What could come before time? Intertwining affectivity and temporality at the basis of intentionality

Hello and welcome. It's April 3rd, 2024. We're here in Active Inference Guest Stream 78.1 discussing what could come before time with Juan Diego Bogota. And this should be a great presentation followed by a discussion. So thank you again for joining. Looking forward to the presentation and discussion. Thank you, Daniel. So hello, Robbie. So my name is Juan Diego Bogota. And today I'm going to talk about mainly phenomenology. Not so much about active inference, but maybe our discussion will go that way, I kind of assume. So to give you a bit of context about this. So this presentation is actually based on a paper that I recently published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences last month. But to give you a bit more context, in general, I'm interested in the relationship between cognitive science and phenomenology. And when I talk about phenomenology, I'm very mindful about the fact that this is a term that is a bit ambiguous in the literature. Because if you talk to maybe philosophers of mind or cognitive scientists, when they talk about phenomenology, they often think about, say, qualia, or, you know, the what it's like of phenomenal consciousness. And that's okay. But I usually use that term to refer to specific philosophical tradition and known as phenomenology that was started towards the beginning of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl. And it was further developed by people like Merleau-Ponty or Heidegger or Simone de Beauvoir. And the whole point of phenomenology is to try to provide a very strict and rigorous analysis of consciousness and lived experience by taking very, very seriously the first person perspective. So it's a matter of trying to unveil the invariant structures of consciousness. And I think that this methodology is quite promising for us to better understand consciousness and cognition, so it might be an interesting thing to further integrate into our scientific understanding of the mind. And I think that a good way of connecting phenomenology with the broader kind of empirical context of the cognitive sciences is the inactive approach, mainly because people like Francisco O'Orella or Evan Thompson have been very influenced by phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty when it comes to ideas like embodiment, the embeddedness of cognition, the importance of subjectivity, this kind of stuff. And in this particular talk, I want to focus on something that these two frameworks have in common, which is how they characterize intentionality. So usually in cognitive science, philosophy of mind, when we talk about intentionality, we mean kind of this directedness or aboutness of certain mental states. So there's this kind of relationship between the mind and specific object in the world. And that's kind of the usual concept of intentionality. But I think that phenomenologists and quite a bit of an activists have a bit of a broader conceptualization of intentionality, not only as this aboutness that is directed towards a specific object in the world, but rather as a general openness to the world. And the whole idea of phenomenology is precisely to identify the structures that constitute that openness. And that's, again, that's kind of the context of my presentation and my paper. But when you look at the kind of the literature in classical phenomenology, you notice that there is one particular structure or feature of lived experience that has some sort of primacy, and that's temporality, or as Husserl calls it, time consciousness. So here I bring a quote of Husserl. What do you mean? There's like multiple kind of overlaid visual frames. Oh, hold on. Let me try again. Thank you. I was entertaining the possibility it was intentional. Oh, no. Yeah, I didn't know what happened. Let me try again. Yeah, looks good. Thank you. Okay, fantastic. Okay, so now without the overlay. So here I have a quote of Husserl talking about time consciousness. He says that in the ABCs of the constitution of all objectivity given…