Experience and the mind in general, so I will claim, is temporally extended, and massively so. Moreover, for many mental phenomena, this temporal extension is stronger than “merely causal”. What is experienced now, for example, is what it is because of its past and future. Without its very specific history, this experience could not occur. Massive experiential bloat runs counter to established intuitions about causality and explanation. But causality and explanation require historical bloat themselves, or so I will argue. I’ll show how bloat is present by highlighting the role of anticipation in memory. What we remember often depends on our habits and acts of anticipation, and such spread in time, taking memory with them in an extensive temporal flow. Bloat has practical consequences, when we want to intervene on experiences. Bloat also has consequences for how to think philosophically about minds—it introduces a factor of perennial indeterminacy.
09:20 AM to 10:05 AM (Montreal, Canada)
+ 20 minutes questions
Enactive, embodied approaches to cognition come in conservative and more radical varieties. Those on the radical end of the spectrum assume that minds are constituted by intelligent activity as opposed to standing apart from it and directing it. As such, radical of E-cognition directly challenge traditional representational-computational theories of mind and cognition. As they have gained traction over the years they have been heralded as a new paradigm for the sciences of the mind. This presentation: explains why some radical E-approaches qualify as truly revolutionary; motivates 'going radical' over ‘remaining conservative’; and examines the practical implications 'going radical' has in the domains of education and training.
10:30 AM to 11:15 AM (Montreal, Canada)
+ 20 minutes questions
10:30 AM to 11:15 AM (Chile)
10:30 AM to 12:15 PM (Brazil)
02:30 PM to 04:15 PM (Portugal)
03:30 PM to 05:15 PM (Central Europe)
What Does it mean to be a Reflective Scientist? The Contours of Ouroboric Thought
The paper explores the trope of a “reflective scientist”. The trope seems to have played an important role in the foundational years of enactive approach, but has fallen by the wayside in the subsequent developments of the field. The main of the paper is to address the question as to what it means to reflexively apply the notion of enaction to the scientist him/herself: if cognition does not stand for representation of the objective world (self-subsistent reality) but for bringing forth (en-acting) of a milieu (organism-related domain of meaning), what does this mean for the nature of scientific cognition and science in general? By drawing on the insights from the life-science debates in the first half of the 20th century about the life-mind and organism-milieu relation, I will try to flesh out the notion of so-called “ouroboric thought”, a type of reflection which steers the middle path between disembodied intellection and lived sensation.
11:35 AM to 12:00 PM (Montreal, Canada)
11:35 AM to 12:00 PM (Chile)
12:35 PM to 01:00 PM (Brazil)
04:35 PM to 05:00 PM (Portugal)
05:35 PM to 06:00 PM (Central Europe)
Debate and closure
Break (1 hour)
01:00 PM to 01:10 PM (Montreal, Canada)
01:00 PM to 01:10 PM (Chile)
02:00 PM to 02:10 PM (Brazil)
06:00 PM to 06:10 PM (Portugal)
07:00 PM to 07:10 PM (Central Europe)
Welcome of participants and presentation of speakers
01:10 PM to 01:55 PM (Montreal, Canada)
+20 minutes of questions
01:10 PM to 01:55 PM (Chile)
02:10 PM to 02:55 PM (Brazil)
06:10 PM to 06:55 PM (Portugal)
07:10 PM to 07:55 PM (Central Europe)
A View of the Future for BMI Basic Research and Clinical Applications
In this talk I will initially discuss how BMI experiments will continue to play a major role in basic research by showing how they have already allowed us to demonstrate the existence of a variety of neurophysiological functions, such as space coding and social interaction mapping, not commonly associated with the motor cortex of non-human primates. I will also describe a combination of approaches that will allow BMI to fulfill its long-anticipated mission of providing new therapies for patients suffering from severe spinal cord injuries. In this context, I will describe the clinical advantages of a protocol that combines multiple non-invasive techniques into a single neurorehabilitation approach for such patients.
02:20 PM to 03:05 PM (Montreal, Canada)
+20 minutes of questions
Enactive thinking is known for being an "embodied" approach to understanding mental phenomena. The body is sometimes described as the origin of basic values, which become the driving force for self-organising complex adaptive systems of body-environment interaction. A strong focus on the body plays both a theoretical role - offering ways to naturalise value and meaning - and a rhetorical one - providing an anchor for a new mode of thinking for those unhitching themselves from neuro-centric and abstract computational approaches. But how we think about the enacted body matters a great deal. Enactive thinking has converged with the themes of a number of longer-standing feminist perspectives about the complex, dynamic aspects of embodiment, which entangle physical, biological, social, cultural, and other flows of activity. These flows which gives rise to the kinds of animating dynamics that enactivists have drawn upon in their naturalised notions of value and meaning. In this talk I want to explore some of the ways in which the enacted body arises, and how understanding as a dynamic entanglement of values leads to particular ways of thinking about experience and action.
