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449A continuum of intentionality: linking the biogenic and anthropogenic approaches to cognitionBiology and Philosophy 36 (6): 1-31. 2021.Biogenic approaches investigate cognition from the standpoint of evolutionary function, asking what cognition does for a living system and then looking for common principles and exhibitions of cognitive strategies in a vast array of living systems—non-neural to neural. One worry which arises for the biogenic approach is that it is overly permissive in terms of what it construes as cognition. In this paper I critically engage with a recent instance of this way of criticising biogenic approaches i…Read more
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426How to count biological minds: symbiosis, the free energy principle, and reciprocal multiscale integrationSynthese 199 (1-2): 2157-2179. 2020.The notion of a physiological individuals has been developed and applied in the philosophy of biology to understand symbiosis, an understanding of which is key to theorising about the major transition in evolution from multi-organismality to multi-cellularity. The paper begins by asking what such symbiotic individuals can help to reveal about a possible transition in the evolution of cognition. Such a transition marks the movement from cooperating individual biological cognizers to a functionall…Read more
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285Predictive processing theories are increasingly popular in philosophy of mind; such process theories often gain support from the Free Energy Principle (FEP)—a nor- mative principle for adaptive self-organized systems. Yet there is a current and much discussed debate about conflicting philosophical interpretations of FEP, e.g., repre- sentational versus non-representational. Here we argue that these different interpre- tations depend on implicit assumptions about what qualifies (or fails to quali…Read more
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266Coupling to Variant Information: an Ecological Account of Comparative Mental Imagery GenerationReview of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (4): 899-916. 2019.Action-based theories of cognition place primary emphasis upon the role that agent-environment coupling plays in the emergence of psychological states. Prima facie, mental imagery seems to present a problem for some of these theories because it is understood to be stimulus-absent and thus thought to be decoupled from the environment. However, mental imagery is much more multifaceted than this “naïve” view suggests. Focusing on a particular kind of imagery, comparative mental imagery generation, …Read more
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181Many Paths to Anticipatory Behavior: Anticipatory Model Acquisition Across Phylogenetic and Ontogenetic TimescalesBiological Theory 1 (2): 114-133. 2023.Under the assumption that anticipatory models are required for anticipatory behavior, an important question arises about the different manners in which organisms acquire anticipatory models. This article aims to articulate four different non-exhaustive ways that anticipatory models might possibly be acquired over both phylogenetic and ontogenetic timescales and explore the relationships among them. To articulate these different model-acquisition mechanisms, four schematics will be introduced, ea…Read more
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129Concern Across Scales: a biologically inspired embodied artificial intelligenceFrontiers in Neurorobotics 1 (Bio A.I. - From Embodied Cogniti). 2022.Intelligence in current AI research is measured according to designer-assigned tasks that lack any relevance for an agent itself. As such, tasks and their evaluation reveal a lot more about our intelligence than the possible intelligence of agents that we design and evaluate. As a possible first step in remedying this, this article introduces the notion of “self-concern,” a property of a complex system that describes its tendency to bring about states that are compatible with its continued self-…Read more
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69Is free-energy minimisation the mark of the cognitive?Biology and Philosophy 36 (2): 1-27. 2021.A mark of the cognitive should allow us to specify theoretical principles for demarcating cognitive from non-cognitive causes of behaviour in organisms. Specific criteria are required to settle the question of when in the evolution of life cognition first emerged. An answer to this question should however avoid two pitfalls. It should avoid overintellectualising the minds of other organisms, ascribing to them cognitive capacities for which they have no need given the lives they lead within the n…Read more
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54Strong continuity of life and mind: the free energy framework, predictive processing and ecological psychologyDissertation, University of Edinburgh. 2021.Located at the intersection of philosophy of cognitive science and philosophy of biology, this thesis aims to provide a novel approach to understanding the strong continuity between life and mind. This thesis applies the Free Energy Framework, predictive processing and the conceptual apparatus from ecological psychology to reveal different manners in which the organizational processes and principles underlying life have been enriched so as to result in cognitive processes. By using these anticip…Read more
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53Minimal perception: Responding to the challenges of perceptual constancy and veridicality with plantsPhilosophical Psychology 32 (7): 1024-1048. 2019.Plant predictive processing suggests that plants anticipatorily perceive their environment. This hypothesis runs up against a challenge which takes the form of two constraints on per- ception advanced by Tyler Burge: the veridicality constraint and the constancy constraint. This paper argues that the veridicality constraint can be satisfied by assuming a general account of predictive processing. To show how the constancy constraint may be fulfilled, an ecologically informed account of invariant …Read more
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15Many Paths to Anticipatory Behavior: Anticipatory Model Acquisition Across Phylogenetic and Ontogenetic TimescalesBiological Theory 18 (2): 114-133. 2023.Under the assumption that anticipatory models are required for anticipatory behavior, an important question arises about the different manners in which organisms acquire anticipatory models. This article aims to articulate four different non-exhaustive ways that anticipatory models might possibly be acquired over both phylogenetic and ontogenetic timescales and explore the relationships among them. To articulate these different model-acquisition mechanisms, four schematics will be introduced, ea…Read more
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5Externalized memory in slime mould and the extended (non-neuronal) mindCognitive Systems Research 1 1-10. 2022.The hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) claims that the cognitive processes that materially realise thinking are sometimes partially constituted by entities that are located external to an agent’s body in its local envi- ronment. We show how proponents of HEC need not claim that an agent must have a central nervous system, or physically instantiate processes organised in such a way as to play a causal role equivalent to that of the brain if that agent is to be capable of cognition. Focusing o…Read more
University of Edinburgh
PhD, 2021
Bridge, Kent, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
4 more