Probability Designs

Abstract

The chapter discusses the assumptions behind the notion of ‘design’ in greater detail. It draws on arguments around intentionality, manuscript genetics, and the extended mind. Design is understood as the author’s engagement with the materials of pen and paper, but also the language and the characters that emerge in the creative process. The conceptualisation of design, then, unfolds between improvisation and planning, between intentions and the resistance that comes from the materials. The chapter concludes by developing a distinction between reading for intentionality and reading for design, which relates to recent discussions in cognitive narratology and literary studies.

Aesthetics and predictive processing: grounds and prospects of a fruitful encounter

“…This is indeed the direction that the growing stream of research on PP and aesthetics is taking. While PP is increasingly adopted as a framework for understanding different artforms and aesthetic phenomena [50][51][52][53][54][55][56], the arts and aesthetics, examined under the PP lens, are starting to be seen as important windows into our mental functioning [45,52,57,58]. The result is a vast interdisciplinary research programme that promises to deliver important insights into our aesthetic encounters as well as a wide range of psychological phenomena of general interest, including perception, cognition, learning, affect, motivation, well-being and the dynamics of subpersonal and personlevel experience.…”

“…Third, PP also allows us to model the dynamics of our engagement (thanks to its Bayesian apparatus) and to connect these dynamics with known facts about brain function (thanks to its hypotheses about neural implementation). More of course will have to be said about how exactly 'predictions' are involved in specific cases, but the work done so far seems at least to suggest that the PP apparatus is plastic enough to be applied productively to a wide variety of artforms, including visual art [50,51,57,93], music [52,54], literature [53,94,95], cinema, [55,56,96] and games [97].…”

Challenges of First-Year Extended Curriculum Programme Students at a University in South Africa

“…In South Africa, studies have also established that poor social integration, stigmatization, lack of acceptance, inability to work independently, lack of critical thinking skills, lack of selfconfidence, as well as accommodation and transport challenges are experienced by first-year students (Uleanya & Rugbeer, 2020;Lekena & Bayaga, 2018;Pillay & Ngcobo, 2010). According to Kukkonen, (2020), student experiences cover the total engagement with the university right from first contact, through recruitment, learning, arrival, and university experience such as graduation, employment, and experience as alumni. Others include student accommodation, living arrangements, security and safety, as well as social inclusion.…”

A hole in a piece of cardboard and predictive brain: the incomprehension of modern art in the light of the predictive coding paradigm

“…Over the past decade, the predictive coding (PC) theory of brain function and cognition has been increasingly used to model the neurocognitive foundations of aesthetics and symbolic forms and behaviours (e.g. [1][2][3]; see also the other papers in this issue). However, compared to language, music and literature, the extent to which it has been applied to the visual arts has been more modest.…”