[SydPhil] Andy Clark talks at Macquarie December 4th and 5th

[Richard Menary]

Dear All,

Andy Clark will give two talks on the 4th and 5th of December. Both talks will be held on the Wallumattagal Campus, Macquarie Park.

The first is the final talk of the Evolving Individuality workshop on the 4th, details and registration can be found here: https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/ykf1Ck81N9tqA1yY6F2f8HGIZnF?domain=pierrickbourrat.github.io

Cognitive Entanglement: Predictive Brains and the Intimacy of Mind and World

This talk is about our ongoing Synergy Grant project ‘Material Minds’. The project seeks to understand the many ways human minds become increasingly entangled with our human-built worlds. More specifically, my target in the talk is a ‘thesis of cognitive entanglement’ according to which the various complex worlds we build and live in fundamentally and non-trivially alter the shape of human thought and reason. Claims of this kind can be found in a wide variety of literatures including philosophy, cognitive science, and cognitive archaeology. But despite this, there is no widely accepted account or model of what cognitive entanglement might involve or exactly how (indeed, if) it could occur. In the talk, I explore the potential for work in predictive processing (active inference) to help plug that gap. Attention, I suggest, is one key resource whose continuous reciprocal interactions with materiality result in cognitive entanglements at multiple scales of space and time.

The second is a Macquarie Minds and Intelligences Initiative public lecture. This will be held on Thursday 5th December from 11am to 12pm in the Hearing Hub Lecture Theatre, Level 1, Hearing Hub. There is no need to register for this talk.

Prediction-Action-Value Machines
In this talk I first Sample the Predictive Processing/Active Inference (AIF) picture of minds as pro-active prediction machines. I then dig a little deeper by asking what’s special about that picture?  How does it differ from nearby views that likewise treat perception (and sometimes action too) as involving a process of (mostly) unconscious inference? The difference, I argue, lies in the way value permeates the kind of generative models assumed by AIF. This makes it intelligible that human perception does not simply reveal a structured world. It reveals a meaningful world - a world biased by organismic needs, individual goals, and our changing abilities for action.



Best,

Richard

Richard Menary FAHA

Professor of Philosophy
Macquarie University

Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics<https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/cH5-Clx1NjizmpwO5H9hNHzKMtz?domain=cave.mq.edu.au>
academia.edu site<https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/-dVSCmO5gluR8Do1KSBiRHR67gX?domain=mq.academia.edu>
Phil Papers Profile<https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/v0pcCnx1jni6gjZlqSZsWHJO3yo?domain=philpapers.org>
Zoom: https://url.au.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/WSznCoV1kpfK5ZVlLFOtOHp9NjZ?domain=macquarie.zoom.us

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