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LTT: Tadeusz Zawidzki
September 30, 2022 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm EDT
Title: Pattern Finding and Pattern Making
Abstract: Human beings are proficient pattern finders (e.g., scientific laws), and pattern makers (e.g., art,
architecture, political systems). According to philosophical tradition, going back at least to
Aristotle, these different capacities are made possible by fundamentally distinct cognitive
competencies: theoretical vs. practical reason. But some of our most effective pattern making
succeeds precisely because it masquerades as pattern finding: ideologies concerning, e.g.,
gender, race, and class, consist in unsupported claims about found patterns which, in virtue of
widespread acceptance, partially make themselves true (Haslanger 2012). Thus, it is hard to
classify expressions of ideology (whether public or private) in terms of the traditional disjunction
between theoretical and practical reason. In this paper, I argue that recent “active inference”
models of human cognition (Hohwy 2013; Clark 2016, 2020; Parr, Pezzulo & Friston, 2022)
suggest a promising response to this problem. According to these models, the brain is
concerned mainly with minimizing the discrepancy between expected and detected information.
It does this by responding to such discrepancies in one of two ways: (1) updating its models of
the world (pattern finding), or (2) changing the world to better fit its current models (pattern
making). The strategy the brain chooses in any particular case depends on indefinitely many
contextual factors that determine which option minimizes the discrepancy most efficiently. When
it comes to the social world, for many reasons, strategy (2) is often more efficient (and effective)
than strategy (1). This is why ideologies abound in human social experience
This talk will also be available live streamed on You Tube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg.
Details
- Date:
- September 30, 2022
- Time:
-
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm EDT
- Event Category:
- Lunchtime Talks 2022-23
Venue
- 1117 Cathedral of Learning
-
4200 Fifth Ave
Pittsburgh, PA 15260 United States