Imperfect Cognitions

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...

This post is by Elly Vintiadis who recently guest-edited a special issue of Philosophical Psychology on psychedelic-assisted therapy and wrote a free access introduction to the special issue entitled The Promises and Perils of the Psychedlic Turn in Psychiatry . Elly Vintiadis Psychedelic substances have been part of human culture for centuries, used in ritual, healing and spiritual contexts to induce altered states of consciousness that could bring insight and change. In recent years, they have re-emerged in psychiatry in psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT), a therapeutic framework in which substances such as psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, ketamine, or ibogaine are administered in controlled conditions, accompanied by preparation, supervision and integration. Research into psychedelic therapies flourished in the mid-20th century but came to a halt in the early 1970s, driven by shifting social attitudes and the onset of the War on Drugs. With their classification as Schedule I substances under ...

This post is by Lorraine Besser. Lorraine is a philosopher, author, and professor at Middlebury College in Vermont. In this post, Lorraine addresses the topic of boredom. Lorraine Besser   Boredom. We’ve all experienced it and we all want to avoid it. But wait: isn’t it sometimes good to be bored? My answer is no , and that the very asking of this question reveals the ambiguous nature of the concept as it is used in ordinary discourse. This ambiguity is dangerous: because boredom is inherently bad, yet also quite natural for us to experience, it’s important to know how to alleviate it. Yet, we can’t begin to understand how to alleviate it unless we are clearer on what boredom is. Most often, when someone claims that boredom is sometimes good, what they mean is that it is sometimes good for our minds to be at rest, and for us to experience the peaceful, calming nature of a mind at rest. Without question, it is sometimes good for our minds to be at rest. A restful mind, however,...

This post is by David Ludwig (Wageningen University, Netherlands) and Charbel N. El-Hani (Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil) whose open access book Transformative Transdisciplinarity. An Introduction to Community-Based Philosophy has recently been published by Oxford University Press. Specialization is inevitable in academia. Becoming an academic often means becoming a specialist in a narrowly defined research area that is carefully sheltered from too much outside influence. While this division of epistemic labor is central to disciplinary progress, it clashes with the reality of complex socio-ecological crises. Issues such as biodiversity loss, climate change, economic exploitation, or public health are not technical problems that can be solved by a specialist with narrowly defined expertise but require collaboration across disciplines, synthesizing insights from distinct fields such as biological and Earth sciences as well as economics and policy studies.  While interdiscipl...

This post is by Kamyab Ghorbanpour, Michał Klincewicz, Paris Mavromoustakos Blom and Pieter Spronck who recently published a paper entitled: " The Blind Gamer: Examining Ethical Agency Through Choice Blindness in Game Design " in Entertainment Computing . Kamyab Ghorbanpour When you ask someone why they chose to read a particular book, they will usually give you a story. It might be about how they came across it in a bookstore, how it was highly recommended by their friends, or how it resembled a book they had previously enjoyed. Regardless, they will provide a story, a story believed both by you and by themselves. But what if that story is untrue? What if they weren’t actually aware of why they chose that book? What if they were confabulating without even realizing it? Choice blindness shows that this is not an unlikely scenario. Research has demonstrated that people can make decisions without being fully aware of them—or, for lack of a better term, they think they know why ...