UKZN–UNIZULU Philosophy Seminar Series, Wed 18 March: David Spurrett, "Engines of Hostility: The Tower of Sabotage and Hack"
M. Whitaker
UKZN–UNIZULU Philosophy Seminar Series
Wednesday, 18 March 2026 @ 14h00-15h30
Engines of Hostility: The Tower of Sabotage and Hack
David Spurrett
University of KwaZulu-Natal
Abstract:
The topic of cognitive hostility is currently lively. The original idea that the activities of agents could pollute the environments of situated or scaffolded agents goes back to Sterelny’s review of Clark’s Being There and Sterelny’s own Thought in a Hostile World. Hostility makes agents less likely to act in their own interests, more likely to act in ways that help the informational polluters. In those early treatments the main source of hostility (camouflage, manipulative parasitism, etc.) is natural selection. The idea that scaffolding and technology could be instruments of hostility, produced by planning and research and developments, has received less attention until recently. I’m working on a book on the various forms of hostility, and the different ways that scaffolded agents can be vulnerable to it. (Working title: “Whose Mind is it Anyway?”) In the final chapter of that book, I develop a framework for thinking about both the sources and targets of hostility. It aims to distinguish significantly different ways that hostility can be produced, and ways that the selection processes of agents can be vulnerable to hostility. The approach I take repurposes Dennett’s “Tower of Generate and Test” and I call the result the “Tower of Sabotage and Hack”. In this talk I argue that we need a general way to think about the sources and targets of hostility, explain the Tower of Sabotage and Hack, and illustrate it with select examples.
Author Bio:
David Spurrett is a Fellow of UKZN and Professor of Philosophy at UKZN. His research focuses on the evolution and operation of mechanisms of action selection and their situated subversion. This talk relates to a book project with the working title “Engines of Hostility: Exploiting and Manipulating Extended Minds”.
For any queries, please contact:
Gontse J. Lebakeng (Leba...@unizulu.ac.za),
Monique Whitaker (Whit...@ukzn.ac.za), or
Jason van Niekerk (vanNi...@unizulu.ac.za)