I’m pleased to be able to introduce Wayne Wu, currently Associate Professor of Philosophy and Associate Director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University, as this month’s featured scholar at Brains.
Wayne’s academic career began in the sciences, as an undergraduate studying biology and chemistry at MIT and then a PhD student and predoctoral fellow in molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley. In 1995 he switched to philosophy, enrolling for three years as a graduate student in the History and Philosophy of Science program at the University of Pittsburgh before returning to Berkeley in 1998, where he completed a dissertation under the direction of John Searle and R. Jay Wallace. He taught philosophy at the Ohio State University for four years before moving to CMU in 2010 to take up his current position.
Wayne’s research focuses primarily on topics in the philosophy of mind and action, especially the philosophy of perception. In the philosophy of action Wayne’s published writings have mostly concerned what he calls the Many-Many Problem, or the challenge agents often face in selecting from among a range of perceptual inputs and possible behavioral outputs. (These ideas are discussed at length in “Confronting Many-Many Problems: Attention and Agentive Control”, recently published in Noûs.) In this vein he has also written about the conception of visually-guided action suggested by the Two Visual Systems Hypothesis. These interests in action relate closely to the focus of many of Wayne’s other published writings, which is the philosophy of perception: for a main element of Wayne’s position is that standard belief-desire models of action tend to go wrong in not giving perception a central enough role in their account of how action proceeds. In particular, Wayne argues that perceptual attention is often a necessary precursor to action, as it allows agents to overcome Many-Many Problems by choosing which perceptual inputs to focus on and direct their cognitive resources toward the actions they choose to perform — a position he develops in the paper cited above as well as “Attention as Selection for Action”, recently published in a volume on attention that Wayne co-edited with Christopher Mole and Declan Smithies.
Concerning attention itself, Wayne is the author of “What is Conscious Attention?”, recently published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, as well as a book on attention that is forthcoming in Routledge’s New Problems of Philosophy series. (Regular Brains readers will be familiar with some of what Wayne has to say on the subject of attention, as he contributed a post on the subject a couple of months ago.) In addition to questions about the role of attention in action, a focus of Wayne’s writings has been the connections between attention and consciousness: Is attention necessary for consciousness? Is it sufficient? Is there a distinctive conscious phenomenology of attention? What effects does attention have on the content of conscious perception? Some of these questions, and many others at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive science, will be the subject of Wayne’s posts during the next few weeks.