The Enactive Torch

An extended abstract on some of the philosophical aspects of using the Enactive Torch has been accepted for a talk at this year’s Workshop on Philosophy and Engineering (WPE-2008) to be held in London.

Engineering Conceptual Change: The Enactive Torch

R. Chrisley, T. Froese & A. Spiers

In the Philosophy and Engineering community, there is general agreement that interaction between the two fields can be mutually beneficial. However, there are distinctive ways in which engineering can play a crucial role in assisting the particular case of philosophy of mind, especially concerning our understanding of conscious experience and perception. The reciprocal design/use cycle of certain kinds of experience-augmenting technologies can facilitate the kind of conceptual advance that is necessary for progress toward a scientific account of consciousness, a kind of advance that is not possible to induce, it is argued, through traditional discursive, rhetorical and argumentative means. We present an example of engineering activity that plays this crucial role in informing philosophical research in the PAICS group at the University of Sussex: the design and use of a novel sensory substitution device (the Enactive Torch) as a means of inducing in the user new philosophical concepts of perceptual experience.

The full extended abstract can be downloaded from here.

The first and second prototype of the Enactive Torch were demonstrated at this weekend’s Workshop on Enactive Approaches to Social Cognition in Battle, UK. This was the first opportunity to explore the effects of participants interacting with each other via this device.

Whether it is possible to use several Enactive Torches in order to conduct a scientific study of the dynamics of perceptual crossing still requires further investigation, though it seems plausible that when two Torches cross they significantly boost each others signal.

Here are some pictures from the workshop demonstration:

Interacting with the Enactive Torches

Experimenting with perceptual crossing

More news coming soon!

Tom

We are going to be presenting and demonstrating the Enactive Torch during Test_Lab on the 21st of Feb. at V2_ in Rotterdam. For more information about V2_ please click here.

The proposal which Tom Froese and Adam Spiers have submitted to this year’s Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson, Arizona has been accepted as a concurrent talk. The Enactive Torch is going to the States!!

The title of our contribution is:

“The Enactive Torch: Promoting first-person phenomenology in the study of enactive perception”

In order to read the extended abstract of our talk please click here.

There will be a seminar about the Enactive Torch taking place for the Life and Mind seminar series at the University of Sussex on Wednesday, the 17th Nov. 2007.

You can find more details here.

We are going to demonstrate the Enactive Torch at this year’s Enactive Interfaces conference. We will also hold a talk (see abstract below).

Toward a Phenomenological Pragmatics of Enactive Perception

The enactive approach to perception is generating an extensive amount of interest and debate in the cognitive sciences. One particularly contentious issue has been how best to characterize the perceptual experiences reported by subjects who have mastered the skillful use of a perceptual supplementation (PS) device. This paper argues that this issue cannot be resolved with the use of third-person methodologies alone, but that it requires the development of a phenomenological pragmatics. In particular, it is necessary that the experimenters become skillful in the use of PS devices themselves. The ‘Enactive Torch’ is proposed as an experimental platform which is cheap, non-intrusive and easy to replicate, so as to enable researchers to corroborate reported experiences with their own phenomenology more easily.

Presented at the 4th Int. Conf. on Enactive Interfaces, (Enactive/07), 19-22 Nov. 2007, Grenoble, France.