[Philosophy of Social Cognition] Talk: Zuzanna Rucinska on Enactive Imagination and Virtual Affordances

[Martyna Meyer]

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
<https://philpeople.org/profiles/zuzanna-rucinska-1> ). 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 <https://www.ofai.at/events/lectures2023fall>  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.

----- ----- -----