Consciousness Live! S3 Ep9 -Discussion with James Dow

you all right we are live joining me today is a very very special extra special guest James Dow so James for those who don't know you can you say a little bit about who you are and what you do please sure yeah so um I'm an associate professor of philosophy at Hendrix College Hendrix College is a residential liberal arts college in rural Arkansas Central Arkansas and I focus on philosophy of mind and action theory and environmental philosophy and aesthetics since coming to liberal arts college I've ended up doing a lot of different things and become a kind jack-of-all-trades I guess um and and then yeah otherwise otherwise I'm in [Music] Environmental Studies program here right I teach I teach environmental ethics and environmental philosophy in that program I also am the chair of the neuroscience program here we have a Neuros interdisciplinary neuroscience program which brings together like philosophy psychology biology computer science it's now going to be called study of the mind and that's a variety of reasons that's the the program tries to like integrate different points of view yeah so like other than that I live on a farm here in Arkansas I it's an eco farm we've had it as a kind of practice of you know we have a community kind of we we did community shared agriculture community supported agriculture for a little while and fed like yeah fed like ten families or so at the peak but now we sell plants and you know have forces and chickens and that kind of thing and live off live off the eggs and live off all those vegetables and whatnot so our goal is to be like a kind of sustainable Iko Iko far more far food forest eventually I don't know there's lots of the things to say aye aye run long if I run long distances that's one of the things I do I've become an ultra runner since being here and that's like helping me to fall in love with Arkansas Wow I play I play music I play guitar and band I'm talking about a bit about that I write music a lot more lately and yeah so very little background yeah yeah stuff that does that interdisciplinary neuroscience thing sounds really cool that's yeah mine is a great name for that actually and were you always into neuroscience I mean I know we yeah we went to grad school together but I wasn't sure that you were into the neural stuff back then yeah so um I guess back then when I was I saw you with Jessie Prince aki-nee and when we worked together part of my project initially was on the problem of other minds you know social cognition how we understand the relationships between self-awareness social cognition awareness of others and joint attention or joint engagement and what the what the kind of map of the relationship between those things were and as I initially started working with him he was like we'll have to we'll have to get more experimental or get more empirical right and I was doing a lot of like you know kind of content and contemporary content analytic contents trying to bring cons back here yeah I mean kind of like in the 20th century it would be like sailors like the cellars tradition right like so cellars crew and I was working a lot on that sort of stuff and but then I got more into like you know kind of developmental neuroscience stuff questions about about mirror neurons you know a lot of that stuff came into my into my dissertation and there was more empirical stuff on like I wrote a little bit about anarchic and syndrome and thought insertion and how anarchic and syndrome and thought insertion problematize different ways of thinking about self-awareness being means error right the idea that you can't be wrong about subjective stuff Lawrence's so I did some of that stuff um but uh coming here I participated in there was a crawfish called The Crossings program which was sponsored by melon and the idea was that you bring together philosophers psychologists biologists on topic and and so we focus on consciousness we focus on all sorts of different topics over the years and that program kind of stimulated a lot of interest I'd say I got more interested since being here ago hanging out with my colleagues talking about about him neuroscience of freewill neuroscience self-awareness social cognition all those topics got more and more interested in it so I taught I teach a course on neuro philosophy and do something like traditional kind of like philosophy of science stuff right and neuroscience but then also like questions about how you apply apply it to different contexts so yeah I got more interested over time but um but yeah I mean in that program we have a lot of freedom to explore whatever we want and come together as groups with guests and stuff I think we need more of those kinds of programs I mean I you got probably know my myself I'm a big fan of into this interdisciplinary Ness so when I yeah these sorts of programs I'm just like I'm amazed at that they're not more prevalent actually yeah even within like neuroscience itself there's so much compartmentalization you know it's like this so-so physiologist they don't speak to the computational guys and so we need more crosstalk in disciplines and across discipline so I love these sorts of projects yeah cool yeah I actually have where I've worked on paper on them on structures of interdisciplinary a little bit and and like identified a few problem areas that I think really need it right so I think you know definitely environmental ethics right the context of climate change research for instance when you when you look at what NSF funds it basically fun like like chemists and biologists and you know natural support natural sciences and then some economics here and there and then if there's epochs involved it's sort of like research ethics right or or kind of like some stuff about green green science right but not so much not very many cases of you know epistemology which seems like you know as far as the conversation about it like the question about you know does knowledge require certainty or a lot of like deniers or skeptical skeptics about climate change will be like well we're not certain about it but epistemologists who knows well the relationship between knowledge and certainty it would be like yeah so like that's not know knowledge doesn't have to be certain in here's why right and similarly wouldn't we get your problem long enough to do something that that would be the worthwhile projects actually yeah yeah absolutely like yeah that there's a there has been in the 20th century a lot of it's not just that you know interdisciplinary spaces don't ask philosophers to participate philosophers have their own structures that keep them from from from engaging right yeah I'm seeing empirical stuff and experimental stuff is relevant to the questions that they're asking yeah sure I think that's me I think that's great so and and you brought up to a couple of interesting points there so on the one hand I mean I know you're really involved in a kind of neural aesthetics at this point yeah a project where you're trying to bring the resources of neuroscience to bear on aesthetic questions as they relate to environmental issues so you have like oh really okay so can you tell us a little bit of how you got into that and way the project there is sure so the broader project I'm working on is a book book project called enacting nature's value which I've been working on for a couple years now and the the real sort of question is how do we understand environmental value right and can we think through questions about environmental value in a way incorporates philosophy of mind question cognitive science you know questions about action those kinds of things right so the the broader project is making sense of an account environmental value and an account that gets applied so the last chopped the first chapter of the book kind of thinks through questions about environmental value the last chapter applies it to like climate change agriculture conservation I just my more recent article was on direct action or environmental disobedience and kind of applying you know questions about imagination to environmental disobedience I'd originally thought that was like the coda of the book but now if that'll just be a thing on its own you know yeah but in the center of the book I'm raising questions in the context of nature aesthetics which is a kind of thriving literature that kind of arose in the mid 90s about and there was lots of conversation about a lot of questions about what's a natural environment what's psychologically relevant for appreciating natural environments you know how should we appreciate them all sorts of questions about our aesthetics and nature aesthetics and you relate these two things and so I think now we're at a kind of like second-generation period where that conversation happened and we're looking for making sense of a way to like move that forward right get through some impasses so in the in the context of in the context of that I really didn't raising the question of how we should um how we should make sense of what what's psychologically relevant for nature appreciation but then like how do how does cognitive science relate to that or how how can you know not just environmental psychology right but how can cognitive psychology help us to kind of make sense of a lot of those debates and so I start off with the question in one chapter and I want an article that I've been working on just asking you know can neuro esthetics help us to understand can it be the methodology that helps us to explore the question of what sort of cognitive mental states right bear on aesthetic appreciation and so in that in that context I basically I poke I set it up in the context of critiques of neuro statics right so I'm wondering you know most mostly I'm focusing on like the inactive astre TKE but broadly they're kind of externalist critiques of neuro statics as a framework and I basically asked like can specifically Alban ohi's critiques what what is I was this critique here yeah so he wrote a book called um strange tools yeah and strange tools the point of strange tools is to is to point out that the neuro esthetics frames the way that we the way that we appreciate the way that we perceive write in terms of something that's to internalist to individualist right not based enough in the body his main his main worry has to do with like a way that he's conceptualizing art and this gets a little bit tricky because like no no he is um not really framing the question of aesthetics in the same way as a lot of neurons that XP Palar or even you know other people who are wondering about whether neuroscience can contribute like Bill Seeley for instance yeah they're they're reframing the way that that we're asking the questions very differently but one one pivotal idea is that that rather than focus on like philosophy of art what counts as our or not aesthetics is in the business of like understanding aesthetic experience right and for noé aesthetic experience is something that's like transformative it's something that you you go into and you go to the mat let's say what you can't go to now but you go to the mat and you experience you know Jackson Pollock's number 14 painting right which is in a modern way and you explain you experience that it like transforms you so you're not the person that you were before right and and so you know your perception your like epistemic Lee transform in the sense that you see something that you've never seen before you're also personally transformed sometimes by art right so you become a different person after the fact and he thinks there's a sort of um that that's pivotal to aesthetic experience right and that that neuroscience kind of poses a problem neuro statics doesn't really capture that differences across time right so there's important differences across time in the in aesthetic experiences that if you just take like okay put someone in a in the context of seen a picture right of Jackson Pollock's number 14 what is the in fMRI right say then what is the that you might not have the same experience right or it might just be a one shot you know here's the experience you don't capture the entire experience right um he also thinks so that's the elect person's across time worried I would put it or aesthetic experience across time the other worry is that different people given their skills right given the structures of their appreciation are going to experience things differently right so like it's not like a kind of cultural relativism or like um you know kind of like it's relative society or culture idea it's more of that like variation in skill especially artists right so he thinks there's something super special about artistic expertise right so artistic expertise gives you a way of looking in a way of listening that kind of everyday people don't have right and so that difference across individuals matters a lot because you know people in the context of the art world are heed to or attuned to the kinds of aesthetic experiences that are possible right that makes sense yeah those are those are me I make sense it from a musicianship point of view so yeah you know I know personally like when I first experienced jazz music I was kind of not I didn't understand it but then once I learned how to play a bit and I tried to play some of it I started realizing what was interesting and unique about it once I started actually trying to do it it gave me new insight into oh I see and then some of the vocabulary and traditions there which the enhance your appreciation of it yeah cool yeah so that's definitely um part of the the broader discussion in in the book right and then also in nature aesthetics so you know like within esthetics there's this question of is aesthetic appreciation based in kind of cognitive skills is it or cognitive concepts right so there's the kind of Kendall Walton tradition where the idea is that you have to have categories that enable you to structure where your aesthetic experiences are in order to be correct about or make appropriate judgments really about where you're experiencing and so that when you gain those concepts then you're capable of making the making the appropriate judgments that that same kind of view gets applied by Alan Carlson in the context of in context nature aesthetics so his view is that that you know you have to possess just like you just like Walton argued you have to possess the art categories in order to properly appreciate the natural world you have to possess possess the natural science categories in order to appropriately appreciate nature natural environments right so yeah men's category as he means what like geology so if we're talking about big spaces geology evolution ecology but mostly mostly like mostly biology right but basically the categories that enable you to structure your perception in ways that you're attuned to what changes are possible within those experiences right so he's really focused on like fluctuation between like positive and negative judgments so the way you put it was good like right like there's a lot of things that I've been listening to now because I feel like I should explore my my understanding music more right and so I'm basically asking people constantly what should I listen to right so that I can then like expand and hear things differently now some people think some people think well there's more non-cognitive right it's more it's not so much about the concepts that you possess but it's about how you know your embodiments about the kinds of things you do right or the kinds of the kinds of activities you engage in right so people might think well you're going to better access the groove of a funk song which I know you appreciate funk right so you're listening to listening to Thundercat let's say which is like cool that's just incredible um that album is incredible but what is it called drunk I think it's drunk yeah drunk yeah yeah yeah seriously I seriously read a seriously recommend now but yeah so listen when you're listening to to funk you know it might be that it's more about your movement right and it's more about the kind of even just playing right that would enable you to so slapping the bass for instance is something that you might have as a skill and that's like an embodied skill that's gonna enable you to appreciate the subtleties of the differences right so I mean a recent thing for me with playing guitar has been like harmonics you know like playing solos and like messing around with harmonics and now I'm like listening I'm like oh wow that harmonic is ringing in the background because the guitarist is you know doing that that's not like an accident exactly you know this is the non-cognitive this approach I mean yeah because some of this is really confusing to me I mean to be honest as I was mentioning before we started I'm really not an expert in this area some really relying on you and learned a lot from reading your stuff they work in progress you sent me so I appreciate that but I mean it so suppose I go to the Grand Canyon and I'm standing there and I'm looking down at the Grand Canyon it's like amazingly beautiful I have this filled experience you know maybe that's what you guys mean by the sublime in this context I don't know but you know is is that is the is the claim from the cognitive side that you need to have concepts like igneous rocks metamorphic rock and those sorts of things to appreciate what you're looking at there fully or so yeah I'm trying to figure out what what it means to say to natural science categories because it just seems really implausible to me that morality is required to enjoy what you're looking at so there's a bunch of um one like in the literature there are times where the scientific cognitivists are explicit that it's necessary right so sometimes there are claims especially the earlier stuff right over time it's really not so much about its being necessary or sufficient right it's more about what the relationship is between the kinds of judgments that you that you pre theoretically want out of us the out of aesthetic judgments about the natural environment so if you want to understand you know say say you want aesthetic judgments to be relevant to policy right then you might think something like well if environmental policy is gonna look claims made about the Grand Canyon being beautiful inspiring wonderful right grand all of those things then then you want your those judgments to be objective you want to be able to make sense of how when you're saying that it's awesome right or when you're saying that it's wonderful now you're not just like expressing something that's subjective or willy-nilly or arbitrary right so one of the one of the claims that that Carlson makes is that that this is this helps us to understand how it could be objective so if we want it if we want aesthetic judgments to be objective then we need to have categories that can structure and so then our perceptions as we're perceiving it are categorizing accurately right what the what the particular thing is so a real like test case and I think you know the way we're talking about now is kind of in the debate between two figures between the cognitivists who are focused on concepts and non-cognitive ists who are focusing more on emotions or sentiments right our fields and and they're the pivotal thing is that the pivotal question that's that becomes like a key example is say say we're you know out on a boat and we see like a humpback whale crest the water right the the cognitivists wants to say that it's that being it's being a mammal it's important to that appreciation right and in particular the kind of like the kind of likes fine-ass right and is important for its movement now if someone says something like well but I can experience the awesomeness of that movement and you know the intensity of the splash this you know whatever whatever it is the person's folks you know and think it's a fish right or think that think that it's a totally different kind of organism and so they're the cognitivists want to say that no it's a it's not you can't be wrong about that category now it's not because it's necessary it's because you miss out so other than the objectivity point you miss out on the kinds of perceptual qualities that you know you could have so you don't see as many of the objects that are relevant to your appreciation and you personally don't subjectively experience it as being like you know I could see this and so I seem to see this right like like you don't have available the kind of phenomenal character the qualities of that that you could experience so I mostly am I mean mostly what I'm trying to figure out is like how does this literature in philosophy of mind sort of first problematize those questions right and then how do we move forward so if people are interested in in an emotion view know Carol who's awesome no Carol writes a lot about emotions in the context of nature aesthetics and Allan Karlsson and know Carol went have gone back and forth about about this debate and it's it's really profitable to like think through like well what do they mean by emotion you know like how are they framing these questions about what's cognitive what's non cognitive like I'm asking a lot of those questions you know and trying to like rephrase them and and move forward by by reframing those discussions so when I know that part of your response to this so what you want to say is that the like the know ease of the world I think yeah it kind of so their main criticism has to do with the lack of connective body movements and so forth and that's not really a knock against neuro asset really that's against a particular approach to it that's right their way of characterizing here totally yeah so so um the way I write the way I outlined it in the paper is that the worries that won the arguments that I just outlined about transformative experience and and the kind of difficulty of like capturing the phenomenon right that's another worry he has that there's a kind of you know like aesthetic experiences like an elusive thing it's not something we can pin down so given we can't like pin down what the phenomena is you're not gonna be able to to like pin it down and then move it to the lab right um so those those kinds of arguments he's more hinting at them I guess in strange tools and I'm trying to like articulate them a bit more and say what are the step by step arguments that he's that that's something that a you know is very basically a sensory motor and activist could defend but I but I do think one of the things that I'm trying to do is to like delineate between worries about neural aesthetics in the context of art aesthetics and then worries about neuro statics in the context of nature aesthetics right so my claim is that then activist worries can be addressed in the context of art aesthetics but they're really more difficult to address not impossible I'm not like a mysterion or anything but they're more difficult to address in the context of nature aesthetics and the reason I the reason I think that is because one I think we have we can make sense of how perception whether we're talking about vision or audition or any of the senses could be active just by making sense of so I draw on like Ben Santana's conception and pragmatic representation where there's forms of representation in perception that have you know kind of almost direct input and immediate causal relationship to your action and he calls those pragmatic representations so I basically I basically say well pragmatic representations could be used as one of the forms of representation that could be read that could be applied in the context of neural neuro statics but that but that there is kind of remaining problems for the neuro statics in nature and mostly I take it to be I guess my contribution is to like make sense of what I call the problem of double mediation so the problem of double mediation is basically that whenever we are trying to investigate neuro statics you know if we were to investigate neuro statics in nature we would kind of have to reintroduce our like structures right so you would have to show people images of landscapes of the Grand Canyon for instance for of whales emerging right and then that that means that we're like the first order mediation kind of like means that that were moving from a question about nature aesthetics to then a question about the question about our aesthetics again right the second problem the second problem has to do with like more like the self or more like you know the I think no he's right that there's something significant about aesthetic experience in the context of in in general right that he's applying to art esthetics but I think it's it's it has to do with like being immersed right you're like kind of like losing yourself or being in the zone right and allowing yourself to like have the art be privileged over your own beliefs your own desires your own interests and then and then in that experience then that makes it available for you to be changed right so I think he's he's right about that but I don't think that that's that really pose a as much of a problem in the art aesthetics cases does in the nature aesthetics case because really you have to be you have to be immersed in that environment right you have to be a body in in the natural world so I'm just kind of highlighting I'm not I'm not so much I'm not so much interested in like scepticism about neuro statics as I am like frame this question and then we're starting from you know the most basic sort of empirical approach and then like ask questions about what we need to do right and then theorize at higher levels and and develop develop a sort of empirical or experimental account of how how how nature aesthetics could be investigated through cognitive science right so it's not I'm not really like committed to the skepticism as much it's like reframing the question right I guess yeah I have a I don't know I find all of this stuff hard to make sense of at some level because I just don't recognize any of the things my own experience so I don't know that it's not good at aesthetic appreciation or not but you know yeah I like Matisse and Picasso and I've been teased by my favorite artist of all time actually I don't never I don't I mean sometimes I just look at it and just like the painting I don't feel transformed or in the lunar so that's not aesthetic appreciation on these kinds of accounts I'm just trying to just seems like the bar is really high yeah or what I would just call enjoying the arts enjoying yeah well I think there it's a matter of as work as we're theorizing it's a matter of how like phenomenal capture arguments work right yeah like I guess the way I think of it is like when someone's making the claim that here's this thing that's super important you know it's not necessary or whatever but it's kind of a phenomena that's that central just etic experience and then the claim was like well what it changed always sneaking back that none you're saying it's not necessary but it's central yeah like a core it's a it's a core thing in that I mean let me we can think about it this way so so say one of the one of the sort of skeptics about neuro aesthetics or let's say pessimists about neuro statics right and like optimists about neuro statics right so some one of the things that the pessimists are worried about is that is that there's a kind of erasure of expertise right so one of the things that that noe is really concerned about is that like not like you have to like cultivate a lot of understanding and knowledge and skill right and in order to be able to make art in order to critique it right in order to be able to historic do all the kind of tasks that are involved in our world and I think I think there one of the things that is involved in expertise and I don't think no he actually points this out but like this isn't coming from another context Hubert Dreyfus when he talks about expertise talks about the the kind of skill that you have involves flow experience right highest level so when you're an expert in any kind of skill you're capable of of being immersed right being in the zone just doing what you do right and and and engaging in that way and so I think that that kind of willingness to go there that is what maybe motivates his idea I'm not sure I haven't asked him about that particular part but then they're like other folks who think well it's not you don't really need to consult experts right like it's a matter of everyday everyday experiences right everyday aesthetic experiences are on a par with the expert ones and so I think I think that's really what drives that that question of what score and what central is that that one word when we start to talk about expertise it's it's at the highest level responding to very specific situations you know like if you're a player responding to very specific situations and improv let's say right or if you're an appreciate being able to like he like oh yeah I know that like I know that right and then relate it to other things so I mean I think that's um I Azzam Azzam sort of working through this I don't think like I agree with you in the context of in the context of aesthetic art aesthetics and nature aesthetics I'm reluctant to kind of frame what's what really matters in terms of its being necessary right yeah like and and and I and I in the book actually I work through like here's a case where someone says it's central right here's the case where they say it's important I'm actually more interested in like the question of how D different types of cognitive structures affect perception yeah so that's the real question it's like what are the what are the effects of imagination which you haven't talked about right or what are the effects of you know emotional or the effects of mystery what are the effects of these different cognitive states on perception and so like empirically I think that's actually more interesting than the question of what's necessary insufficient right yeah yeah I think I think we want to say no that like I think they appealed to expertise it there's something that's important there I mean just personally I remember like you know I've never been a fan of Andy Warhol's work and I always you know that was boring and not interesting just don't just to look at and yeah I have a friend who's an artist I worked with at LaGuardia Michael Rodriguez an amazing artist and he's a big Andy Warhol fan and he just started you know telling me about the history and how he's responding and then I started realizing yeah there's something clever and interesting about or hauled yard but I never came around to like enjoying looking at it like I don't like really look at his stuff I don't find it appealing yeah like the color schemes this this any of the layout any of that stuff but I appreciate something that place it has in the conversation you know in the you know in the art conversation he's making a point about something by doing it that way so I think maybe that's where expertise would come in but it I don't see how it like affects your the aesthetic she elevates so that's what I guess I yeah totally I mean that's the main that's one main critique of cognitivism in the context of our aesthetics but also in that context nature aesthetics people will say something like you even put aside the question of whether scientific concepts are necessary or not right what's the what are the what's the effect of them on aesthetic appreciation right and they're people like Emily Brady is someone in the nature aesthetics literature she argues for the imagination view and her her argument against Carlson is basically like yeah so it does change something right so having signed to the concepts in the contents the nature appreciation changes something but it doesn't change aesthetic appreciation what it changes is your aesthetic understanding right so she thinks something like yeah of course like like you like you put it you know you come to understand our history differently by appreciating well this is why Warhol's important right and you maybe you can relate are in advertising you can relate and you were home development underground right like you you understand like relationships you understand the contextual the kind of understanding of the art world but it doesn't shape your aesthetic appreciation right it doesn't change the way that you the way that you see or the way that you hear the way that you look or listen or whatever and so so yeah I mean I think that's that's pretty that's a compelling that's a compelling objection and one of the one of the key issues here is like now that now that we're at it's kind of second generation framing above environmental aesthetics a lot of the focus has been on assessing kind of critiquing scientific cognitivism about nature appreciation but then we just end up with like a bunch of different views right so I'm gonna kind of show you kind of show you my screen it's not possible yeah and as a matter of fact I mean the people who will listen to this later won't be able to see it but you certainly or they won't be able to see it the video they will be but then there'll be an audio version of it that one but certainly with the people who watch the video on YouTube could see whatever you share okay let's try as I can show you I can show you like a diagram of the positions oh that might be that might that might be something that helps to like give you a map it's even a tree nice tree yeah it's a tree of environmental aesthetics so um I also have a tree of environmental values accounts and a map of consciousness too if you can get to that but um these are just things I use in my teaching but but I mean these are the basic questions which is probably on that side what is the natural environment what's relevant psychologically speaking to appreciation the natural environments how are we do appreciate them and there's some people who are like on the left hand side you know that's what is what is the aesthetic appreciation there's some people who think that like the natural environment is non aesthetic and because there's no agent involved so someone will say something like well there's no that no agent made the natural world so it can't be aesthetic appreciation because instead of appreciation involves assessing how an agent solve problems with material things in order to make something right so that's that particular view what's the a sub n over here that's um the nature of the aesthetic appreciation of nature oh I say done right so the N is just the object the natural environment that question is the top question is kind of it's related to how we're framing what the difference is between art and nature right so our first question is really like you know there's there's tough cases like there's cases like mixed cases I call them which are like environmental art right where someone will like make cut a big hole in a canyon let's say right and then say you're here's a work of art so it's partly natural and it's partly our official so those questions are people other were really people who defend the view that you can't have aesthetic appreciation of nature yeah yes for real yeah this is bizarre no yeah so the the the idea is that um and and this is actually an it's related to environmental ethics though so think about like they about when you're when you're raising a question of whether wilderness exists or not like is that is that a reasonable category yeah and and and there when we talk about wilderness in the great wilderness debate people will say something like some people will say yes wilderness exists its its parts of natural environment which are untrammeled by humans right untouched by humans places that that haven't had causal interventions or and then there are other people who say well there's not another those places left like if climate change is what it is right and we live in the Anthropocene then every aspect of nature's in some way affected all right even by wildness on Cerys or yeah yeah so here here the question is you know where's the where's the natural environment and but then but then even in that case like it depends on what the structure is that makes it untouched so you know this gets into questions about which we're familiar with and the conscious that are true of like when you think about something right and you like conceptualize it have you had an effect on it right like like how do you is that an intervention so I mean you know of course nobody's out there sports spilling oil on moon although someone just dropped some on the moon didn't think yeah did somebody I forget what it was but anyway so so so yeah Pluto's not been affected in that sense but it might have been affected in the sense that there's social constructed categories that structured way right me not so that's a weird nobody got loaded from a planet it was affected yeah alright so maybe memory may be cognitively or conceptually that's a way of intervening in the natural world right and so it doesn't count as being wilderness on on at least that definition okay and so in that context you know the question is like well if we want to preserve or conserve nature then then um and we intervene in it then we're actually like making something right so this is in the context of people who argue that like any any intervention by humans is a kind of like faking nature kind of like making an artifice out of nature and if you think that kind of thing you know you eat in this view you either like think yeah humans are intervening and that's that's always the case and so then it's all art appreciation right of a kind or you think there's still something left but then it's so minimal that it's not relevant I don't know who this Elliot person is over here on the top but so what is someone like that say what happens when you look at a nice sunset and feel like just an overwhelming sense of like dude that's awesome they're saying that's not an artistic appreciation so it's got to be something though yeah it's a it is a it's not an aesthetic appreciation it is it is I mean it's obviously a carbon states an emotional response right but it doesn't rise to the level of an aesthetic judgment the real issue is that it has to involve an agent who is solving problems so I guess if you were a religious person then you could you would go you could yeah this actually yeah if you're a religious person or spirit you know you thought creationism was true or whatever or if you're simulation theorist coding was excellent on that yeah I mean that's actually that's that's an interesting question and it's interesting that that's an interesting question because like I think that actually frames a lot of the way we think about agency right we I think I think in the context of the nature aesthetics literature and the way we understand environmental value we don't reflect enough on like the way we're conceptualizing what intentional action is what awareness of agency is you know and I think I think there you could and this is a part part of the book the fifth chapter I'm I'm focusing on the question of wildness right so I think you know there's a there's room for making sense of the aesthetics of wildness experience of wildness in the natural world that does that gets around this issue right because I I framed it before as when we're defining in the great wilderness debate we're raising the question well what as wilderness or not so taken and take place you want to conserve or preserve that's a wilderness area that question is kind of like a question about the ontology of that thing and and and I think you know well why not think about just what's relevant to the experience that you mentioned right which is you have an experience of wildness you have an experience of something that's like beyond your control you know if it's like you know dynamically sublime I put it then there's something about the natural world that's like overpowers you right it's like has like an infinite power that that's beyond the way you can conceive of it or talk about it and they're you you might say something like that's that's wildness and that kind of wildness we need in order stand it we need to understand form different forms of agency that might be involved so yeah that that kind of comes up in that discussion a bit but yeah whenever I whenever I teach this I have to kind of pause sometimes and said you know philosophers in this discussion just sort of say well God doesn't exist and my world wasn't created you know like there's no agent of nature so let's move on take that projected decision take that for granted then yeah but but I also don't think like even if you think that even if you think okay there isn't agent or there isn't even intelligence in the natural world right so creation is it's false does that mean that you have to then think there's no property that you experience right is something that's beyond your control no I don't think so right so the ontology doesn't kind of like bubble up and make it the case that you can't make sense of an experience of something being strange or being you know beyond the kind of way you could talk about it or you know outside of your human control I mean it seems at that point it's like a verbal issue mostly whether you want to call it aesthetic or not yeah no I mean I think I think it's it's a pretty heavy-handed argument to say well here's what aesthetic experiences it's being able to assess when maker solves pretty good the problems with material things right like that's that that sort of it stacks the deck in favor of the aesthetic approach yeah against against I mean sorry in favor evident home aesthetic approach against that aesthetic approaches yeah and and I think I think really you know some of them were contemporary stuff on on awareness of agency it becomes important here right so so we're aware of our own agency aware of ourselves as causes in the world but then we're also aware of other people's agency and we're aware of animals and you know trees and the kind of movements that exist in even basic things like rivers right right and we we might sometimes say hey I don't know hold off that that River doesn't is not an agent right but there are other occasions where it's like especially natural disasters where you're like oh that rivers an agent you know like I drove through a tornado once it was actually the last time last time I went to Tucson which I think the the conscious conference yeah which I think was 2016 okay yeah so that got year I came back and I was at the airport I wasn't paying attention I was driving home and I was on the highway I saw a guy with like a camera on the side of the road I was like what's he what's the deal with the camera and and then I looked out to the west and there was this massive like wall of blackness right it was like a parallelogram I was like hold like that's a tornado right yeah and I came to find out there's like different kinds so like I was thinking like Wizard of Oz style still I was new to tornado land so I was thinking it would be like a funnel but now there's like wedge tornadoes which are much bigger and actually more devastating in some ways um but then like I was like whatever I'm just gonna drive through it like I'll make it I'll make it around and it was super dumb but like I was like no this will be metal like this would be super fun and so so I like where there was a dumb mistake um I grant but we don't encourage driving through tornadoes here no no you have to turn it also do not drink bleach no I alright go just back your inside is in fact yourself with myself that's dumb yeah okay we're not gonna talk about that but yeah so like and and as I was driving I was driving through it and you know and you experienced you experience it as as a kind of agent right in the natural no you're you're incorrect about it because it's not you know there might be certain conditions are not met for agency present there but but I think that's part of the experience and so a lot of what I've what I've been trying to do is like recover recover that a bit and say yeah say you know like even even if it's the case that there are reasons in these arguments for sort of saying you know wilderness doesn't exist but but still a wildness exists in the sense that you have an experience of here's this this thing that's that's beyond your control alright that's an agent in the sentence of bringing about cause and effect in the world altering things has a kind of stable character I mean disappears after a few miles the tornado does but but you know not to go too far off on a tangent here but you've had a couple of these kinds of experiences I know you wrote about once or lightning struck like right in front of you oh yeah and then he stepped into the lightning patch yeah and now you drive into the tornado couple close calls here I have yeah so um that was actually a Mount Monadnock up in Vermont which is it's a great mountain I'm sorry New Hampshire it's in New Hampshire okay um so when I lived in Boston I would drive up there and I was taking on my own and a storm and and I was almost at the peak and I was like kind of like it's not a great peak actually like especially in the storm but I was like oh and I'll try to get up there and a storm came through and yeah there was like this light a ball lightning which was you know come it's basically like it's not really a ball like I said round like org of lightning that's like connected to the ground and then connected to the cloud and was weird by the desire I had expected that to be like way more intense like a lightning strike to be way more intense but it was kind of chill like it was kind of like you know here's a there's an orbit in front of me I mean and I came to realize that like like I felt it right like my hair stood up and I felt it in my body and stuff but but it wasn't like it wasn't like a lightning strike that like you know maybe all after the last like the earth or knocked out a tree or like God you know hit me in the head or anything um but yeah that experience was that experience was intense and yeah I write about the kind of desire to get immersed in it right like because at the moment I had this weird kind of sense of wanting to wanting to experience it more deeply right and and so that that has served as a house it kind of metaphor for for for a not a sort of non-cognitive experience of wanting to be immersed in the natural world but then also an experience of the sublime right an experience of something that's like much more much bigger than you more powerful than you so yeah I used that as a in some of the stuff I've been doing on the sublime you said it's a good example but so before I want to get to this imagination stuff by the brilliant like this just some things that you were saying before about wildness and the experience of it which I really like yeah I wonder like Paulo so how worried are you that this is gonna be applied to other areas because I mean you know don't couldn't you have that same experience in in New York City on a Friday night in the village let's say there's something about control that seems being almost verging on incomprehensible so is that an experience of wildness Fran yeah so one of the one of them I think one of the benefits of detaching the the kind of aesthetic experiences that were interested in from the from like the question of what a natural environment is right the benefit of is that we can highlight the aesthetic experiences that we have and share right and can talk about independent of that question so I think you know a lot of stuff in the context of an of environmental aesthetics right now is challenging that like rural urban distinction right okay and so so I think that's important to recognize because because we tend to think when you think of natural environments we kind of make that assumption right but environmental aesthetics includes it can include any to conclude urban environments as well right and so some of the some of the benefit of thinking about the the property itself right like here's the experience this is this is wildness in my experience of something that's the way I define it is that it's something that is um that it's strange or unfamiliar right it's something that kind of seems to outstrip your the concepts that you have so you kind of long to like gain a deeper understanding that seems inaccessible of course like what we talked about before you can you can categorize it later and it won't anymore and then the last thing is that it seems to be on your human control so I sort of focus on though as this being and yeah I take that to be a benefit I think yeah my other experiences of messengering in New York definitely influences this yeah I've had the same feeling when I'm under I mean I I would never this is kind of a non sequitur but I was on the train coming back from Manhattan to where I live and I was you know mind my own business meeting a book suddenly I looked up and I noticed that the entire the entire car was filled with policemen like every single person on the car was a policeman yeah it was just like you know paralyzed my first instinct is like you know run away I don't really think of the police as protecting me too much unfortunately I know they do sometimes but then yeah it looks like I was like feeling the same way like I and walked into a nest of spiders and that's how I bailed out like holy crap and it was a really intense experience on my part and they were all smiling and laughing thought it was a graduation coming back from Madison Square Garden wave so they were just having me graduates but it felt like you know there was a part of me that I wanted to understand why I had that kind of reaction that was going on there yeah in the way that you're describing your connection with the Lightning I wanted to step into it a little bit and figure out that what is it that so why did I have this like in really you know panics I'm in a dangerous situation right now kind of experience but really they're just differently people he they were celebrating you know this is a friendly environment so that was an experience that I would classify strange not on my control and yeah so so I'm glad to hear you sort of say these sorts of things that that some of these questions can be applied in urban environments as well anyway yeah I mean I think the one of the things that I kind of hinted at when I was talking about how the no as for you and which i think is important for the neuro studies question but it's also important for like how we make sense of what we're doing in aesthetics and then also how we make sense of what we want as a model for a naturalistic aesthetics or terrible aesthetics right um I think I think historically the discussions are framed in very weird ways so like in the 19th century it was the case that people were the romantics for instance and and Baumgarten and certain people who are interested in aesthetic questions they're framing the question about like you know here's this experience with the cops I have this experience right and or they weren't talking about that but like you know you have a perdu you start with a particular experience and then you're like what what is this this is this is unique or this this changes my emotional life right or this transforms me as a person or like I came to find out something about about my community right that I couldn't have otherwise or you know this resonates with me at the kind of distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness or whatever right like whatever it is that in the experience it's a significant experience and so back then it was it was commonplace to like be like okay aesthetics of nature aesthetics with people aesthetics with our aesthetics with like you know whatever like people didn't distinguish between but he go kind of it up like but yeah no I mean he kind of refrained how we're thinking about aesthetics in terms of like its focused on the human creation on human freedom and other people did too I like but the idea was that that that changed towards like it wasn't only Hegel there were other people too but like in the 20th century you know like all the aesthetics books our philosophy of art books they're questions about what counts as art and what counts as an are right or count art and craft and things like that and so that question became like pivotal question um but I think one of the benefits of of thinking through nature aesthetics and art aesthetics and doing this work and connecting it to like philosophy of mind stuff is that we're gonna it's going to help us to like kind of recover that way of approaching aesthetic experience as as a kind of experience right and an independent of questions like we we don't need to breathe we don't need to figure out like well is this dance or not yeah like it alert like if you have an experience you have an experience of kind of you know street dancer like someone just doing shuffling or what huh or breakdancing right to make it old-school [Laughter] yeah like I recently watched this video of like the history of dance which was really cool it's like my dance troupe going through like the issue of different dances and really doing my mind but um but yeah like that whatever that experience is you might not categorize certain things as being dance or not but that doesn't really matter like right you see someone moving away that like you couldn't yourself or you haven't seen someone before you know yeah you have a sense of being changed through that so so I think that that that shift is important and I think I think that um thinking about the the wide variety of ways that aesthetics is it can be can be investigated and kind of using nature aesthetics the challenge the the way that people think about our aesthetics is it important to you right because like most people your study aesthetics or mostly folks our statics and so now in the art aesthetic stuff it's like mostly visual art that's true definitely yeah so that's actually you know in terms of like where I where I land in that in that map and where I do most of the work it tends to be on what's called engagement so the engagement the engagement view kind of focuses on on non-cognitive embodiment actions you know move bodily movements these kinds of things so his main his main critique is that his main claim kind of in this context is that yeah our aesthetics is privileged vision and audition right it's just like visual and music and that stands in the way of really getting to what's significant about nature aesthetics which is your body in an environment right and tastes and smells and touches mostly touch the kind of sensuality of the natural world right is is what is what is significant about experiencing I was in a natural environment yeah definitely so so that that that does get us to kind of reframe I mean to feel like you know just connects to some philosophy of mind stuff like you know that that's also true in the study of perception right or in like the way we understand phenomena consciousness like we we tend to think yeah let's start talk about vision and so when I'm teaching cognitive science I'm always like well we're talking Mars theory right and then we articulated an account of all the different levels of cognition and then and then it's like well is it vision like why is that the thing that's guiding us otherwise right and yeah maybe of course it's gonna be levels of cognition a variety of ways to make sense of different senses but then once you start thinking through like well now our experiences aren't just like a single one right right so I think I think aesthetics is actually like plays an important role in in its so it's not only like like the philosophy of mind card scientists alike be used in the context of aesthetics but it's also like aesthetics presents a challenge to the way that were were theorizing about consciousness about about and we were theorizing about you know any of the phenomena or concerned a bit about mental phenomena so you mentioned that you couldn't come down I know you're on the engagement and activist side of things yeah the argument in one of your thinks of one of your chapters forget which one where you talk about the nature scope mmm I think this is an argument that you're using against the cognitive approaches is that can you say a little bit about the nature scope I thought that was pretty cool yeah so the nature scope the idea of that is that um you could if scientific cognate ism is true then it's I won't use like core necessary but but having scientific concepts affects your aesthetic experience in a way that other kinds of cognitive phenomenon don't right so we'll put it that way and we're really assessing like you know the changes in the kinds of judgments you're gonna have or the changes in the kinds of perception you have so the way I put it is in terms of like perceptual contents so perceptual contents were concerned about what objects are we perceive as were as we're aesthetically I've appreciated something in the natural world so let's just say you know I go out on my deck and I listen to frogs all the time sorry frogs in my pond we'll take that as an example or I watch my chickens right and in in those cases there's certain there's certain objects that you can visually experience there certain things you can listen for certain objects of audition that you can experience you know you might pick up the Frog and touch it and righty boys so so like there it's the perceptual content and you're wondering what's gonna what's going to shift it what's going to shift that perceptual content I think there's also a phenomenal character right like what's the what are the qualities of the object once you've got the different objects that you're perceiving what are the different qualities that you that you can experience different sensory qualities I'm not really talking about like quality here I'm talking about like what are the different features of the way it's gonna support or or looks and and so so I think one of the one of the ideas of the of scientific cognitivism is that that you could possess all of these all these scientific concepts and that that could change the perceptual continent and a phenomenal character but what I basically argue is that well we could imagine them a nature scope right and a nature scope is just basically you know rather than a microscope or telescope it's like a set of cognitive capacities right so it's like a set of all the scientific concepts and if you can imagine okay that's implanted like in the person's brain or maybe where externally or something then you would have all the experiences that that you would that the scientific cognitivist wants you to have but I guess there the question is would there still be something would there still be something lacking right and one of the things that I think is lacking is that you're not you're not playing a role right your agency is missing from the experience right so so what explains what's weird about the nature scope case is that there is a kind of agency missing there's an embodiment missing you kind of replaced you replace the exploration or replace the imagination right you replace the other kinds of activities that are relevant to that experience so what do you what is meant by imagination in this context I know you you gonna make a big case for the higher-order imagination view which I want to talk about but I also mentioned someone else who says they have the imagination view as well so yeah imagination seems like one of these Beck's turns to me that I'm not whenever I hear it I'm like what are we talking about yeah what is it exactly that you mean what what are we talking about here yeah so um there are different kinds of so Emily Brady is the main person that focuses on the imagination view another person is uh is Yuriko say Ito who she argues for like what's called a folk narrative view but yeah that's on the map to the she argues for that kind of view but and they're rather similar actually like on the map I relate them to each other and but Brady has a distinction between different kinds of imagination so there's a variety of kinds that she talks about exploratory imagining exploratory imagining involves like kind of searching your sensations looking around in your experiences and allowing associations to develop she also talks about projective imagination which is a kind of simulating into a perspective putting yourself in the view of a tree right or putting yourself in the point of view of an animal so that's kind of empathetic perspective taking she also talks about AM bleed if imagination which is basically like narrative like going beyond your experience as the natural world to construct a kind of context in which you're thinking about character settings plots actions like so take like the traditional notion of narrative and then you're applying not and what the last one which she takes to be the most significant which i think is the most puzzling actually is what she calls revelatory imagination and that's the kind of like disclosure which calls the disclosure of particular truths and they're the idea I think is that you you gain access to aesthetic truths through like revelatory imagination so I think the best way that I've the the way that I usually think about this is in terms of like heidegger's notion of of disclosure or on hiddenness so I think she means something like that so it's not like an aesthetic truth we're like it's true that these that these frogs are in playing and in you know making sounds and that that's an e sharp right or whatever which is now weird things like that but but yeah like that that is not that's not the kind of aesthetic truth it's more like I haven't ever experienced this before and then like in experience you missed in in imagining it it comes to be something that's that's disclosed to me or revealed or like on his what would you be doing when you have that way so so I understand what some of these other things I'm not sure why they get called imagination yeah yeah but what's this last thing what are you doing when you like what's happening in the mind of the person they're picturing something they're just running a narrative like yeah i think i think revelatory imagination is actually closer to yeah it's closer to what people talk about when they talk about being being like engaged with nature or being like immersed in nature so it's sort of like allowing you you think you hand yourself over to the environment and that's kind of imagination I think for her in the sense that you're like well it's all you like like I'm giving this over to you and you're going to show me something right you're going to teach me something and so so that's a kind of imagination it's not like projecting because you're not like I'm gonna put myself in the point of view of the rabbit in the garden right you're more like well let me just follow it right and allow for what gets revealed so both both umm both Brady and sy Ito talked a lot about like kinds of sympathy like traditional notions not like sympathy like you know your dog died and so on I have pity or sorrow at the loss that you feel the grief that you have but not by the way she's 14 and still very healthy oh that dog is awesome I remember that little dog yeah unfortunately an eagle died a couple years ago you might remember yeah he uh he fought along life we was talking about yesterday if he like he was on the deck for two years barking just like couldn't see couldn't hear but you know he's he's still grasped in the spirit you know like yeah but yeah we're actually thinking about getting another dog it takes a while to get over it I know it's rough yeah I mean we haven't we have another we got from our neighbor's dog got left actually we need named her Sophia she's a she's an awesome dog it took a little while for me to get used to her because it was like kind of it just showed up you know so I wasn't like I want this dog and then you know it was like yeah we suddenly had a dog but she's so she's such an awesome dog but yeah our family's debating now like do we want a lap dog or do we want like a real dog [Laughter] obviously obviously on the side of the real talk yeah back to the imaginary the imagination up here dog prejudices we can fight about that in the comments if you want yeah so um so yeah I mean I think I think the the idea there is that oh sorry so yeah the main the main idea is like they they talk about a kind of sympathy in the traditional sense today where you're like where you're gotta go you're in your it's not that your state your state's like your emotions or your beliefs or your desires are mapping onto someone else's sympathy in the sense of like you are actually feeling the suffering of pain the pleasure like whatever it is the other organisms experiencing so it's like take take the kind of direct perception view of empathy or of like social awareness and then like think about I guess that's the way I think about it is that that you just by perceiving it you're directly in contact with the object in the world and that that's sympathy if I'm figuring out that sympathy as a kind of imagination right because you're you're still using the other kinds right you're taking perceptions that you have and you're associating with variety of things you're projecting your point of view but um but your your your privilege the other right your privilege in the thing that you're perceiving and that leads to a kind of unhidden as' or a disclosure of something deep in the world so I think that's what she thinks about how is that so how is that different from the taking the point of view kind of imagination I think I think it's that in the so think about it this way we'll use the human case and see if we can get to the natural case so I can I can engage in productive imagination with you like simulating your perspective about a variety of emotional states thing off right so you know let's pick a good one so your joyful about a new metal band listen to right yeah though I like like her new favorite metal babe bloodbath yeah so okay I'm gonna listen to that I just got I just got sleeps dope smoker I know I thought your picture of that old school though oh no I know I know it's old school but like and I listen to sleep before a lot but like I never had it on vinyl and now now likes my stimulating of the economy what I'm doing and like so and bind them direct to by the way like like by little data from the artist and then you get like a note that says like no it's from the record label but you know oh I see okay yeah anyway um so you let you listen to that particular thing right and you have like a particular joy and I see you experiencing that now in projective imagination I'm like taking my point of view on yeah I like I like sledge metal or I like thrash metal or whatever and I'm I'm simulating what it's like to be you right and experiencing that I think the revelatory imagination leaves yourself out like you're intentionally trying to remove yourself from from the perspective so um this is also key to two burly ants idea and to engagement theory right engagement theory is Amy a kind of like disappearance of the self or a shutting down of consciousness right so so it's that's actually what you're trying to do in nature experience is to or like that's that's like what it means to appropriately do it just to strive to mmm - like remove - stop being aware - to stop using concepts to stop having your point of view being be involved and to engage directly with the things right and so so I think that that those views are similar and that at that point and so so I think it's a different thing you're trying to do the way I distinguish it is like in the in the person that in projection case right you're taking your point of view and projecting on on the natural phenomena in the revelatory case you're aiming to have the point of view be the natural phenomenon of the frog right where if it's you know it could be anything that you're experiencing it seems it possible it seems impossible yeah I mean so I play you mean by that because like it if we're just like Nagel kind of reasons I know what it means to do that with it with like you or me but I'm not sure what it means to do it with frogs or a tree yeah that's interesting um yeah I guess there it sort of has to do it has to do with when when we're talking about the engagement of you it has to do with kinds of movement right so you don't have to you don't have to like have a subjective point of view or a subjective take on things that's like what it's like for me to experience the world in order to experience the movement of something right so let's take more let's take a case that's really let's take a case that would like really be difficult right so think about the movement of a tree limb in a storm right yeah we're thinking about the way that that a creek flows right a meandering path creeks those kinds of things there definitely you know you they don't have a point of view you know perspective right they're not organisms right there there you don't find you find the tree on the evolutionary tree right but you don't find there's no creeks um but I think they're I think what what Berlin has in mind is something like turning yourself over to the movement right so the the point of view that you're attempting to achieve is just perceiving the movement having the movement revealed to you and I actually think that that's what's interesting about like thinking about where necessity agency stuff in this context is that there's going to be a lot of cases where our bodies our bodily movement like the way that we perceive our own awareness is makes it difficult to make sense of those kinds of movements right right well I embrace the I embrace the idea that it's difficult to do that kind of thing right but I guess now for the same reasons it's not because because I because I think something like or what is uh like within each of those contexts that serve like what is the point of view we're concerned about I think for Brady it has more to do with like the difference between telling and narrative about some feature of the natural world and letting the place tell you yeah so sometimes sometimes there's like a kind of listening that we do that we can distinguish aesthetically where it's like you know I've and and kind of looking and kind of touching where it's like I've I'm letting my past experiences inform me right in a way that I'm trying to make sense of like well this pine tree seems like this other country that have experienced right or you know here's a pile of snow way up on this mountain this is like the last time that I saw a mountain in July right and or you know let's tell a narrative and you structure the narrative or you're telling a story and you're you know you're kind of articulating what that is I think I think there's a there's a shift where you are where you're where they think you you know nature tells its story on its own terms right but I guess I don't yeah because like with the tree example with this with the river example so you know there are certain movements that she's gonna make that are physically impossible for me to make that's right yeah there are certain bendings of that branch was it happened to me I'd be dead passive loaded or you know that's he's extremely not happy yeah so in what sense am I so I don't know what means to give yourself over to that kind of a movement where where you're somehow dropping out and you're what just experiencing the movement of the tree yeah as your own or like as a tree wood or so I just don't I'm not trying to be difficult or that's gonna I don't know and understand I actually I mean I I that's how I so yeah so I agree with I agree with what you're saying and what I end up are you mean about wildness is that that what's significant about the experience is that a difference that you're highlighting right so so so I think awareness of agency is something that in the most minimal forms has to still be present in our experience right and so I do think that what's what's interesting about wild experiences um and they don't have to be in wilderness areas or whatever but you know what experiences wellness is that contrast between the kinds of bodily movements the kinds of motions that exist in nature in the kinds of motions that were capable of so just think about you know to two bucks smacking their antlers together right and in a kind of war meeting or whatever in that case that's a kind of movement that we can't experience all right I mean we play football and stuff but that's the closest we can understand about what what serve moments might be involved so in this context I'm I guess I'm trying to I'm using a particular framework to make sense of that difference so the framework that I'm using is what's called the interface problem so that the interface problem in that context Awards the agency literature which is you know mirto malapa listen and patrie and a few other people were working on this and have some awesome stuff to say about it but like the the question is like how do we you know there's like distal intentions right intentions that are goals that we have and the proximal intentions intentions four particular bodily movements as means to those ends right and here and now and then motor intentions and motor intentions are just those intentions of structure our bodily movements right and one of the one of the things that I'm working with is making sense of how how we can explain wildness experiences the kinds of experiences you're talking about in those terms right so we have motor intentions to perform certain bodily movements and we can imagine okay I'm going to do this now I'm gonna snap now and then I have motor intentions that are interfacing with my snapping my goal my distal intention is like give you an example right and the proximal intention is doing that thing with my chainsaw finger right and then and that kind of that kind of integration can happen in in a variety of ways and people theorize about that but I'm trying to make sense of like well our motor intentions can't be mapped on to the kinds of movements that exist in the world very much so but we can make sense of like we can theoretically say something like why is the tree swaying like that right or why is the creek moving like that and you're not gonna get like you know kind of Davidson belief desire explanations of why they're doing it right right but you still can make sense of like well you know the buck wants to me and the tree wants to spread its spread it's do whatever right like like there's all sorts of things that you can think up for the organism having a goal and then doing particular motions or movements in order to do that but we can't like we can't in evolutionary terms right urn ecological terms but we can sort of integrate our goals and our aims in that way and so I think that that's like um that's one of the benefits of talking about the awareness of agency literature and the sort of cognitive science of action literature is to like use that to reframe what we what those experiences how we can make sense of those experience right so so is what you're saying then that part of what the appreciation of wildness is is in understanding a kind of intentional state which we could not have mm-hmm that that's sort of where the appreciation comes from is like okay I can see what the intention is but there's no way I could have that and that's where is appreciate yeah and I think it's even it's even that you're attributing you're attributing a sort of proximal intention in your experience right so you know I want experience when I was in a trail race and it's the very end was doing a 50k and I was at the very end and and out of the forest comes this like like five or six deer dough is coming running down this hill and I'm running and I'm like already kind of out of it like tripping a little bit because I didn't eat very much and then like and I heard this sound I was like hell is that like it was like it was like a train coming right and it just like it was like a massive dose running across the trail ran like right across in front of me and I'm I was like looking at it like looking at them and like I'm running for 50k and I'm like kind of dragging my legs you know and I hadn't just had this experience of like wow that's that kind of movement is now it isn't and i'm tributing to they want to run they want to get away from something you know I'm like definitely attributing rightly or wrongly I'm attributing intentions but what what is what is like mismatched in my experience is actually that I can't have access to their motor intentions so they experience the experience is getting explained by well there's actually a mismatch between the attribution of the kind of goals that the organism has right so higher cognitive goals where and the sort of thing I have access to right now there's questions about like are those conscious or not or how do we you know how do we make sense of how that integration happens and then all sorts of other questions about that but like but I think that's that's one way at least to for that phenomena yeah it's interesting because you know it's just thinking while you're saying that it's like there's a lot of connections sort of with like Dennett's work with the intentional stance because it almost sounds like what you're saying is we can take the attentional stance towards these things a tribute to them intention is that or beyond what we have and appreciate them in new ways where we couldn't if we didn't take that view towards them yeah totally yeah whether they really have those intentions or not it's kind of irrelevant it's just that it's useful and interpreting their behaviors yeah and I also think too I mean um it can this is where some of this gets mapped into questions about environmental ethics because really what I want to be able to do is use use the framing of these questions and aesthetics to like talk more about about questions that we have in developing an account of our mental value and so really you know I'm I'm interested in how cooperation cooperation between humans cooperation in nature and then cooperations between humans in nature is pivotal for kind of our environmental ethical questions and so I do think that that yeah like that framing helps then it's then it's sort of there's one aspect of Dennis view that it's really like you know other people applying his view like Bryce's account or like Deb Tollefson talks about like group agents yeah kind of based in in Dennis account and so that that literature is super interesting to me making sense of like well how do we apply that there they're kind of approaching a question theoretically and and you know raising questions about about group agents but then how do we apply this in the context of questions we have about cooperation right some of which are like very high level things like cooperation in international contexts right in order dress climate change in other cases they're very like they're very specific applied things like you know growing a vegetable and how you know growing plant in order to get some cucumbers or whatever and they're sort of back and forth the relationship that he needs calls so yeah I mean uh that's the ultimate with that's the ultimate application like after that chapter on awareness of agency I then reframe the discussion in terms of cooperation kind of socialize the discussion and then make sense of like whoa yeah where are those mismatches and out of those mismatches how are those mismatches important for our for kind of overcoming our our assumptions about whether it's possible to cooperate with the natural world I know right yeah so that's like the later the later stuff which is you know a lot of this is like drawing on them I write a bit about um Aldo Leopold's account so a lot of what a lot of what inspires what I'm doing is making sense of Aldo Leopold's land ethic which is which is pivotal II based in in cooperation right is a council ethics in general is about cooperation yeah and then his environmental ethics is toilet based and cooperation and so so that's what I'm you know I think a lot of the literature on joint action and you know on social cognition and all that stuff that I've that I've kind of worked on in other articles is then like getting brought in to that to that question yeah that's really interesting I mean the emphasis on cooperation is really cool I've always felt like nature's been very uncooperative yeah with me in particular I mean I have asthma hay fever I've allergies yeah and I haven't really been grateful I felt like it's attacking me constantly and trendek you know but the but still nonetheless the idea of cooperation between us and nature I think it's a really challenging ideas and it's really cool to think things through from that point of view yeah so thank you yeah one one book you might check out which would be which would fit with that with your worry about you know the kind of idea of nature attacking me there's there's a book by Ben Hale called the wild and wicked you know with MIT and it's it's super interesting and he actually use it as a foil in the first chapter of the book because he's very skeptical of sentimentalism and ethics in general but then he's also skeptical of aesthetics right as a framing for environmental values questions and part of the part of the issue is that you know when we think about aesthetic appreciation we tend to think about it in terms of like pretty things right nice things things that create joy things that create experiences which are positive but then when you go out in the natural world and you got a grizzly chasing you or a big pile of right totally right or you can't breathe currents then then yeah like like I've had I don't have asthma but I've had in runs I've actually had I can't remember what they call it but in a run people were driving on the road a lot and it create a lot of dust and so I ended up with asthma for the last five miles of grace and I was like why is this happening to me right but then when I got to him in to the doctor or doctors and nurses there and they were like you know you just had ya Basma but it's just like induced by but yeah like that sucked like that that experience is not it's not a pleasurable experience right right so so a lot of what I do though is to like there's a there's a whole literature called positive statics which is making sense of how how how we can move from negative aesthetic experiences positive aesthetic experiences right but then also how restructuring appreciation in the negative case helps us to helps us to illuminate further the kinds of appreciations we can have yeah so um so that that literature is actually really important for addressing Ben Hills worries about the role that aesthetics place an environmental value but then the general intuition that like you know nature nature is like okay it can kill you and it will kill you if it wants to you know and so for the kind of the idea that the idea that yeah it's like appreciation there the idea is that not that appreciation doesn't always need to be beautiful I can sometimes be ugly no there can sometimes be lots of other negative experiences I mean human the suite of emotions are like you know basic ones joy anger sadness disgust fear whatever right and then it had a bunch of other ones guilt shame Lola like a lot that boat is pretty negative right and so if you start to think about like well if that's gonna be something you know we tend to focus on all and wonder and these like highly you know like elated positive experiences but not only maybe aesthetic experience just of nature involves all of those other negative things too really yeah and it's what its what those how those contribute so I mean in the context of cooperation I actually that's one of the recent articles I wrote on on the awareness of joint agency so the one our one hour I can't remember what when when it came out couple years ago in social philosophy all right um I looked at like when people think about where Ness of joint agency doing things together what's their sentimental focus alright so when they focus on that they tend to focus on positive experiences so they focus on joy or the feeling of unity or the feeling of togetherness and I sort of argue that well you know negative sentiments also matter and they matter for them the maintenance of the maintenance of the activity right so so I think this work if like so for example from when I was young everyone loved to rolling around the grass but if I did it I'd be covered in welts yeah and couldn't breathing was like the least of my worries it's like itchiness and yeah feeling of like the grass is rejecting me my contact with it is like you know so how is that figure so if you have an experience like that which is my experience with grass by growing up yeah and I mean just regular grass not know code words here but how is that an appreciation how do you turn that into something that's aesthetically appreciate it because to me it felt like you know go away the grass is telling me yeah there I think I think the question is um what account do we do you start with right so I think the the cognitivists think that when you add understanding of ecology or you have of evolution or you add understanding of like the context right or even just like human evolution why do people have reactions in this way right then the more you investigate that the more that's gonna restructure the kinds of appreciation that are capable that you're capable of right that you that it will not cause you pain suffering that you have so so you know like think of it in the context of there's going to be there are certain things that that say say you want to convince someone so so just go back to an example before like you know it's the sleep is a kind of doom metal right or sludge sludge metal or whatever stone or metal I have a hard time listening to pretty much any other doom oh oh really yeah like people give me examples and I'm like I'm like well it's not sleep right okay and so so you know obviously that's like bias right that's prejudice and so the cognitivists think that that yeah that's it's a matter of adding more beliefs right so so so if someone wanted to add get me to appreciate more deeply different kinds of stone or matter of metal or you know do metal or whatever then they can point to certain things that are that are not affected by that bias or prejudice right so it doesn't sound like sleep but right and then they point to that pretty good so I think the cognitivists think it works something like that that the more you find out about the evolution of grass or the evolution of the particular thing that you're allergic to the more you're gonna understand the kinds of things that you can appreciate about it right without without worry so you know someone might someone might be able to touch some I know some people can touch certain kinds of certainly some people can touch poison ivy without getting the rash right and other people like me like I can't touch it right well I can certainly like look at it and it's not going to bother me right it would breathe it and they get in the lead internally totally that's why that happened to me once before and look at it from afar so I got it from afar yeah actually one time someone was burning it and it went like on my face my hell yeah that's terrible yeah but anyway um like I'm having trouble seeing I mean to take a different example so when I was 8 or 9 years old I went into the ocean and was sucked in by an undertow yeah I was clinging to the pylon of the of the pier where I lived that time is my beach and I just I just felt it like dragging me underneath and I was like clinging on so luckily a surfer noticed me and came over and rescued me yeah CPR and all of that but I really liked the sense of agency where time where I really felt like the ocean was sucking me in again on it mean it wanted me down and it was this overwhelming sense of force and it's for the longest time after that I hated the ocean I mean I'd like to look at it I didn't want to go near it I was like that thing's out to get me and I don't really understand how learning more about oceans and undercurrents and those things are supposed to help me appreciate that sense of like terror and panic and overwhelming force yeah or the sense of I mean from the grass so I'm not sure well what the cognitive is is gonna say and so then we can go right so then we could shift through another another kind right another a theory so so say we focus on the states they would not say the cognitivist stuff doesn't help one question would be whether the emotion theory or the what's called the arousal theory could help and they're where Carol really points to is the question of whether whether you're whether the emotions are correct or not right yeah and and there sometimes you know we have fears that are generated by the experience and then you have a kind of what is it called a version an acquired aversion it's not what it's called there's a specific category that I'm forgetting but anyway like I have an acquired version for avocado it's unfortunately like there really good food right and they're super healthy yeah guacamole is like no thing that people get into but I like I can't be around I like that I can't be around with avocados and I don't be around avocados like I see them and I'm like uh I like your version right now that doesn't it doesn't make sense right it's an emotional response of disgust and that emotional response of disgusts it's like incorrect right yes and so we can make sense that it's being correct in the sense in which well here's the function of it the function is to help me to not just something that's going to be harmful to me right and so so you know you can theorize about what's the evolutionary basis or what's the even it could be you know what's the cultural basis of it right because I might be blamed for doing for eating avocados right so it could be a cultural basis to you that frames when it's gonna be correct and one's gonna be incorrect to possess that emotion and so on the emotional view the idea is that yeah we kind of reflect on what those emotional states are and we can achieve a more positive state by trying to adopt the the correct emotions in those contexts and weed out all the incorrect emotions and then you'll come to have a better awareness of of the deeper appreciation right a more positive appreciation a positive doesn't need to be joyful it just means it just means that you're you're available to all the kinds of aesthetic experiences that might be possible some I mean make sure this line of argument by the way that the emotions can be a praise for correctness and in fact I my dissertation I spent a long time trying to defend that view so it's I'm glad but but that's so I mean I guess they saw the question that I'm getting at is like it so I still think grass is pretty I don't like to look I mean I think lawns are disgusting and I hate that people have lawns because it's kind of pointless grass but it like when I see grass in nature I enjoy it even though I feel like it wants to kill me when I see the ocean I think the ocean is magnificent even though I feel like it wants to destroy me and you know my time surfing too I'll forget about that you know being dragged into by the way I hate surfing for that reason however I still it aesthetically enjoy the ocean and its presence and even swimming in the ocean and so forth so I'm just I'm having trouble understanding how this relates to the aesthetic enjoyment which seems to me like something different from all of these things we're talking about yeah I guess it depends I mean in the nature aesthetics literature people tend to focus on beauty right as being the kind of umbrella category that structures the way we we do aesthetics and I think that's super-important right but the sublime is also a kind of experience right and so the way you're describing it to it seems like that could be you know the power of the ocean that is so overwhelming that them you know that it seems like it's gonna swallow you right like that kind of that kind of experience which you know that's also represented in different paintings like Turner's paintings for instance yes his paintings of the ocean about us for that reason like kind of captures the sublimity of it in a way that just you know swallows humans pretty like in the experience you you're like that is that is the experience of the sublime in the other so I think I think they're yeah like that can be that can be a kind of an aesthetic experience you know and and fear you know fear that is involved in that or horror it could be part of this like experience so again like I think the the positive negative thing is kind of it's kind of confusing because it's not only like joy or elation or like positive feelings in that sense right it's more about like is the is the range of possible aesthetic experiences opened up to you right yeah so it's more about like negative judgments in the sense of like like Hume sense of like if they're they're kind of like biased or prejudiced judgments that we have that are sometimes based on like an unfamiliarity and other times are based on a shitty experiences we have right and other times sometimes they're even principled right so like you know you might people might have a negative judgment about certain things that a lot of people like right so so you know there's a lot of social capital around talking about a particular movie right that everybody likes yeah you might think well it's inauthentic to love that movie because everyone's talking about that movie in the game like capital by talking about that movie so I'm gonna be like no I don't want to talk about that movie right that's a that's a kind of that's a negative aesthetic and so you know you can get through that snobbery right like overcome the critique you the reasonable critique you have which is that's not very charged a lot of the judgement about why it's good or whatever and then come to appreciate it positively now you might still disagree you might still disagree with the social the way that that appreciation is socially structured yeah and you still might have all sorts of negative appraisals of it but nevertheless you're open to the kind of experiences that are possible so I listen accents positive you can I ask you about this the hail thing that you were talking about the wild and the wicked yeah sure bob was a bob hell is that who was Ben hail Ben okay so I wonder cuz part of what I was wondering about when you were bringing that up is so if you want to base the value of nature and the aesthetic and enjoyment of it or maybe not enjoyment even just the aesthetic appreciation of nature so you can open up these different categories so if you take a person who's you know kind of like me but um I was more like this when I was younger but I've grown at it but I was like you know I don't like nature I don't want to be in it so I find both of its it's a malevolent force it's trying to kill me at every second of my life so it's part of the worry there that if you have a person like that then they're not going to so when you say that nature is valuable because of the aesthetics they're gonna say well I don't find it valuable right it's part of the worry there that the variability of the kind of experience that we have is going to sort of be too subjective in the sense that it can't ground these kinds of we should preserve nature absolutely yeah totally so so I don't know healthful view only I only read that book but um but the idea is he's kind of more of a kind of content pragmatist right so he's a pragmatist about environmental values in the sense that he thinks that you know a lot of environmental policy should be based on empirical stuff from the social sciences right and it's not going to be based on theorizing about intrinsic value let's say but then also he thinks that what's what he's a kind of content in the sense that he thinks that human rationality creates our duties or obligations so the fact that humans possess rationality means that we can think through what we should or shouldn't do with respect to the natural world and that gives us a kind of obligation to protect the natural world and brought more broadly he's like against this kind of sentimentalist or empathy with nature way of framing what the grounds are for our obligations and but then more particularly things yeah like when when people he talks about us like the precious vase phenomena like when people talk about nature aesthetics they tend to focus on you know it as being something that's had some pretty or beautiful or whatever but nature is not like that nature is gonna kill you and so it can't it can't be used in that way um I'll share with you kind of share screen again I'll share a diagram that might help to like frame some of the some of the relationships that I'm interested in cool let's look at this so I just made this today actually so the Nexus that I'm concerned about and this is really like the contemporary debate is what is the relationship between nature aesthetics and environmental ethics in the more extreme case of the judgments about environmental ethics those people are worried about like is there intrinsic value right is there value in the natural world that goes beyond means-ends reasoning is there biocentric value right like has there value that exists independent of human points of view and is their holistic value and so some of that is like you know how do we how do we make sense of our our judgments about the value of the natural world there's also like motivation I'm interested in like how do we care for it right what motivates to raise us to have concern for it so there's that sort of question and then the last is like the development question right the levels of value development and here I think nature aesthetics these are open questions I think they're questions about how we map these onto each other so I think certain things in nature aesthetics can kind of help us people make judgments about the beauty sublimity picturesque you know positive positive negative jodan judgments about the natural world and those are gonna those might or might not not behind so those questions about values I'm trying to in the book the book starts with an account of those distinctions between intrinsic instrumental biocentric and the per centric individualist holistic structures of value and then attempts to like basically first say we haven't done enough of talking about nature aesthetics and those in the ways that people make those distinctions yeah and then kind of give it a positive account and you know Leopold's Leopold's land ethic basically argues that like you know what's good is the preservation of the the integrity stability or what's called resilience and beauty of the natural environment and so that view is like pivotally beautiful Beauty plays an important role so there you know that's that's a kind of basic idea in the motivation context the question is like how does perception relate to effect right so how does your aesthetic sensitivity or your aesthetic sensibility in the natural world make you care for certain things or out of concern for certain things and here I think some of the some of the work that I think is most significant here is in the context of Agriculture so it's really in the question of like you know as someone is engaging in gardening or engaging in cultivating plants or caring for animals what sorts of aesthetic sensibility do they come to possess and then how does that map on to the way they could have care and concern so that's a key question and then you know in the context of development it's really like what what's the familiarity you have with different places different psychological states right what are evolved responses we talked a little bit about that so I think I mean it's this this I would say is like the kind of big question that that Hale is worried about and then other people are worried about T there's a bunch of people who there's a recent Journal of art and art criticism that raised this question about like what's the relationship between nature aesthetics and environmental ethics but I'd say this this is my way it was like framing what the different possible questions are I mean it's only a picture but you know it gives you a sense of like these are the different things we're wondering about right ya know I think this is the nexus between these is really important i mean yeah i think connecting these questions together is a super interesting way of going about the project yeah firstly for someone like me who's really interested in art but it's I mean I wrote an essay in high school entitled pave the world get rid of all of this stuff grow the plants on the moon's shifting back to the earth and we'll just skate everything and have a giant skate park down here but mostly because I have my experience with nature was I call apart from it right a Lea native from it and I've grown out of that obviously that's a that's a kid's way of looking at things obviously but just connecting these issues I think it's really important in general go back to my screen to like take certain discussions there in philosophy of mind and then like go to the weird places with them yeah so like you know in thinking about like awareness of agency talking about expertise or you know thinking about that context that was like okay unusual you know a council would make something an intentional action enough don't really hang well when we're talking about expertise right so how do we make sense of skill to action so I think yeah like the more recent stuff I've been working on is like the more esthetics of cooperation stuff like how do we make sense of what's beautiful about cooperating and then how does that how does that because in Leopold in the upholds I'm writing he he like focuses mostly on symbiosis right relationships between organisms that he takes the beautiful and of course like not the natural world is like you know competitive and vicious and there's also it's terrible stuff too but there but there's this kind of like way he's using the way we're going to develop our theory it's a focus on the development thing the the way we're going to develop our theory is in terms of like being able to recognize symbiotic relationships forms of mutualism and then and then using that to like sort of critique the way that we understand human cooperation right and so so that's what you know that's one area you know there's a lot of discussion about like what's the nature of human cooperation there's lots of discussion of you know how do we how do we think in philosophy or biology about about the structures of relationships between organisms right but like I think one of the things I'm I've been working on now is to like make sense of how those two discourses don't really hang out together that well and how we can like reframe the paper I'm working on now it's like trying to make sense of like how does how we reframe Leopold's like why didn't you pull think the aesthetics of cooperation is so important and how do we reframe it and you know in different context context like climate change and agriculture and stuff like that yeah exactly I think that's a super cool project I'm noticing we're getting really out of running out of time here okay yeah for a long time yeah bring kids stirring downstairs no I mean we haven't even talked about this notion of higher-order imagination that you're you want to develop into a half count of consciousness so so I wonder if sort of for the last few minutes here if we can segue into that I mean there's some things that I'd still would like to talk about the problem is that I just don't know anything about this so I'm talking with you has been very informative and I like thinking through these issues so I get distracted yeah but I do want to talk about this higher-order imagination stuff yeah sure can you tell us a little bit about what you mean by higher-order imagination what are the kinds of imaginations maybe we discussed earlier you're learning yeah so um here's that here's the basic the basic kind of like place where this comes from so I think one of the one of the ways that people frame the development of different theories of consciousness is in terms of like the transitivity principle right what you're definitely familiar with a lot of people are probably familiar with but the idea is that you know that for a state to be a conscious state you have the person is conscious of that state right and then the discussion is is something like well what are the different ways that we can be conscious of anything right and so if we want to articulate what that could be usually people say something like well it can be thought or it could be perception and so like when I outline you know the kind of diagram of consciousness I thought that tab will but under yeah so yeah like that I'll just show it briefly just so that and then we'll come back to it where's mmm is it there that's weird I can't find it on my share thing so whatever um you got to click over so it's on the screen in the middle show up oh sure that's weird no it was was it we'll skip that okay anyway the distinction that people's draws between like higher thought in our perception well in fact Rosenthal goes even further says there are no other ways that we could be aware of things it's cozy doesn't really say that like a hundred percent explicitly says that where is that well it is you know I'm sure east I'm sure you write about it but I'd like that particular thing because I've been sort of like I've been kind of cagey about that like I I basically said well what are the phenomena that people think hired or thought can't explain right and then let's start with that and then ask what is it that our imagination can do and approaching that so I I haven't the way I was thinking of it was you know probably people don't make this hard and fast distinction it's just sort of like a pragmatic thing right like these are the different ways we're aware and but that's helpful um yeah I'll send you the reference I mean it's in here sweet I think I've read that book yes I think in every bullpens are picky - no I mean I'm grateful I read that book that that in the experience of being in rows most classes like was transformative yeah it was it I learned a lot and I'm and I learned to think in a way that is like it's in just indispensable you know like he it was it was just so challenging all the time so and to see that book develop was awesome - yeah I know it was a cool thing it was a cool thing I mean I remember those conversations I remember you being there yes so I think I think imagination is another possible way right and then the question becomes something like whoa okay the key thing I have to do theoretically is then argue that imagination is not just kind of thought right our imagination about just kind of perception because the way you were describing it earlier sort of makes it sound like it is right cognitive process or some quasi perceptual process yeah so the way that other people talk about imagination yes right so I was describing it in Emily Grady's account the kind of motivation for thinking about a thinking about this project kind of came out of thinking about the aesthetics the nature aesthetic stuff because one of the things that I started to think about is are there kinds of imagination in a context of action that are more alike that are like dance performances right or like theatrical performances and can we use the sort of notion of a performance or the notion of a bodily movement and a kind of like imagining yourself doing something to frame the ways we might talk about imagination in the context of aesthetic appreciation so is it is it the case that like you know you can come to see different things hear different things like perceived things differently and have different quality of experiences by way of by way of different kinds of performances that you enact in the natural world and how would those different performances be be things that were you know embodied embedded right change your perception and and and is it is it more like like that's kind of like the idea is the analogy that we tend to focus on when we move from artists etics to nature aesthetics again is visual right or auditory but maybe dance is what's significant right and so I started thinking about that and then as I was thinking about that I was like well I have to make sense of the phenomenal character and so maybe there's kinds of imagination maybe the the way I think about higher order imagination is a kind of like enactment right of the lower state or like a performance right so it's like there's a there's a state and then there's like a choreography right that structures the way that we perform stick and that's what gives rise to conscious so I think there there's like a the ideas that it's like yeah so the idea is that that kind of imagination as a I'm I'm preparing to do a certain kind of movement right can play a role in generating our consciousness of that state so to take an example suppose you know you I see the the tea over here yeah I want to reach for it so what you're saying is that my conscious perception of the tea is somehow in part constituted by my imagining my movement towards the tea yeah this is a higher order in activist view that's right mmm yeah so it's a it's in a kind of an activism that structure that focuses on the action-oriented way that conscious states matter or function right so another way to get to this to and this is um this is where I guess I was I thought was thought was more strict about the distinctions but in the function of consciousness stuff he tends to say you know like in that paper he's like what's function consciousness and question becomes something like whoa we have first-order states in those first order states play a variety of roles right yeah and when he's when he's cataloging most states he's like our thoughts like you know logical inference does that need to be conscious or not and then he was like no it doesn't need to be right it could still play that state that role in goes through all the different states but one of the things that he doesn't he doesn't really talk about in that context his um is like rehearsing actions right so he talks about and talked about intentions and he says yeah you can have an intention that's not conscious and conscious right and so it doesn't matter to the role whether it's conscious or not so there might not be a function of conscious but um but I think I think well and I thought I thought a few times after reading that well what about like rehearsal of actions and how would were hurt it's not it's not in in that case right you're imagining what what would happen if you did that thing and imagining what what would happen if you did that thing you're aware of a variety of things right so I guess one of the question is like you know does the theoretical questions first does does imagination hang with the transitivity principle that can it be a kind of awareness right and then like and and then in this function case can I give us a new way to think about the function of consciousness right which is like the rehearsal the rehearsal of how it is that those states would bear on our action but and also that I think there's a further question is whether it can occur unconsciously because part of the view is that the higher-order States whatever they are have to be unconscious but now I guess I don't have to be but that is typically thought to develop into a regress if you don't the unconscious yeah the kind of a minute so kind of imagining that you're talking about it seems I mean typically to be conscious to be something I would consciously engage in and I'm not a way I mean maybe you defend this somewhere I don't I'm not aware of but yeah it's like we you would have to argue for the fact that you could have these kind of imagination episodes unconsciously or without being aware of the direct current yeah so I think I'm I think this is where it gets into questions about the kind of self control over action stuff right so so I think I think yeah you know and and I guess otherwise my articles like the stuff that I've written about it I keep coming back to like a way of framing different levels right so like levels of representation or levels of of accounts of self-awareness and stuff and so like when I think about when I think about that kind of question I think about it in terms of like well there's probably levels of self control over action and some of that some of that is explicit where I'm like like where I'm actually doing choreography right or where I'm actually doing you know performance of music or where I'm you know about to do an action painting let's say right so in those cases I might I might make explicit and be very aware those actions but in that in the intention in action as I'm performing the action if things are going well I have a kind of control over the action and I'm still I'm still like imagining what I'm doing but it's only when things are going badly that like it becomes something that becomes something that I become aware of so feels like what we're saying that you think it's a normal case that these kind of imaginings happen unconsciously yeah and then and then when and then when something's amiss then you then you kind of make explicit that you know well is that really what I saw or is that really what I heard and then you kind of come to have control over the over the action-oriented nature of it right and you want and I think there what's what's significant about that and I think this is important for aesthetics is that you know it helps you to to grasp how how looking is different from seen and how listening is different from from hearing right and variety of other ways of making that distinction or a one that one's passive ones active someone's passive and then also one one has a kind of seeming or appearance to it because of the way that it's that it's being rehearsed as bearing on as having those kind of action-oriented properties right and and then you end up with an account that that that makes sense of the normativity or - I think I mean I think that's for me that's the pivotal that's one of the little questions not about consciousness in the area of consciousness for like in this context like yeah how do we make sense of the norms that structure the way that we proceed right and the way that we experience an aesthetic experience and so that's what I've initially motivated me to start thinking about that is that you know those kinds of actions of mental rehearsal right those are those are things that can be normative right you can you can say well I didn't I didn't I didn't look in the Pro way because I didn't I didn't make it the case that I was available to this seeming that way right or you should have and you should have right and that that gets to kind of I guess here too you know like if so so there are kinds of regresses that happen in the context of action theory if it's the case that you have a kind of volitional account right so like what accounts for why it's the case of something is intentional action versus not unlike yeah a bodily movement that's caused by a will or a volition and that volition is something that's an action right and you then you face this kind of regress right exactly but I think I think um the it doesn't have to be it doesn't have to be like a state right or it could just be like a causal structure or a mechanism or something right I don't I don't think it has to be you don't have to think about it in terms of a kind of action I guess I mean so one of the questions that I had and thing about this is how it might be related to or different from predictive processing accounts so you know because that's a general that what we're starting to think of maybe as a general feature of the way the brain encodes information yeah being what the kind of response that's gonna get or the kinds of feedback that are coming back and every minimization and all those sorts of things so do you see a connection between predictive processing and the kind of imagination that you're talking about or how are those situated together yes and no so yes in the sense that maybe ultimately that's the kind of basis that that kind of state is the basis of it and I guess in an activist literature people are really you know they're interested in how Andy Clark is using this you know a framework to think about done activists of activism about perception I guess I guess MIT you know like in pure clean maybe they're the same right but I think one of the worries that I would have and this comes back to what we started with this question about question a lot of the questions about neuro statics has to do with the normativity of of our perception right and of our aesthetic experiences and so so I think I think it's not about prediction or even like expectation right it's like about how how it should be like how how it ought to be like how you III really think we have to capture like the normative structure of of our perceptual experiences and I guess that's what I worry about I worried that that um that the predictive processing account kind of leaves that out or leaves that leaves that distinction unclear unanswered and I'd like I'd like to to think that no that's a pivotal phenomena right like the the fact that our orientation what we should or shouldn't do with respect to looking at something or listening to something that's that's pivotal to the experience right phenomenologically but I also think just explaining and and so I think I think this they imagined the heart or imagination of you helps with that because you can you know there's a different I guess there's a different way that it could be correct or not or appropriate or not yeah in the case of imagining then there is in the case of prediction right and I think that's significant yeah interesting yeah okay so I've seen where I'm really running out of time here so all right sorry if I could ask you if there's anything which hasn't come up which you were hoping would come up an answer can be no but just don't I always like to check well I would have liked to talk about environmental disobedience a bit but I mean I just think that's super fun to talk about so like the Seuss I wrote a paper recently in a public policy book on environmental disputes which is basically like several disobedience on behalf of the natural world and and so in that context there's I just think that's interesting I just say you know if anyone wants talking about that it can give me an example is there an example of it yes so like have you seen like the Sea Shepherd's that show about Sea Shepherd's they're like people who protect whales and alright okay yeah so they're they're like breaking other people's boats and stuff they're breaking laws they're like destroying and destroying equipment right and they're so they're they're breaking of rowdy gloves so it's kind of disobedience but it's on on behalf of its civil in the sense that it's on behalf of some value that's your society doesn't care about and one of the things that I've been interested in is how an act of imagination can help us in that count in that context so um the that's kind of a thread to that I think um it's a kind of way that I apply some of the stuff that I've been thinking about but um but I don't know how can it help us it can help us because of the way that people frame how it is that we should interpret what people are doing when they're appealing to values in the environmental case or in the natural case they tend to highlight it in terms of to disks cursive kinds of ways of expressing right there like asserting something about value so whatever and I use this account to like say that the the account of an active imagination to say that actually they're like performing the values the protection or the care or the concern is is a kind of stopping that harm from occurring and so I connect that with a variety of ways that it's--there theatrically presented right with a variety of ways that it's um that performance plays a role in political action and so is a very short article kind of like reframing the different ways that people think like from brawls to the present and then apply in those different accounts to different views of environmental this BD ins but I but I've been I mean I've been it more interested in like the performing view performative accounts and how those performative accounts can work so in this same context would be people like chained themselves a tree so they don't get caught with them yep totally yeah yeah and how is it an active imagination gonna help us there because the way that we're framing happened how they're expressing those values and it's really a matter of like how it bears on the policy so how do you explain yeah to the judge right here's what they're they're doing to to express their conscience that's a that's a puzzle in that literature right and one of the things that people tend to focus on and role Rawls really focused on was that you're making an assertion about your values and I'm basically saying no that's not necessarily the case we can think about it in terms of kind of an active imagination they're they're enacting through you know their so you can think of it in terms of like sometimes destruction of property is understood as a kind of violence right and that that immediately makes people think something like well this can't be under this has be unjust right if this had to be bad that's people and but but the idea is that well no like their performance is actually the destruction of human like using a drift neck to capture tons of fish right and also capturing dolphins and whales and other creatures and so the destruction of that property is actually an enactment of the care and concern right there they are bringing about the values of preventing that pain suffering of the nanyan animals by way of imagining what the world would be like if they if those values environmental values were present so rather than thing as an expression of a violent act do you see it as an expression of care that's right yeah which read changes the way you already conception is the way that people conceptualize it yeah really interesting so I mean that that's just a kind of continuity of some of the things we talked about but um but yeah we could we could talk a bunch I don't want to keep you well when keeping you well we could keep each other but actually yeah come back any time because you know we're not going anywhere anytime soon I'm here all summer if you want to come back for around to be never lonesome yeah this is great I'm super grateful and if other if people have questions I want to follow up on any the crazy I said then we can we can talk about it and thank you again because this is like helping you know like get back in to doing some of us doing some of the research on it so I know the Philip II know I thank you for taking the time to do this I know we were supposed to do it before and I was sick back then and now I'm starting to wonder whether I had Kove it or not nobody knows but I know I know yeah at least I was really you know they bite sick and anyway so yeah I know we were supposed to do it but thank you for being patient and allowing me to bake off a little bit and then you know I'm grateful we got to do it it's good to reconnect and it's a good and you know this is a doing doing kind of like applied philosophy of mind and nature aesthetics and environment values like weird so yeah any opportunity to talk about it and connect with people potentially is great what I'm here for to try to help the weird but serious persons connect with other weird go serious participants they know I love people who think about strange things but in a serious way I'm serious about that so yeah I think you the work you're doing is really cool and I reading through your stuff I've learned a tremendous bond I'm not joking about that so it was really challenging for me especially as someone who's always come with its antagonistic kind of feeling towards nature and really think through these issues was really eye-opening and and quite rewarding actually so I appreciate the work you're doing well thanks man yeah so hang out for a second offline in dial I'll say goodbye but other than that thanks again James that was real soon hopefully all right cool

Channel: Richard Brown

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Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: k14NH5ZKr6Y

Length: 139min 34sec (8374 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020