Center for Discursive Inquiry

CENTER FOR DISCURSIVE INQUIRY (School of Critical Studies, CalArts) HOSTS Sonia de Jager, PhD researcher at the Erasmus School of Philosophy, Rotterdam Jimena Clavel Vázquez, Assistant professor at the philosophy department of Tilburg University, and Inigo Wilkins, writer and independent researcher.

Active Ignorance: Self-Evidencing, Confirmation Bias, and Model Performativity in Predictive Processing
The structure of our sessions this semester will be focussed on dialogues and conversations where our guests will present for a few minutes each so as to encourage conversation amongst all attendees.
Saturday October 12th 2024
11.30am - 2.00pm PST

Predictive processing (PP) and active inference constitute a novel embodied computational theory of mind that unites perception, cognition, and action under a single explanation: the reduction of uncertainty through acting on the world and constantly updating a generative model of the causal etiology of sensory change. However, most accounts construe such uncertainty reducing activity to naturally tend toward increasing knowledge, or as optimizing the fit between the generative model and the world. This presentation introduces the concept of active ignorance to elucidate how unwarranted epistemic entitlements are pervasive in thought and follow directly from the premises of PP. Drawing on agnotology, we argue that the tacit Enlightenment conception of mind as progressively banishing ignorance is inadequate. Active ignorance is characterized as an ‘agno-inferential’ strategy whereby epistemic communities ignore, deny, or alter evidence that conflicts with their preferences, potentially reinforcing maladaptive systemic affordances which sustain social cognition as a whole. In the midst of the massive misinformation and the rise of fascism we consider the concept of active ignorance to be an important intervention into the nascent image of thought proposed by PP.

ZOOM link:
https://calarts.zoom.us/j/91326918640?pwd=3GbQpqOCftwkGmRyWRmEVhai3LpeSK.1

Suggested reading:
Wanja Wiese and Thomas Metzinger: https://predictive-mind.net/papers/vanilla-pp-for-philosophers-a-primer-on-predictive-processing
Active inference and the primacy of the ‘I can’ by Jele Bruineberg:
https://predictive-mind.net/papers/active-inference-and-the-primacy-of-the-i-can


For more information on our group and the CDI please visit our website,
https://criticalstudies.calarts.edu/center-for-discursive-inquiry

At the conjuncture: art and the imagination
The imagination has a long and complex trajectory as a human faculty, but in this epoch of planetary-scale computation and the explosion of synthetic intelligence, genomic engineering, and robotics it has been decentered and accelerated in compelling and disconcerting ways. Now more than ever the security of positivistic reasoning has undergone radical questioning, addressing with urgency the fundamental perceptions of what we are, and what our reality consists of, yet opening as well almost unthinkable and unimaginable possibilities for our definition of what human modes of thinking and the imagination could be. However, the tension between the possibilities that the imagination holds and its material reality remain intolerably constrained and controlled by the structures of planetary capital. The question of global sapience, as potential and as problem, consists of dense strands of transparency and opacity. In this project, the focus will be on proposals for reconfigurations of time, space, and otherness that necessarily generate comprehensive interrogation of the formation of histories, and at the same juncture think time as informing possible alternate, non-linear futures.

This current research module explores and models the dynamics of the imagination as a manifestation of artistic production and critical thought, in part ‘as if’, in part as concept/object modeling, to effectuate other modalities which might lead to different modes of world-making. This ‘global’ (as opposed to individualistic) reenergized faculty of imagination—imagination on a global scale—asks us to focus on the relations between the empirical, the socio-political, the economic and the scientific space of what is common, and potential philosophical concepts of universality. It asks us to consider the condition of the subject in the world, the world that forms a subject, and the transgressive production of the global imagination through it, as well as the divisive violence that is incumbent upon the planetary impulse itself.

The global in this case brings us back to the question of metaphysical meditations and socio-political ruptures, and vice versa; it demands that we address the traversals between what mind is and what is a world; what is an act of self-consciousness about it, and the acts of unconscious doings when both are acts in the world. The complexity and contradictions of the representations of transcendence and embodiment are not simply political or philosophical, but they can instantiate new perspectives on the role of the global artistic imagination.

For more information on our group and the CDI please visit our website,
https://criticalstudies.calarts.edu/center-for-discursive-inquiry

Bios:
Jimena Clavel Vázquez is an assistant professor at the philosophy department of Tilburg University. She completed her PhD in Philosophy at the St Andrews/Stirling Philosophy Graduate Programme. Her work lies at the intersection of philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive sciences and phenomenology, with a focus on perception and imagination.
Sonia de Jager is a PhD researcher at the Erasmus School of Philosophy, Rotterdam. Her work spans predictive processing philosophies, natural language processing and computational semantics, as well as critical, radical traditions which unsettle the objectivist frameworks negatively constraining contemporary images of cognition and computation.
Inigo Wilkins completed his PhD in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths in 2016. He has done extensive research and writing on subjects related to noise, working across many disciplines, such as sonic culture, cognitive science, philosophy, and finance. His forthcoming book is called Irreversible Noise (Urbanomic).