California Phenomenology Circle
Department: Philosophy
Date and Time: January 11, 2020 | 2:00 PM-4:00 PMEvent Location: HIB 55
Event Details
Jeffrey Yoshimi (UCI Ph.D. in Philosophy) will present new results in phenomenology and cognitive science.
Jeff is Associate Professor, UC Merced, Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences.
Jeff was lead organizer of the conference, “Horizons of Phenomenology”, held at UC Merced in Spring 2018.
"Visualizing Phenomenology using Cognitive Maps"
Abstract: Naturalized phenomenology is the attempt to understand phenomenological accounts of conscious experience using the empirical and computational resources of the cognitive sciences. I describe an approach to naturalized phenomenology that is (especially when compared with the alternatives I have tried) simple, flexible, easy to implement, and easy to visualize. It involves the use of cognitive maps, which are recordings of past states for an agent, which can be plotted in a state space and then colored using various techniques, e.g. using a heat map indicating which states have been visited most often. This simple construct facilitates a great deal of work linking such phenomenological concepts as horizons, constitution, fulfillment and frustration with empirical and computational work on spatial maps used in navigation, flexible action repertoires, and intellectual skill.