Katsunori Miyahara

Hokkaido University | Hokudai · Center for Human Nature Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience (CHAIN)

We explore the nature of expert minds in skilled performance by examining classic Japanese dramatist Zeami’s account of skilled expertise in Noh drama. Zeami characterizes expert minds by the co-existence of mushin and riken no ken. Mushin (“no-mind”) is an empty state of mind devoid of mental contents. Riken no ken (“seeing with a separate seeing”...

This chapter explores a non-intellectualist approach to skilled expertise by comparing modern phenomenological philosopher Hubert Dreyfus’ account of absorbed coping with fifteenth-century Japanese dramatist Zeami Motokiyo’s account of Noh performance. It begins by presenting Dreyfus’ account of skilled performance and skill development, which envi...

Habitual actions unfold without conscious deliberation or reflection, and yet often seem to be intelligently adjusted to situational intricacies. A question arises, then, as to how it is that habitual actions can exhibit this form of intelligence, while falling outside the domain of paradigmatically intentional actions. Call this the intelligence p...

This book evaluates the potential of the pragmatist notion of habit possesses to influence current debates at the crossroads between philosophy, cognitive sciences, neurosciences, and social theory. It deals with the different aspects of the pragmatic turn involved in 4E cognitive science and traces back the roots of such a pragmatic turn to both c...

Chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly capable of engaging in what seems like natural conversations with humans. This raises the question of whether we should interact with these chatbots in a morally considerate manner. In this chapter, we examine how to answer this question from within the normative framework of virtue...

Phenomenology is one of the most promising approaches to study conscious experience. It holds that a rigorous study of conscious experience requires a transition in the subject from the "natural attitude" (NA) to the "phenomenological attitude" (PA). NA describes our ordinary stance, in which our attention is directed at external objects and events...

The gap between the Markov blanket and ontological boundaries arises from the former's inability to capture the dynamic process through which biological and cognitive agents actively generate their own boundaries with the environment. Active inference in the free-energy principle (FEP) framework presupposes the existence of a Markov blanket, but it...

There are many theories of the functions of consciousness. How these theories relate to each other, how we should assess them, and whether any integration of them is possible are all issues that remain unclear. To contribute to a solution, this paper offers a conceptual framework to clarify the theories of the functions of consciousness. This frame...

The gap between the Markov blanket and ontological boundaries arises from the former’s inability to capture the dynamic process through which biological and cognitive agents actively generate their own boundaries with the environment. Active inference in the FEP framework presupposes the existence of a Markov blanket, but it is not a process that a...

This paper disputes the theoretical assumptions of mainstream approaches in philosophy of pain, representationalism and imperativism, and advances an enactive approach as an alternative. It begins by identifying three shared assumptions in the mainstream approaches: the internalist assumption, the brain-body assumption, and the semantic assumption....

What role does habit formation play in the development of sport skills? We argue that motor habits are both necessary for and constitutive of sensorimotor skill as they support an automatic, yet inherently intelligent and flexible, form of action control. Intellectualists about skills generally assume that what makes action intelligent and flexible...

This chapter aims to situate Merleau-Ponty’s notion of body schema within the context of contemporary philosophy of pain. In the first section, the chapter starts by introducing his notion of body schema and its role in his account of the experience of pain. It then briefly reviews current theoretical treatments of pain in the analytic philosophy o...

The subjective features of psychological phenomena have been studied intensively in experimental science in recent years. Although various methods have been proposed to identify subjective features of psychological phenomena, there are elusive subjective features such as the spatiotemporal structure of experience, which are difficult to capture wit...

We discuss our attempts to develop a short-term phenomenological training program for training naïve participants in phenomenological skills. After reviewing existing methodologies for collecting phenomenological data and clarifying the benefit of the short-term training approach, we present two training programs and two experiments that tested the...

We explore the integrated structure (or the unity) of consciousness by examining the “phenomenological axioms” of the “integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT)” from the perspective of Husserlian phenomenology. After clarifying the notion of phenomenological axioms by drawing on resources from Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (S...

In opposition to mainstream theory of mind approaches, some contemporary perceptual accounts of social cognition do not consider the central question of social cognition to be the problem of access to other minds. These perceptual accounts draw heavily on phenomenological philosophy and propose that others' mental states are “directly” given in the...

Enactive approaches in cognitive science propose that perception, and more generally cognitive experience, are strongly mediated by embodied (sensory–motor) processes, and that our primary experience of the world is action-oriented or pragmatic (Noë, 2004; Thompson, 2007; Varela et al., 1991). Extended mind theorists propose that cognition superven...

The general idea of enactive perception is that actual and potential embodied activities determine perceptual experience. Some extended mind theorists, such as Andy Clark, refute this claim despite their general emphasis on the importance of the body. I propose a compromise to this opposition. The extended mind thesis is allegedly a consequence of...