Imperfect Cognitions

This weeks post is by Kristina Šekrst, a researcher and engineer working at the crossroads of logic, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. She is sharing an introduction to her new book  The Illusion Engine: The Quest for Machine Consciousness (Springer Nature, 2025). Kristina Šekrst The Illusion Engine began with a simple question: how could machines ever think? It quickly met a less simple one: how could I, with a foot in both philosophy and software engineering, make either side intelligible to the other? Engineers glaze over at metaphysics; philosophers glaze over at code. Somewhere between the two, confusion turned into fascination. The book grew out of that mismatch, moving between deep technical dives – attention mechanisms, backpropagation, transformers – and philosophical puzzles about consciousness, intentionality, and meaning. It asks whether a machine that hallucinates might, in doing so, come closer to something like experience. This quest...

Today's post is by Helene Cæcilie Mørck, co-written with her fellow authors, in which they address their latest article, For a Choreography of Emotions: Spatiotemporal Phenomenology , published in Psychopathology on July 28, 2025.  Helene Cæcilie Mørck   Helene Cæcilie Mørck  I draw on my twenty years as a choreographer, as well as my lifelong lived experience with altered states related to schizophrenia. During several hospitalizations for psychosis, I found that my training and embodied knowledge as a dancer and choreographer provided me with methods to navigate the emotional chaos I was experiencing.  I developed an inner choreographic map, using my embodied knowledge to structure the emotional turmoil and altered states I experienced. In close collaboration with Giovanni and Veronica, we have been translating this knowledge and deconstructing the language of dance and choreography into practical tools that potentially could be used to test the Chore...

  This post is by Annalisa Coliva , Chancellor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, and editor-in-chief of the Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy . What does it mean to be a woman? Philosophers, feminists, and activists have debated this for decades, often clashing over whether “woman” should be defined biologically, socially, or politically. In recent work (Coliva 2024), I have argued that we should instead think of woman as a family resemblance concept—a flexible, open-ended framework that avoids the pitfalls of rigid definitions and better accounts for inclusivity, particularly for trans women. A family resemblance account rejects the idea that woman must be tied to strict, necessary, and sufficient conditions. Instead, it allows for overlapping similarities and “intermediate links.” Just as Wittgenstein described the concept of game—where tennis, solitaire, and playing with dolls share different but overlapping traits— woman can include diverse ca...

This post is by Daria Cybulska (Poland/UK), who is the Director of Programmes and Evaluation at Wikimedia UK, leading programmes and advocacy for knowledge equity and information literacy. Daria is a trustee at Global Dialogue, a platform for human rights philanthropy, and in 2023/24 was awarded a Churchill Fellowship, investigating Central Asia’s online civil society and its resilience responses to a shrinking civic space. She was also a fellow at the AKO Storytelling Institute, based at the University Arts London.   Daria Cybulska Wikimedia UK demystifies and drives engagement in open knowledge, as the national charity for Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects . We have been delivering education activities for over ten years, with an explicit focus on the use of Wikimedia as a tool to develop information and media literacy skills . Our programme takes place online and in schools, universities, museums, libraries and community settings. Our research shows that learning t...

This post is by David Simonin, director of the project entitled "Homo Fabulator: the performativity of illusory representations" (HomoFab), and editor of a new book (in French) on the power of stories. The book is called Les Fables de l'Homme  (Human Fables) (Éditions Kimé 2025). Book cover for Human Fables (2025) What if our illusions shaped reality more reliably than the truth? In the age of fake news, post-truth and virtual realities, there is no doubt that false beliefs, fictions and illusions have a profound impact on our societies. What was long perceived as a deviation to be corrected now appears to be a constant feature of human thought and behaviour. This collective work offers a unique exploration of the power of fabulation: why do we need to tell ourselves stories, individually and collectively? What are the effects of these narratives and representations? Combining philosophy, literature, human and social sciences, the authors question the foundations of our ...

This post is by Orestis Palermos who is the author of Cyborg Rights: Extending Cognition, Ethics and the Law (Routledge 2025). Book cover of Cyborg Rights For most of human history, the privacy and integrity of the mind—its freedom from intrusion and manipulation—has been taken for granted. Dark practices such as torture, brainwashing, or aggressive propaganda have always existed. Yet in times of peace, they were rare, widely condemned, and—except in extreme cases like torture—often possible to resist. That presumption of freedom of thought is now slipping away.  Cyborg Rights (Routledge) argues that the sanctity of our mental lives could be under serious threat, due to our growing reliance on extension technologies: smartphones, laptops, AI, and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Consider Neuralink’s wireless neural implant , which already allows people to control computers with their thoughts.  Or imagine the next step: smartphones controlled by BCIs, their outputs displaye...