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1294A Multi-scale View of the Emergent Complexity of Life: A Free-energy ProposalIn Michael Price & John Campbell (eds.), Evolution, Development, and Complexity: Multiscale Models in Complex Adaptive Systems, . forthcoming.We review some of the main implications of the free-energy principle (FEP) for the study of the self-organization of living systems – and how the FEP can help us to understand (and model) biotic self-organization across the many temporal and spatial scales over which life exists. In order to maintain its integrity as a bounded system, any biological system - from single cells to complex organisms and societies - has to limit the disorder or dispersion (i.e., the long-run entropy) of its constitu…Read more
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52Extended Consciousness and Predictive Processing: A Third Wave ViewRoutledge. 2019.This book is forthcoming in Routledge. Here is the barest sketch of our aims: We have two aims in this book. First, we aim to persuade you that conscious experience is sometimes realised by cycles of embodied and world-involving engagement. Second, we aim to persuade you that it is possible to develop and defend the thesis of extended consciousness through the increasingly powerful predictive processing theory developed in cognitive neuroscience.
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423Diachronic Metaphysical Building Relations: Towards the Metaphysics of Extended CognitionDissertation, Macquarie University. 2013.In the thesis I offer an analysis of the metaphysical underpinnings of the extended cognition thesis via an examination of standard views of metaphysical building (or, dependence) relations. In summary form, the extended cognition thesis is a view put forth in naturalistic philosophy of mind stating that the physical basis of cognitive processes and cognitive processing may, in the right circumstances, be distributed across neural, bodily, and environmental vehicles. As such, the extended cognit…Read more
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Review of Feeling Extended: Sociality as Extended Body-Becoming Mind (review)Journal of Consciousness Studies 21 (5-6): 228-235. 2014.
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40Material Agency: a Theoretical Framework for Ascribing Agency to Material CultureTechné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 13 (3): 206-220. 2009.This article attempts to articulate a theoretical framework, the target of which is to systematically unearth the conditions validating the ascription of agency to material culture. A wide range of studies, located within the interdisciplinary field known as material culture studies, testify to and aim at uniting the materials of material culture with the notion of agency. In this article the argument is advanced that material entities have agency only if two necessary conditions are met: an ont…Read more
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801Hierarchical Markov blankets and adaptive active inference (review)Physics of Life Reviews 24. 2018.
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23Extended cognition and fixed properties: steps to a third-wave version of extended cognitionPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 11 (2). 2012.This paper explores several paths a distinctive third wave of extended cognition might take. In so doing, I address a couple of shortcomings of first- and second-wave extended cognition associated with a tendency to conceive of the properties of internal and external processes as fixed and non-interchangeable. First, in the domain of cognitive transformation, I argue that a problematic tendency of the complementarity model is that it presupposes that socio-cultural resources augment but do not s…Read more
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116Distributed Cognitive Agency in Virtue EpistemologyPhilosophical Explorations 15 (2): 165-180. 2012.We examine some of the ramifications of extended cognition for virtue epistemology by exploring the idea within extended cognition that it is possible to decentralize cognitive agency such that cognitive agency includes socio-cultural practices. In doing so, we first explore the (seemingly unquestioned) assumption in both virtue epistemology and extended cognition that cognitive agency is an individualistic phenomenon. A distributed notion of cognitive agency alters the landscape of knowledge at…Read more
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93Cognitive assembly: towards a diachronic conception of compositionPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 14 (1). 2015.In this paper, I focus on a recent debate in extended cognition known as “cognitive assembly” and how cognitive assembly shares a certain kinship with the special composition question advanced in analytical metaphysics. Both the debate about cognitive assembly and the special composition question ask about the circumstances under which entities (broadly construed) compose or assemble another entity. The paper argues for two points. The first point is that insofar as the metaphysics of compositio…Read more
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26Looking beyond the brain: Social neuroscience meets narrative practiceCognitive Systems Research 35 5-17. 2015.Folk psychological practices are arguably the basis for our articulate ability to understand why people act as they do. This paper considers how social neuroscience could contribute to an explanation of the neural basis of folk psychology by understanding its relevant neural firing and wiring as a product of enculturation. Such a view is motivated by the hypothesis that folk psychological competence is established through engagement with narrative practices that form a familiar part of the human…Read more
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153Extended Cognition & the Causal‐Constitutive Fallacy: In Search for a Diachronic and Dynamical Conception of ConstitutionPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 90 (2): 320-360. 2013.Philosophical accounts of the constitution relation have been explicated in terms of synchronic relations between higher‐ and lower‐level entities. Such accounts, I argue, are temporally austere or impoverished, and are consequently unable to make sense of the diachronic and dynamic character of constitution in dynamical systems generally and dynamically extended cognitive processes in particular. In this paper, my target domain is extended cognition based on insights from nonlinear dynamics. Co…Read more
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19The enactive roots of STEM: Rethinking educational design in mathematicsEducational Psychology Review 27 (3). 2015.New and radically reformative thinking about the enactive and embodied basis of cognition holds out the promise of moving forward age-old debates about whether we learn and how we learn. The radical enactive, embodied view of cognition (REC) poses a direct, and unmitigated, challenge to the trademark assumptions of traditional cognitivist theories of mind—those that characterize cognition as always and everywhere grounded in the manipulation of contentful representations of some kind. REC has ha…Read more
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375Experiential fantasies, prediction, and enactive mindsJournal of Consciousness Studies 22 (3-4): 68-92. 2015.A recent surge of work on prediction-driven processing models--based on Bayesian inference and representation-heavy models--suggests that the material basis of conscious experience is inferentially secluded and neurocentrically brain bound. This paper develops an alternative account based on the free energy principle. It is argued that the free energy principle provides the right basic tools for understanding the anticipatory dynamics of the brain within a larger brain-body-environment dyna…Read more
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67Species of realization and the free energy principleAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (4): 706-723. 2015.This paper examines, for the first time, the relationship between realization relations and the free energy principle in cognitive neuroscience. I argue, firstly, that the free energy principle has ramifications for the wide versus narrow realization distinction: if the free energy principle is correct, then organismic realizers are insufficient for realizing free energy minimization. I argue, secondly, that the free energy principle has implications for synchronic realization relations, because…Read more
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53From mutual manipulation to cognitive extension: Challenges and implicationsPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16 (5). 2017.This paper examines the application of the mutual manipulability criterion as a way to demarcate constituents of cognitive systems from resources having a mere causal influence on cognitive systems. In particular, it is argued that on at least one interpretation of the mutual manipulability criterion, the criterion is inadequate because the criterion is conceptualized as identifying synchronic dependence between higher and lower ‘levels’ in mechanisms. It is argued that there is a second articul…Read more
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73Composition and Transactive Memory SystemsPhilosophical Explorations 19 (1): 59-77. 2016.A recurrent theme in research on socially distributed cognition is to establish the claim that the cognitive phenomenon of transactive memory is grounded in a specific mode of organization: mechanistic compositional organization. My topic is the confluence of transactive remembering or transactive memory systems (TMSs) and mechanistic compositional organization. In relation to this confluence, the paper scrutinizes the claim that the kind of organization grounding TMSs and/or tokens of transacti…Read more
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162Autopoiesis, free energy, and the life–mind continuity thesisSynthese 195 (6): 2519-2540. 2018.The life–mind continuity thesis is difficult to study, especially because the relation between life and mind is not yet fully understood, and given that there is still no consensus view neither on what qualifies as life nor on what defines mind. Rather than taking up the much more difficult task of addressing the many different ways of explaining how life relates to mind, and vice versa, this paper considers two influential accounts addressing how best to understand the life–mind continuity thes…Read more
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179Predictive processing, perceiving and imagining: Is to perceive to imagine, or something close to it?Philosophical Studies 175 (3): 751-767. 2018.This paper examines the relationship between perceiving and imagining on the basis of predictive processing models in neuroscience. Contrary to the received view in philosophy of mind, which holds that perceiving and imagining are essentially distinct, these models depict perceiving and imagining as deeply unified and overlapping. It is argued that there are two mutually exclusive implications of taking perception and imagination to be fundamentally unified. The view defended is what I dub the e…Read more
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508This paper considers questions about continuity and discontinuity between life and mind. It begins by examining such questions from the perspective of the free energy principle (FEP). The FEP is becoming increasingly influential in neuroscience and cognitive science. It says that organisms act to maintain themselves in their expected biological and cognitive states, and that they can do so only by minimizing their free energy given that the long-term average of free energy is entropy. The paper …Read more
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619The Markov blankets of life: autonomy, active inference and the free energy principleJournal of the Royal Society Interface 15 (138). 2018.This work addresses the autonomous organization of biological systems. It does so by considering the boundaries of biological systems, from individual cells to Home sapiens, in terms of the presence of Markov blankets under the active inference scheme—a corollary of the free energy principle. A Markov blanket defines the boundaries of a system in a statistical sense. Here we consider how a collective of Markov blankets can self-assemble into a global system that itself has a Markov blanket; ther…Read more
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50Predictive brains and embodied, enactive cognition: an introduction to the special issueSynthese 195 (6): 2355-2366. 2018.
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11Cognitive Transformations and Extended ExpertiseEducational Philosophy and Theory 46 (6): 610-623. 2014.Expertise is usually thought of as an individual achievement. The expert is a receptacle for knowledge and skills. The knowledge and skills required for expertise are usually thought of as residing...
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127Extended cognition & constitution: Re-evaluating the constitutive claim of extended cognitionPhilosophical Psychology 27 (2): 258-283. 2014.This paper explores several paths by which the extended cognition thesis may overcome the coupling-constitution fallacy. In so doing, I address a couple of shortcomings in the contemporary literature. First, on the dimension of first-wave EC, I argue that constitutive arguments based on functional parity suffer from either a threat of cognitive bloat or an impasse with respect to determining the correct level of grain in the attribution of causal-functional roles. Second, on the dimension of sec…Read more
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8In Search of Ontological Emergence: Diachronic, But Non-supervenientAxiomathes 24 (1): 89-116. 2014.Most philosophical accounts of emergence are based on supervenience, with supervenience being an ontologically synchronic relation of determination. This conception of emergence as a relation of supervenience, I will argue, is unable to make sense of the kinds of emergence that are widespread in self-organizing and nonlinear dynamical systems, including distributed cognitive systems. In these dynamical systems, an emergent property is ontological and diachronic.
Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia