History and Philosophy of Science Research Seminar - The Bridge of Nature: Reconfiguring Reason and Cause in Cognition

Modern skepticism has opened a chasm between the mind and the external world.  Whether the chasm can be bridged and how has been the chief challenge of philosophy since Descartes.  And to meet the challenge, modern philosophy has depended on a model of perception that is a one-directional passive process (mind fitting the world).  Recent findings in psychology and brain science have overturned such a model.  Kahneman’s “thinking, fast and slow,” and the predictive processing or active inference theories of Friston and Clark are the two chief representatives of the new ways.  We argue for the notion of Bridge of Nature: a path over the chasm between reason and cause.  Traffics that are thought to be passible only over the Bridge of Reason are now traffics on the Bridge of Nature; and the traditional division between Cause and Reason needs to be reconceived.  We explore the valuable contributions from the Bayesian model of active or perception-action integrated theory of perception and the existence of unconscious or sub-personal categories of hypothesis, inference, and confirmation as biological processes, and conclude that reason is mainly for maintaining “nature” rather than defeating skepticism.