Book Club Potluck - Zombies in Western Culture

Karl will host our discussion of the short book, Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis by John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro, and Filip Miscevic; and a paper, "Naturalizing relevance realization: why agency and cognition are fundamentally not computational" by Johannes Jaeger, Anna Riedl, Alex Djedovic, John Vervaeke, and Denis Walsh. Karl suggested both.

Karl writes:

"The problem of meaning often surfaces in or lurks below many issues and problems addressed by philosophy, linguistics, semiotics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence and cognitive science in general. As many of you know, I have frequently attempted to relate issues dealing with meaning during the courses of our Meetup discussions. My concerns have mainly dealt with philosophical problems in semantics, mental representation, and phenomenal intentionality of meanings. But perhaps a more common meaning of meaning includes the distantly related notions of purpose or relevance, as in “the meaning of my life.” If you are interested in thinking and philosophizing about the meaning of not just my life, but yours, too, then I propose the two readings nominated above.

"Cognitive Scientist John Vervaeke has been working on and arguing for his Relevance Realization theory for nearly 3 decades. With Zombies (2017), Vervaeke, et. al. provide a compelling case for the increasingly popular, cultural phenomenon of Zombies in Western film and other media as symbolic, and, perhaps, symptomatic, of the contemporary crisis of meaning. The crisis of meaning is then related to his Relevance Realization theory. This short book is intended for lay audiences.

"In his more recent 2024 paper "Naturalizing Relevance Realization," published by Frontiers in Psychology, Vervaeke, et. al., places Relevance Realization within the Embodied Cognition paradigm in the cognitive sciences, focusing on its incompatibility with the computational theory of mind, and algorithmic models of the mind, in general, but still grounded in and consistent with some Predictive Processing accounts of perception, cognition, and action. Some familiarity with these philosophical and cognitive science camps will be helpful for the readers’ understanding of this paper."

ZOMBIES IN WESTERN CULTURE – A Twenty-First Century Crisis
By John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro, & Filip Miscevic
And Naturalizing Relevance Realization: why agency and cognition are fundamentally not computational
By Johannes Jaeger, Anna Riedl, Alex Djedovic, John Vervaeke, & Denis Walsh
LINKS: ZOMBIES (free pdf version), NATURALIZING RELEVANCE REALIZATION
Note: Zombies is a short book, <100 text pages, also available at Amazon, et. al. Naturalizing Relevance Realization is a 20-page paper, available via Google Scholar.

If you would like to host one of our events and you have a book in mind, please let me, Karl Kiefer, or Mark Hopkins know, and we will create a Meetup event for your book, assuming your suggested title qualifies as a book on philosophy in our view, and assuming that we deem you to be qualified to host. Our criteria are somewhat vague, but let's just say that we are not interested in books on the supernatural. We are interested in books that you might find in a syllabus for a college philosophy course. We are also focused on finding hosts who have demonstrated ability to direct philosophical conversation. You can always email me at camkruger@gmail.com if you have questions and/or suggestions.

As always, it's essential that everyone who comes to the meeting reads the book in its entirety and brings something for the potluck.

Happy reading!