Reconvening The Cognition Futures Reading Group
After a yearlong hiatus, one of JOPRO + OREL’s longest-running discussion groups returns to investigate where studies of the mind and cognition can go next.
The Cognition Futures Reading Group (CFRG) spent over three years meeting weekly to read and argue about what cognition is and where its study is headed, ranging across phenomenology, cybernetics, dynamical systems, complexity, and the philosophy of mind, and folding in a cybernetics discussion group along the way. After a quiet stretch, the original members have reconvened, joined by one newer voice.
We recorded the reunion and edited it into a short public session:
It is a genuine reunion: people catching up and comparing what each has been working on. A brief look at who was in the room:
Dr. Bradly Alicea (Bradly Alicea) and Morgan Hough have kept a steady line of cybernetics work going through Orthogonal Research and Education Lab. Alicea is lead author of a recent paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A on world models1 in natural and artificial intelligence, alongside other members of the CFRG team.
Avery Lim (Avery Lim) co-founded JOPRO’s Digital Narratives and Emerging Story Technologies (DigiNEST) group and is developing a project on allostatic kinds and other taxonomies around information affordances and variation in agentic information processing.
Amanda Nelson returns to exploring core theoretical and philosophical dimensions of cognition, including dynamical-systems approach and her earlier work on embodied neurophenomenology. She brings the group’s next reading: Randall Beer’s “On the Proper Treatment of Dynamics in Cognitive Science.”2
Jesse Parent (Jesse Parent), who convenes the group, has been working on questions of common currencies and navigation; the nature of observers, audience, and performance in relation to contemporary communication; and on what cognitive science might become in an era of large language models.
Parent, Lim, and Bradly were also a part of the Cognitive Science Society’s CogSci 2021, where they hosted a Discussion Group on “Trajectories in Cognitive Science.”
More public sessions are on the way. If the conversation resonates, follow along here, and find current openings across JOPRO’s network of programs on the Opportunities page.
Subscribe for updates from Cognition Futures and other JOPRO programs and projects. With thanks to Orthogonal Research and Education Lab, a longstanding partner on this and related work.
Introduction to the Special Issue here: Adam Safron, Michael Levin, Victoria Klimaj, Zahra Sheikhbahaee, Dalton Sakthivadivel, Adeel Razi, David Ha, Nick Hay, Kevin Schmidt, Irina Rish, David Krakauer, Melanie Mitchell, Samuel J. Gershman, Joshua B. Tenenbaum; World models, artificial general intelligence and the hard problems of life–mind continuity: toward a unified understanding of natural and artificial intelligence. Philos Trans A Math Phys Eng Sci 14 May 2026; 384 (2320): 20240533. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2024.0533
See also: Favela LH, Raja V. Dynamical Cognitive Science! Wherefore Art Thou? Top Cogn Sci. 2026 Feb 17. doi: 10.1111/tops.70042. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 41700491.