lessons from embodiment which computationalists would do well to learn. For example, orthodox schemes for individuating computations are individualist, atemporal, and anti-semantical (formal), but considering the role of the body in cognition suggests by analogy that — even to explain extant information processing systems unrelated to cognitive science and artificial intelligence contexts — computations should instead be characterised in terms that are world-involving, dynamical and intentional/meaningful. Further, the counterfactual-involving nature of computational state individuation implies that sameness of computation is not in general preserved when one substitutes a non-living computational component with a living, autonomous, free organism that merely intends to realise the same functional profile as component being replaced. Thus, contra computational orthodoxy, there is no sharp divide between the computational facts and what is usually thought of as the implementational facts, even for unambiguously computational systems. The implications of this point for some famous disputes concerning group minds, and strong AI, will be identified.
PAICS 