Tom Froese

I’ve been invited to give a talk for a seminar series at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL). The talk is scheduled to happen on the 19th of March at 14:00. Title and abstract below:

The role of engineering in recent cognitive science

For most of the history of cognitive science the practices of hardware engineering and scientific inquiry have been closely intertwined: designing and building robots was a central part of the field’s scientific process. By building robots according to how the mind (supposedly) works, engineering provided cognitive science with the opportunity to validate its hypotheses empirically, and to adjust its theories if substantial practical difficulties arose (e.g. the shift from symbolic A.I. to situated robotics). In this manner the engineered product was not only a tool for – but also itself a target of – scientific research.

Nevertheless, nowadays there is a larger split between these two practices. Robotics is mainly focused on practical applications, while its original scientific role has largely been replaced by software simulations. For if it is easier and cheaper to simulate the system than to construct it physically, and if this lack of physicality does not negatively impact on the scientific questions which need to be answered, then why not use a simulation model? Nevertheless, in one growing area of cognitive science, namely sensory augmentation research, the role of hardware engineering is indispensable. Here the design of appropriate physical interfaces and devices can help cognitive scientists to probe the underlying mechanisms of the human mind in ways that would otherwise be inaccessible.

We present recent work in this area based on the Enactive Torch, a collaborative project between the CCNR and Adam Spiers of BRL.

This will be a joint seminar between the E-Intentionality seminar series and the Life and Mind seminar series.

Life and Mind ‘As-It-Could-Be’: Technological Methodologies for a Science of Subjectivity

Tom Froese

4:30 p.m. Thursday, 22 January – Pevensey I 1A1

In this seminar I want to reflect on the role of recent technological developments, in particular the creation of artificial intelligence and sensory augmentation interfaces, in relation to the goal of gaining a better understanding of life and mind. I will argue that both forms of technology are indispensable if we want to obtain insights into the essential aspects of the phenomenon of subjectivity in terms of both its living (third-person) and lived (first-person) features.

Generally speaking, in order to determine the essential aspects of a particular phenomenon it is necessary to know its ranges of variability and conditions of break-down, namely those situations when it ceases to be the type of phenomenon it originally was and becomes something else. However, since the appropriate kind of variation is often hard to find in terms of factual cases, technology might be of help here. It has already been recognized, for example, that the field of artificial life can make a substantial contribution by mapping out the domain of life as-it-could-be (Langton).

But what about the first-person aspects of subjectivity? Here I will try to show that there are some essential similarities between the methods of artificial modelling and those that have been developed by the phenomenological tradition of first-person study. Moreover, I will argue that a similar technological supplementation of this first-person research might be possible, for example through the use of sensory augmentation interfaces. The starting point for this endeavour thus could be a systematic investigation of perception as-it-could-be.

All welcome!

Ron Chrisley and I are co-organizing the “WG1: Fundamentals” work group symposium at this year’s COST conference: Consciousness: A Transdisciplinary, Integrated Approach (COST Action BM0605), to be held on the 20th Nov. 2008 in Gent, Belgium.

I will also give a short presentation during this symposium. Title and abstract are below:

The Enactive Torch: A technological bridge between eidetic and empirical psychology

T. Froese

The method of eidetic intuition (Wesenschau) was an important aspect of the early phenomenology of Husserl. However, the essences which are intuited in this manner, namely by a kind of imaginative ‘free variation’, are not only difficult to obtain in practice, but also necessarily limited by our imagination in principle. Moreover, such ideal essences have little implication for developing our understanding of the circumstances related to our factual existence in the world. Thus, as the phenomenological tradition developed further, especially in terms of recognizing the importance of embodiment and situatedness, it became crucial to develop a methodology that was more adequate to the concreteness of actual existence.

One popular approach, pioneered by Merleau-Ponty and continued by others today, is to turn to empirical psychology in order to analyze case studies of pathological conditions. These represent a kind of ‘factual variation’ of human existence which can help us to determine essential aspects of consciousness that would be difficult (if not impossible) to simply intuit imaginatively. However, this methodology also poses significant difficulties to the phenomenological tradition, especially in terms of its inherent lack of researchers’ first-person access to the phenomena in question, and thus the impossibility of proper intersubjective verification.

Here we propose that certain technological interfaces, such as the Enactive Torch (Froese & Spiers 2007), can provide a way forward by enabling a systematic variation of (perceptual) lived experience that can potentially be available on a first-person basis for all interested researchers. Moreover, it points to a way of capturing experience by means of a practice based in sharing technology rather than linguistic specification.

References:

Froese, T. & Spiers, A. (2007), “Toward a Phenomenological Pragmatics of Enactive Perception”, in: Proc. of the 4th Int. Conf. on Enactive Interfaces, Grenoble, France: Association ACROE, pp. 105-108

An extended abstract on some philosophical aspects of using the Enactive Torch has been accepted as a talk for this year’s Workshop on Engineering and Philosophy. The title of the talk will be:

Engineering Conceptual Change: The Enactive Torch

R. Chrisley, T. Froese & A. Spiers

For more information and to download the extended abstract please click here.