Emperor’s New Markov Blankets, Attention, Dan Dennett

hello everyone and welcome back to the show today I'm extremely pleased to be speaking with Chris deler Chris is a post-doctoral fellow working in the center for research in cognition and neurosciences in Brussels he focuses on computational models of cognitive functions mental representations and Consciousness as well as broader topics prominent in philosophy of computation philosophy and ethics of AI metacognition and philosophy of science Chris thank you ever so much for joining me um thanks for the invitation oh it's an absolute pleasure um people have been asking for a bit more of uh you know critical voices on active inference which uh and and you're the perfect person to go to but before we get there uh we were talking a little bit off air about Dan Dennett um Dan passed away unfortunately last week at the time of this recording I believe it was and he was your PhD supervisor so clearly a great deal of your work has been influenced by Dan um I wanted to talk about your 2015 paper um discussing the cartisian theater and it's sort of place or lack of you know it's it's it's sort of ought to lack of place in predictive processing or perhaps not but before we go there um I know you want to say a couple of things about Dan and it would be great just to discuss his sort of influence on you more more broadly sure thank you so yeah so this is a really sad moment because that has I think it's easy to say defined in large in many ways defined the the the shape of philosophy of Mind in the 20th century up to today and it's a really great loss to to see him go um and I I guess I I mentioned to you when we were setting up this meeting that I would like to spend a little bit of time discussing him because uh I think that Dan is in some ways uh a kind of a philosopher who should be uh followed in the way that he approached philosophy of mind and uh I think that it's you know worth focusing on that that's that's one thing that I find really interesting and important about him and the other thing is that uh I had a personal relationship with him uh I did two extended research stays with him during my PhD and we've met at many occasions at different conferences uh and uh over the past weekend there were a lot of obituaries uh that that showed up about Dan and uh he clearly was a lot of things to many people and it's actually astonishing to see how many people he has influenced across multiple disciplines but I think it's also worth remembering uh that he was just an extremely kind uh nice guy he was just a he was just a joy to to be around um and so that's the second thing that I sometimes feel is missing from contemporary philosophy so so the way he did philosophy is that he tended to focus on science right and he thought that there's no philosophy free science uh and similarly he thought that that philosophy of Mind should be informed by uh our best state of scientific knowledge and sometimes I feel philosophers forget that it's very easy to uh stay within the boundaries of our discipline and and not reach out uh and not try to to you know have a peak what's going outside of the boundaries of the Ivory Tower of philosophy of mind and I think it's really important to remember that that it that you know that if there's a legacy to Dan's work it's that philosophy can be informed by science and it's actually very productive and important for philosophers to engage with scientists and it's a kind of a two-way it's a two-way uh exchange of ideas where both sides can benefit productively um and then the second thing is that philosophers can be extremely serious about themselves and about their work and about really entrenched in their positions and and uh very competive uh and uh yeah kind of hardheaded and I think that Dan uh although we cannot say that he had a small personality he was definitely uh you know a flamboyant personality as well but he he was really a person who was very kind towards Junior Scholars he was he would always find…