From martyna.meyer at univie.ac.at Wed Oct 11 15:37:22 2023 From: martyna.meyer at univie.ac.at (Martyna Meyer) Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2023 15:37:22 +0200 Subject: [Philosophy of Social Cognition] Talk: Zuzanna Rucinska on Enactive Imagination and Virtual Affordances Message-ID: <260101d9fc48$10888e90$3199abb0$@univie.ac.at> Dear all, I hope you're all doing well! I'm writing to you because, with the support of the Forum (the Vienna Forum for Analytic Philosophy) and the Cognitive Science Hub, we were able to organize a talk of dr. Zuzanna Rucinska on Enactive Imagination and Perception of Virtual Game Affordances. The lecture will take place in the seminar room 16 at Kolingasse 14-16, 1090 Wien on Monday, October 23, at 4pm. ----- ----- ----- Abstract: What is the role of imagination in our engagement with games, including virtual reality (VR) games? There are, to date, two mainstream answers in the literature to this question: the answer of fictionalists, which is that imagination allows us to bring to mind fictional entities, and the answer of realists, which is that we directly perceive the digital reality at hand. In this article, I put another option on the table, and argue that following a particular enactive account perception and imagination, imagination can play a distinct role in our engagement with virtual games outside of representing fictional entities, which is to anticipate virtual actions and perceive virtual game affordances. ----- ----- ----- The talk is based on Zuzanna's new paper which is currently under review. Since it might be of interest to some of you, she allowed me to share it with the group (nonetheless, it's important you don't distribute it any further). You can find the paper in the attachment. Naturally, it's great to read it before the lecture :) I'm really excited to have Zuzanna give us a talk (you can take a look at the papers she has published in the last years ). If you're curious about the topics of affordances, virtual reality, direct perception, or imagination, please consider stopping by. I warmly encourage you all to attend & I'm looking forward to seeing you there. :) All the best, Martyna PS: Some of us will go directly from Zuzanna's lecture to Simon Penny's Talk on Skill: Know-how, Artisanal Practices and 'Higher' Cognition at OFAI. Details here and below. We scheduled it so that there will be a short meal/coffee break between the talks. Join us! :) ----- ----- ----- Simon Penny (University of California Irvine and Nottingham Trent University) 23 OCTOBER 2023 AT 18:30 CEST (UTC+2), OFAI - Freyung 6/6/7, 1010 Vienna Skill: Know-how, Artisanal Practices and 'Higher' Cognition Skilled practitioners attest that in their experience of skilled practice, intelligence feels like it is happening in peripersonal space, at the fingertips, on the workbench. This paper begins from the premise that skilled embodied practices are intelligence - as much improvisation as hylomorphism (Ingold) - enacted amongst tools, materials and cognitive ecologies. As a lifelong practitioner, I seek to remain grounded in practice, while pursuing an interdisciplinary inquiry into the concept of skill, engaging philosophy, psychology, anthropology, cognitive science and neuroscience. The experience of skilled practices destabilises the (received) skill-intelligence binary, which is seen as a corollary of the mind-body binary. A dualist framework that distinguishes 'higher' and 'lower' cognition and valorises abstraction, is not conducive to optimal discussion of skill. I will discuss the historical construction of this privileging of abstraction in philosophy and theorisation of cognition. A different framework will be suggested, drawing upon concepts of know-how (Ryle), the 'performative idiom' (Pickering), enactivism (Varela, Thompson, DiPaolo), pre-reflective awareness (Legrand), epistemic action (Kirsh), cognitive ecologies (Hutchins, Sutton). Arguments from neuroscience are then marshalled, focusing on phylogenetics and on proprioception, in order to build a non-dualist approach to neurophysiology, that provides a more balanced theoretical framework within which to discuss skill and/as cognition. If embodied practices are taken to constitute intelligence, this has ramifications for general conceptualisations of intelligence, and in turn, for rhetorics validating artificial intelligence, and claims made for interactive screen-based pedagogies. ----- ----- -----