Arts and Minds Lab

Motivation

Philosophy is a central discipline within the sciences of the mind. It challenges assumptions of psychology and cognitive neuroscience. In our case, we do this based on insights from a 4E philosophy of mind (4E stands for embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive) that we want to shift towards the affective-aesthetics relations, and cultural artifacts that make up our lifeworld. Such cultural artifacts are media of the mind, and the mind is fundamentally mediated by them. A third basic operating principle of the mind beyond its affective-aesthetic and mediated character is the prospective character that we explore as part of predictive theories of the brain. This is I would characterize as AMP cognition. Under such a conceptual framework the lab aims to capture how our designed environment (from the urban built environment to now AI driven media ecologies) impacts mental states, such as perception, emotion, and cognition. We see philosophy’s task to provide a systematic perspective that then also identifies blind spots in the cognitive sciences regarding our culturally mediated mind and our aesthetic relation to the world. We believe that philosophical theory building should nonetheless go hand in hand with experimental studies — it should be empirically engaged in this sense — and requires also collaboration with practitioners such as designers, architects, artists. This is what we try to do at the Arts and Minds Lab.