Engines of Hostility: The Tower of Sabotage and Hack

David Spurrett (University of KwaZulu-Natal)

The Mind, Language and Action Group (MLAG), a research unit of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Porto, invites you to the sixth talk of the new MLAG Seminar Series featuring presentations by international researchers on topics of interest to the group. The talk, given by David Spurrett (University of KwaZulu-Natal / UKZN) and entitled "Engines of Hostility: The Tower of Sabotage and Hack", will take place on March 26, 13:00-14:30 Western European Time (WET). The meeting is online. MS TEAMS details: Meeting ID: 311 808 653 439 13; Passcode: ec6WP7q5.

The seminar is jointly organized by Sofia Miguens (MLAG-IF), Dan Zeman (MLAG-IF), James Grayot (MLAG-IF), Rafael Antunes Padilha (MLAG-IF|IFCH-UNICAMP), Samuel Lima (FLUP) and João Carlos Rocha Lima (FLUP). Information about MLAG can be found here: https://ifilosofia.up.pt/research-groups/mlag. To contact the organisers, please send an email to [email protected].

All welcome!

ABSTRACT:

The topic of cognitive hostility is currently lively. The original idea that the activities of agents could pollute the environments of situated or scaffolded agents goes back to Sterelny’s review of Clark’s Being There and Sterelny’s own Thought in a Hostile World. Hostility makes agents less likely to act in their own interests, more likely to act in ways that help the informational polluters. In those early treatments the main source of hostility (camouflage, manipulative parasitism, etc.) is natural selection. The idea that scaffolding and technology could be instruments of hostility, produced by planning and research and developments, has received less attention until recently. I’m working on a book on the various forms of hostility, and the different ways that scaffolded agents can be vulnerable to it. (Working title: “Whose Mind is it Anyway?”) In the final chapter of that book, I develop a framework for thinking about both the sources and targets of hostility. It aims to distinguish significantly different ways that hostility can be produced, and ways that the selection processes of agents can be vulnerable to hostility. The approach I take repurposes Dennett’s “Tower of Generate and Test” and I call the result the “Tower of Sabotage and Hack”. In this talk I argue that we need a general way to think about the sources and targets of hostility, explain the Tower of Sabotage and Hack, and illustrate it with select examples.