Agora Speaker Series - Guidelines for an Autopoietic Approach to Phenomenal Consciousness

With a primarily epistemological focus, autopoietic theory has long and emphatically argued for a constructivist and anti-representational conception of perceptual experience. However, it has said little or almost nothing about the phenomenal dimension of said experience considered in itself (i.e., disregarding its epistemological status). For instance, while it is relatively clear how autopoietic notions such as operational closure and structural determinism ground an anti-representational epistemology, it is not clear how they might contribute (if at all) to explaining phenomenality as such. Overall, autopoietic theory has remained notably silent about phenomenal consciousness as a philosophical problem. In this talk, I analyse the theory's central philosophical/methodological commitments and outline, in conversation with some extant theories of consciousness (e.g., enactivism, IIT), the guidelines of what might become an autopoietic approach to phenomenal consciousness.

Mario Villalobos followed undergraduate studies in medicine (University of Concepción, Chile) and psychology (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile). He obtained a master’s in philosophy at the University of Chile and received his PhD in Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science from the University of Edinburgh. Since 2016, he is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the School of Psychology and Philosophy, University of Tarapaca, Chile, and from 2022 to 2023, he was appointed an associate researcher in the Department of Philosophy in The School of Media, Arts and Humanities, University of Sussex, UK. His main area of research is the philosophical development of the autopoietic theory of living beings and cognition.

The event will be held in 20-4. All welcome!