I just attended the AAP (Australian Association of Philosophy) conference, the largest philosophy get together in Australia. It was my second time attending this annual conference, this time at the University of Wollongong. Even with my limited experience of conferences I think it is a fun but a little weird. Due to attendance and presentations being open to all comers there is a diverse range of talks and a wide range of attendees. This tends to make the conference more about getting your field of research across to a wider audience then really tackling a problem in depth. That said, I have seen very technical talks, and I think that is where I experience the weirdness. The conference is many different things to different people, I find this makes it hard to connect to people the way you can at smaller and more focused conferences. At the AAP everyone seems to take pride in butting heads together.
There is also a lot of talk around the big names, seeing what the high profile figures are up to. This is both in terms of the keynote speakers (which were of a very high quality this year) but also those well-known in the Australian philosophy scene. For a quick review of those of interest to me: I still don’t understand David Chalmers’ metaphysical project. The detailed work he does, and encourages his students to do, is a level of technicality I don’t see as being beneficial. The main concerns around his work don’t seem to got away anytime soon through careful metaphysical considerations. That said, you cannot fault the quality of the work.
I have a similar concern with Peter Godfrey-Smith’s work. In his talk he discussed the topic of information transfer between animals. It must be said, it was a fascinating topic and the insight provided into a bias in Dawkins work was informative. As was Godfrey-Smith’s appeal to David Lewis, which will no doubt offer something useful to the topic. Yet the overall treatment was very black-box in nature as “signaler” and “receiver” were simple components in a very simple model. This is at odds with the modern embodied-embedded/ecological approach. If there really is a revolution towards more holistic approaches it is a very slow going one, having to reach each topic in philosophy individually.
While I was not able to attend I heard that Kim Sterelny’s work is still impeccable, probably the best at tackling philosophy of mind from an evolutionary/biology perspective. Also the talks by the La Trobe contingency went well, though there seemed to be a strong accented voice of disagreement in a couple.
My own talk was on at a bad time, the first talk of the morning the day after the conference dinner. So not many people had yet recovered. I was told it was good by those that did attend, basically because everyone agreed. This type of feedback is not the best but it is nice change to the normally combative comments I get. The talk was essentially the same challenge to affordances that I outlined in my previous blog post. From the mammoth text below I changed it into a more presentable form and tighten the argument. The conclusion is still the same, that affordances can explain innate perception to action behaviours but not more complicated cases. For that, something more is needed. Whether it is representations or something else I left it as an open question. That is the work of the next chapter in my thesis and will be revealed soon.
As a last comment both on my talk and the conference: it is only when I go to such conferences that I realise how “heideggerian” I am in contrast to many of those working in philosophy of mind. This both excites and scares me. For on one hand I have a good amount of knowledge that many do no posses, while on the other, the work I do seems outside the radar of most. However, I think it is too late for me to change now. I both enjoy this type of philosophy too much and also think it is right way for phil. of mind to be heading. All that said, the conclusion at the end of my talk was that Heideggerian AI was Heideggerian enough. I regret not using that as the title for the talk itself. Maybe next time.
