Peer-Reviewed Conference Presentations: Recent and Upcoming
Jan. 2025 – Self-Shaping Actions: A Phenomenological Account of Flow States – American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division Meeting, New York
The flow state has been a subject of increasing interest in positive psychology and the philosophy of agency. In psychology, flow is described as an autotelic state (i.e. as intrinsically rewarding). Moreover, iterated flow states are said to lead to the development of an autotelic self capable of experiencing its actions as their own reward. Nevertheless, both the autotelic self and its relation to autotelic actions remain undertheorized in the psychological literature. But what must the self be in order to optimally develop through autotelic action? Moreover, just how is it that autotelic actions can fundamentally reshape self-experience? Drawing on Husserlian phenomenology of time consciousness, I provide an account of flow as self-shaping action. This account explains how the autotelic structure of flow functions as a source that motivates the development of the autotelic self over time.
Oct. 2024 – Experience For Its Own Sake: Towards A Phenomenology of Autotelic Experience and Well-being – International Society for the Philosophy of the Sciences of the Mind (ISPSM), webconference
I argue that well-being is a phenomenological problem since well-being is an inherently normative phenomenon and since its normativity can be elucidated at a phenomenological level of analysis. I first give a phenomenological account of well-being understood as an autotelic state in which action and attention are experienced as their own reward. I then argue that it is at a phenomenological level of analysis that we can disambiguate between the distinct senses in which autotelic experience can carry normative weight. I do so by giving an account of the temporal, horizonal structure of autotelic states that allows us to make a principled distinction between the distinct forms of autotelicity that are evinced in neutral exercises of skill and in actions that facilitate the cultivation of virtue. I conclude with a methodological reflection on the role that phenomenology can play in developing an account of the content of autotelic experience that clarifies its normative dimension and that thereby facilitates dialogue between psychological and moral approaches to well-being.
Aug. 2024 – Experience For Its Own Sake: Towards A Phenomenology of Autotelic Experience and Well-being – The Center For Subjectivity Research, Copenhagen, Denmark
Jun. 2024 – Self-Shaping Actions: A Phenomenological Account of Flow States – Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture (EPTC) meeting, Annual Congress, Montreal, QC
Nov. 2021 – Is Consciousness Fundamental Or Fictive? Why Realists and Illusionists About Consciousness Are Both Wrong – Western Canadian Philosophical Association Conference, Victoria, BC
In the debate between realists and illusionists, one theorist’s datum is oftentimes another theorist’s fiction. On the one hand, phenomenal realists argue that consciousness, understood as qualia, is the central datum to be explained by any theory of mind worth its salt. On the other hand, illusionists argue that the realists’ concept of consciousness fails to refer to any datum but is instead an antiquated theoretical construct that has long since outlived its usefulness for a science of mind and so should be reconceptualized in terms of third-person neuroscientific evidence. I argue that the oft-neglected transcendental philosophy of Ernst Cassirer provides us with the conceptual resources we need to surpass the current deadlock between realists and illusionists by enabling us to recognize that the entire debate is misframed given that consciousness is neither a datum, nor a posit, but is instead the general condition for the intelligibility of particulars.
To read a draft of the above paper, please visit the following: link
Nov. 2019 – Representation as Sensorimotor Orientation: The Role of Non-Propositional, Spatial Simulation in Scientific Representation – Western Canadian Philosophical Association Conference, Lethbridge, Alberta *Winner of the WCPA Best Graduate Student Essay Prize*
The pervasive use of images and diagrams in science has recently garnered a great deal of debate in the literature on scientific representation. Bechtel et al. (2013) argue that images aren’t merely contingently useful tools that scientists use in order to communicate scientific findings. Rather, they suggest that images are a constitutive part of scientific theories. This is because images represent worldly mechanisms in ways that draw on scientists’ capacity for spatial simulation. However, the authors’ account seems to be at odds with the fact that the congenitally blind are also capable of spatial simulations despite lacking visual input. I argue in support of Bechtel et al. that the contingency of visual imagery does not rule out its constitutive role since it forms an integral part of scientists’ sensorimotor coupling with the world. Furthermore, I argue that scientists’ reliance on imagery and spatial simulation shows that there is a crucial non-propositional and perceptual component at work in scientific representation.
Workshops
Nov. 2024 – Can AI Be Transcendental Subjects? A Husserlian Perspective – Invited speaker for “AI and Consciousness” workshop, James M. Houston Centre for Humanity & the Common Good, Green College, Vancouver, BC.
In my talk, I built on Johannes Jaeger’s recent (2024) argument that current LLMs do not meet the criteria for agency identified by Enactive cognitive science. I argued that, in addition to relying on Enactivist descriptions of the structure of agency such as Jaeger’s, we must also use a phenomenological approach in order to identify the criteria that allow us to recognize conscious agency in any given entity. I then argued that transcendental subjectivity (and, in particular, the fundamental structure of time consciousness that Husserl calls “the living present”) is the condition for the possibility of conscious agency. I concluded with an argument that tried to show that current AI models are not the kinds of entities that could instantiate that structure.
May 2024 – Invited Tallis Scholars Workshop participant and respondent to Raymond Tallis’ “Rescuing the Self” public lecture, James M. Houston Centre for Humanity & the Common Good, Vancouver, BC.