Juan Diego Bogotá

ABSTRACT. The early moderns surely didn’t defend an embodied, extended, embedded, or enacted conception of the mind, but we aim to show that this perspective can make sense of some of their practices; in particular, the epistemology of early modern experimentation. Focusing on Newton’s early optical work, we argue that the epistemic warrant he claims for his experimental results turns crucially on how the experimenter is situated towards gaining particular kinds of maker’s knowledge. Our account provides one answer to a long-standing puzzle regarding Newton’s method: his appeal to ‘compelled assent’ as an epistemic standard. We thus provide both a novel interpretation of Newton’s epistemology and a proof of concept towards applying tools from contemporary philosophy of mind to the history of science.

Just accepted:

Situated Cognition in Early Modern Experimentation: The Case of Compelled Assent
– Kirsten Walsh, Adrian Currie & Tom Roberts

Abstract in alt text or read the full paper here:

#philsci #philsky #hps

Can the predictive mind represent time? A critical evaluation of predictive processing attempts to address husserlian time-consciousness - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences Predictive processing is an increasingly popular explanatory framework developed within cognitive neuroscience. It conceives of the brain as a prediction machine that tries to minimise prediction erro...

In case anybody is curious... link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I just got an email notifying me that a paper I published 2 years ago has finally been published in an actual issue of Phenomenology of the Cognitive Sciences. So now, a paper I wrote years ago and was "Bogotá (2023)" is now technically my latest publication. I don't know how to feel about all this

Sad that I missed the labubu on Marx's grave in my attempt to keep away from social media for some time!

It was great to work on this project led by Lars Sandved-Smith, and alongside @hohwy.bsky.social, @jdkiverstein.bsky.social, and @antoinelutz.bsky.social.

The idea is to aim at a disciplined circulation between first and third-person perspectives, using the formalism of deep parametric active inference and the dual information geometry of Bayesian mechanics as a generative passage.

More specifically, we aim to provide a principled methodology for the scientific study of consciousness that, following phenomenological philosophy, focuses not on the contents of experience (i.e., what is experienced) but on its structures (i.e., how it is experienced).

I'm back from the dead to announce a paper that was published a couple of days ago and that I worked on. We're all very proud of this one. We elaborate on Varela’s neurophenomenology, proposing Bayesian mechanics as a generative passage between phenomenology and neurobiology.

Out now! Mind as Metaphor (OUP, 2023) t.co/eBlYtDd5lY

Hi. DM me the details. 650 words sounds short for an article, so I’m a bit confused.

I love you Britain, but after having a proper taste of Finnish trains over the last four months I don’t think I want to travel in one of your trains ever again.

El listado está lejos de ser completo. Por favor hagan sugerencias para completarlo. No se sientan incómodos al sugerir su propio nombre, y disculpas de antemano por la omisión. Gracias!

go.bsky.app/4XmN14ihttps...

Spanglish es my language del thought.

Two reviews, one talk, one abstract, one revision, and my birthday on a single week. Never again.

What makes it a bit funnier is that my PhD thesis was also titled 'Life and Mind'. But in my defense, that wasn't the title I wanted. For bureaucratic reasons, I had to submit a 'preliminary title' in a rush for the university to contact potential examiners, and then they didn't let me change it :(

I find it hilarious that Springer allowed two books in the same series to have essentially the same title.

(PDF) Where There Is Life There Is Mind… And Free Energy Minimisation? PDF | This chapter explores the possibility of integrating the enactive and the Free Energy Principle’s (FEP) approaches to life and mind. Both... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on Re...

Here is an open-access, pre-print version of the paper: www.researchgate.net/publication/...
But if anybody wants the pdf of the published version, reach out to me and I'll send it over.

There is also a nice discussion about why I think that sense-making does not fall into the 'hard problem of content' that radical enactivists talk about. Cognition requires a non-representational form of content, and sense-making is just that.

Drawing from the latest literature, I show that even if the FEP by itself doesn't say much about life or mind specifically, it can be used to model the sense-making dynamics of organisms as described by the enactivists. The point is not to conflate operational, cognitive, and statistical boundaries.

Where There Is Life There Is Mind… And Free Energy Minimisation? This chapter explores the possibility of integrating the enactive and the Free Energy Principle’s (FEP) approaches to life and mind. Both frameworks have been linked to the life-mind continuity ...

New paper: I explore the possibility of integrating enactivism and the Free Energy Principle to address life and mind. I examine some of the arguments in favour and against their integration, and claim that something close to it is possible.
link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...
#philosophy #philsky

It’s so heartbreaking when you’re reading a manuscript you are reviewing that at first shows a lot of promise, but then starts falling apart when the authors are developing their own proposal

📣Calling all enactivists and critics!

Russell Meyer, Marilyn Stendera and myself are guest editing a special issue for Adaptive Behaviour called "Prospects for the science of Enaction" and are looking for contributions!

You can read more about our call here: listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa?A...

Oh yes. I just noticed that. I have no idea how or why that happened. Anyhow, thanks! :)

Nope, I’m not . What makes you think so?

I tend to tell myself that I am first and foremost a phenomenologist and that is all I want to write about, but then I go on to write 3000 words about the distinction between causal and constitutive scientific explanations. Oh well

In a nutshell, phenomenologically, organisms are disclosed as such from the empathic perspective of the biologist. Phenomenology can analyse this empathic constitution providing an explanatory basis for a non-objectivist biology and for a phenomenological conception of cognition

Understanding living systems as sense-making agents (in a phenomenological sense) requires rethinking biology as a non-objectivist science. That project can be grounded on the explanatory potential of phenomenology, and Husserl's views on transcendental phenomenology and biology.

I argue that, while the two characterisations must be seen as two complementary perspectives on a single phenomenon (i.e., cognition), it is the phenomenological characterisation the one that allows for sense-making to be understood as an intentional openness to the world.

In my paper, I distinguish two characterisations of sense-making (the enactive concept for cognition) that, thus far, haven't been disentangled in the enactive literature: an operational one (adaptive behaviour, agency) and a phenomenological one (subjective perspective).

More specifically, I believe that the charge of anthropomorphism within the enactive framework is the result of a lack of clarity concerning the role that phenomenology may play when discussing basic life and cognition.