[PhilosophyEvents] TWO talks by Dr. Jelle Bruineberg, April 9 and 10

[Dan Hicks]

Hello philosophers and friends of philosophy!

UCM Philosophy will be hosting two talks by Dr. Jelle Bruineberg (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) on Thursday and Friday, April 9 and 10. Both are free and open to the public. If you’re a student at other school, or community college faculty, contact me (danhicks at ucmerced.edu<mailto:danhicks at ucmerced.edu>) for a parking subsidy and directions for the campus talk on April 10.

Embodied cognition meets the attention economy
Thursday, April 9, 5:30pm
UC Merced on Main (1635 M Street, Downtown Merced)

Herbert Simon’s credo that “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” is generally taken to be foundational for the attention economy, the economic system in which human attention is the scarce commodity: it is because there is too much information in our environment that attending has become so difficult. My aims in this talk are twofold: first I want to show that the attention economy rests on shaky conceptual foundations that are untenable in the light of contemporary cognitive science of attention. Second, I draw on principles from embodied cognition to provide an alternative diagnosis of our current situation. The problem is not so much an abundance of information, but an abundance of always available action possibilities, making selecting the relevant course of action much more difficult.

This talk is intended for a general public audience.

Attention’s relevance problem
Friday, April 10, 3:30-5pm
COB1 265 (UCM main campus)

Intuitively, attention serves to attune an agent to what is relevant. A distracted agent is one that attends to things that are not, in fact, relevant. But what is the standard by which something is relevant? Answers often point to specific internal states, such as goals or intentions, or to specific external states, such as tasks or settings. The story cannot be so simple: something task-, or goal-unrelated can be highly relevant, and staying “on task” in the face of such events is seen as an attentional failure: a hungry bunny that fails to notice the arrival of a bird of prey is missing something relevant. This suggests that what is relevant is not just dependent on an agent’s occurrent goals or tasks, but is dependent on a wide set of interests.

My aim in this talk is first to motivate that this is the right way to think about relevance.  My second aim is to spell out a number of consequences for attention. If what is relevant is dependent on a whole array of interests, then attuning an agent to what is relevant becomes much more complicated. I will argue that the problem at hand is one of unencapsulation, similar to the more familiar relevance problem for belief fixation. I will try to show that many activities that are typically labeled as distractions can actually be thought of as “relevance-checking” behaviors.

This talk is intended for an academic audience.

[Bruineberg-public.png][Bruineberg-scholarly.png]
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Dan Hicks
Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Philosophy
University of California, Merced

Pronouns: they/them/their

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