This is episode #25 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 22nd of September, 2022. 

My invited speaker today is Dr. Aleš Oblak, who identifies himself as a cognitive scientist more than any other field relating to the sciences of the mind. He likes to describe himself as someone who holds somewhat incompatible views about the nature of the human mind: on the one hand, he believes human beings are irreducibly complex and require a qualitative approach; on the other hand, he argues that our behavior can be productively understood by complex machine learning analyses. Currently his work revolves primarily around psychopathology, as a researcher at a psychiatric clinic.

We started the discussion with how he got into this field, then we tried to tackle one of the most important questions: the lack of explicit validation procedures in the phenomenological literature. Aleš described his own method of “consensual validation” and argued for the solution of establishing a shared vocabulary that captures specific aspects of experience — i.e., to describe the experienced (rather than outside) world.

Aleš is also a proponent of a “naturalistic cognitive science”, highlighting the need for methodological pluralism in naturalistic approaches to first-person research. In fact, he calls for more ecological research designs in psychology.

The second part of the interview covered the role of AI in allowing us to collect data, investigate lived experience, simulate different aspects of it, and through it, perhaps come to some universal structures of consciousness. 

Here is the show.

Show Notes:

- the lack of explicit validation procedures in the phenomenological literature
- a method of “consensual validation”
- establishing a shared vocabulary that captures specific aspects of experience
- toward a “naturalistic cognitive science” (methodological pluralism in naturalistic approaches to first-person research)
- a call for more ecological research designs in psychology
- the future of AI in allowing us to collect data, investigate lived experience, simulate different aspects of it, and through it, some universal structures of consciousness

Relevant papers:

A Oblak, A Boyadzhieva, J Bon. Phenomenological properties of perceptual presence: A constructivist grounded theory approach. Constructivist Foundations, 2021

A Oblak. Accusatives, Deixis, and Pointing Fingers. Constructivist Foundations, 2021

Link to Dr. Oblak’s Google Scholar page: 
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=p-HJoNYAAAAJ&view_op=list_works