Bio

<aside> 💡 Michael Wheeler is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stirling, specialising in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. He is the author of the influential book Reconstructing the Cognitive World (2005) and is known for his Heideggerian approach to cognitive science research, challenging traditional Cartesian assumptions that treat cognition as an abstract, rule-bound manipulation of internal representations.

</aside>

<aside> 💡 Darius Parvizi-Wayne is a PhD student at Macquarie University working in Heideggerian approaches to predictive coding models, exploring the relationship between absorbed coping, being-in-the-world, subjectivity and active inference. He was also the host of the Active Inference Insights podcast, which is affiliated with the Active Inference Institute.

</aside>

https://youtu.be/J8kDj53uxwE

(Potential) Discussion Notes & Questions

• A Heideggerian AI perspective on the contemporary AI wave (LLMs, DNNs, etc.)
  • Why, for instance, don’t language models follow the “embodied-embedded” state of being like humans? LLMs, after all, as Active Inference (AIF) researcher Jeff Beck argues, are “embedded” in language?
• It was reading Parvizi-Wayne (2025) that convinced me to pick up Wheeler’s (2005) off my shelf and actually read it! Loving it so far.
  • It would be great if Darius could talk about Wheeler’s influence on your own thinking, especially the philosophy of AIF you’re doing.
• Since in Wheeler (2013) you claim, as a naturalist, that if there is a conflict between empirically grounded science and philosophy, it is the philosopher who has to revise their views, have recent developments in AI made you revise your philosophical positions? (I’d ask Darius the same question since he is a Dreydeggerian)
• Critiques of contemporary functionalist movements towards developing AGI (if such a thing exists)?
• Do you see any paradigms in cognitive science and AI that at least gesture toward overcoming the frame problem?
  • Also, worth touching on what a non-computationalist cognitive science entails?
  • In Darius’s dialogue with Matthew David Segall, you mentioned that the Dreyfus brothers, I believe, say something like “Why the frame problem is a problem, but you don't have to worry about it.” I couldn’t find the specific paper, but would it be an interesting thread to pull on with Mike?

Existentialism and Cognitive Science

• The bearing existential phenomenology has on AI, as it does on CogSci: And how can this bearing move beyond critique qua embodied cognitive science?

https://leidlmair.at/doc/WhyHeideggerianAIFailed.pdf

• Would love to hear Wheeler’s response to Dreyfus's (2007) critique of the embodied-embedded approach - not sure if you’ve written a response elsewhere?
  • It seems Dreyfus sees all attempts at a Heideggerian AI project as still representationalist; ipso facto, they are computational.

Reconstructing the Cognitive World

• Since a lot of contemporary AI works through distributed computing, has that given Wheeler any interesting insights for debates around cognition, that is, if Wheeler thinks AI research has anything generative to offer cognitive science research?

Speculative Questions

• Are humans generally intelligent, or in other words, do humans have AGI?
• Transcendentally speaking vis-à-vis Kantian philosophy, can a computational machine be Dasein?