- 1919-1 Tancha, Onna-son, Okinawa 904-0495, Japan
- Embodied Cognition, Origins of Life, Second-Order Cybernetics, Enactive Interfaces, Dynamical Systems Approach to Cognition, First-Person Methodologies, and 24 moreConsciousness, Evolutionary Robotics, Artificial Life, Autopoiesis, Prehistoric Archaeology, Anthropology, Situated Cognition, Enactivism, Dynamical Systems, Cognitive Science, Phenomenology, Embodiment, Embedded Systems, Altered States of Consciousness, Distributed Language, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Science, Distributed Cognition, Biosemiotics, Cognitive Sciences, Embodied and Enactive Cognition, Neurophenomenology, Intersubjectivity, and Extended Mindedit
- Coordinator of the Embodied Cognitive Science Unit. See our website at: https://groups.oist.jp/ecsuedit
Biological processes are end-directed, that is, teleological. Explaining the physical efficacy of end-directedness continues to be a profound challenge for theoretical biology, especially given its unavoidable implications for our own... more
Biological processes are end-directed, that is, teleological. Explaining the physical efficacy of end-directedness continues to be a profound challenge for theoretical biology, especially given its unavoidable implications for our own self-understanding. For a comprehensive theory of life, it is pivotal to bridge our human-centric view of end-directedness, which the social sciences and humanities consider intrinsic to our actions, with the natural sciences' view of actions' in purely physiological terms, especially in terms of thermodynamic tendencies. A comprehensive theory should therefore provide an end-involving account, which illuminates how both physiology and teleology distinctly contribute to behavior generation. Here we introduce the "Participation Criterion": End-involvement in a bodily process entails that, in principle, it is distinguishable from one without end-involvement, specifically in terms of physiologically unpredictable changes in unexplainable variability. To exemplify the difficulty of satisfying this criterion, we critically analyze two theories on the thermodynamic basis of end-directedness. We then propose that "Irruption Theory" points to a way forward because it predicts that bodily processes have an endinvolvement-dependent increase in their entropy rate. This is consistent with evidence of an association between conscious intention and neural fluctuations, is open to further experimental verification, and provides a novel perspective on the role of thermodynamic entropy production in the organism.
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Varela's enactive approach to cognitive science has been elaborated into a theoretical framework of agency, sense-making, and sociality, while his key methodological innovationneurophenomenology (NP)-continues to inspire empirical work.... more
Varela's enactive approach to cognitive science has been elaborated into a theoretical framework of agency, sense-making, and sociality, while his key methodological innovationneurophenomenology (NP)-continues to inspire empirical work. We argue that the enactive approach was originally expressed in NP as three core tenets: (1) phenomenological pragmatics, (2) embodied cognition, and (3) conscious efficacy. However, most efforts in NP have focused on applying tenet 1, while tenet 2 has received notably less attention, and there is even explicit distancing from tenet 3. By way of a critical review of four case studies, we show how NP thereby falls short of its full potential. Crucially, it needs to demonstrate that the first-person perspective matters, not only as a source of correlations with third-person data, but because lived experience, as such, makes a difference in its own right to the living body's dynamics. Given that methods for improving subjective reports have become accepted in human neuroscience (tenet 1), and given the increasing availability for recording multiscalar organismic activity during embodied action (tenet 2), we propose it is time to integrate these research strands by using this issue of conscious efficacy as a pivot point (tenet 3). The development of genuinely experience-involving accounts of neurophysiological activity during embodied action holds promise for rebooting neurophenomenology in stronger form.
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Cognitive science is lacking conceptual tools to describe how an agent’s motivations, as such, can play a role in the generation of its behavior. The enactive approach has made progress by developing a relaxed naturalism, and by placing... more
Cognitive science is lacking conceptual tools to describe how an agent’s motivations, as such, can play a role in the generation of its behavior. The enactive approach has made progress by developing a relaxed naturalism, and by placing normativity at the core of life and mind; all cognitive activity is a kind of motivated activity. It has rejected representational architectures, especially their reification of the role of normativity into localized “value” functions, in favor of accounts that appeal to system-level properties of the organism. However, these accounts push the problem of reification to a higher level of description, given that the efficacy of agent-level normativity is completely identified with the efficacy of non-normative system-level activity, while assuming operational equivalency. To allow normativity to have its own efficacy, a new kind of nonreductive theory is proposed: irruption theory. The concept of irruption is introduced to indirectly operationalize an agent’s motivated involvement in its activity, specifically in terms of a corresponding underdetermination of its states by their material basis. This implies that irruptions are associated with increased unpredictability of (neuro)physiological activity, and they should, hence, be quantifiable in terms of information-theoretic entropy. Accordingly, evidence that action, cognition, and consciousness are linked to higher levels of neural entropy can be interpreted as indicating higher levels of motivated agential involvement. Counterintuitively, irruptions do not stand in contrast to adaptive behavior. Rather, as indicated by artificial life models of complex adaptive systems, bursts of arbitrary changes in neural activity can facilitate the self-organization of adaptivity. Irruption theory therefore, makes it intelligible how an agent’s motivations, as such, can make effective differences to their behavior, without requiring the agent to be able to directly control their body’s neurophysiological processes.
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There is an overlooked similarity between three classic accounts of the conditions of object experience from three distinct disciplines. (1) Sociology: the “inversion” that accompanies discovery in the natural sciences, as local causes of... more
There is an overlooked similarity between three classic accounts of the conditions of object experience from three distinct disciplines. (1) Sociology: the “inversion” that accompanies discovery in the natural sciences, as local causes of effects are reattributed to an observed object. (2) Psychology: the “externalization” that accompanies mastery of a visual–tactile sensory substitution interface, as tactile sensations of the proximal interface are transformed into vision-like experience of a distal object. (3) Biology: the “projection” that brings forth an animal’s Umwelt, as impressions on its body’s sensory surfaces are reconfigured into perception of an external object. This similarity between the effects of scientific practice and interface-use on the one hand, and of sensorimotor interaction on the other, becomes intelligible once we accept that skillful engagement with instruments and interfaces constitutes a socio-material augmentation of our basic perceptual capacity. This enactive interpretation stands in contrast to anti-realism about science associated with constructivist interpretations of these three phenomena, which are motivated by viewing them as the internal mental construction of the experienced object. Instead, it favors a participatory realism: the sensorimotor basis of perceptual experience loops not only through our body, but also through the external world. This allows us to conceive of object experience in relational terms, i.e., as one or more subjects directly engaging with the world. Consequently, we can appreciate scientific observation in its full complexity: it is a socio-materially augmented process of becoming acquainted with the observed object that—like tool-use and perceiving more generally—is irreducibly self, other-, and world-involving.
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Historical archives show us that past pandemics were relatively poorly documented, but this time around there are widespread efforts to keep a detailed record. Our main concern, as a multidisciplinary team spanning psychology, philosophy,... more
Historical archives show us that past pandemics were relatively poorly documented, but this time around there are widespread efforts to keep a detailed record. Our main concern, as a multidisciplinary team spanning psychology, philosophy, psychiatry, medicine, and anthropology, is that this record also includes a detailed account of how people experienced the pandemic from their own first-person perspective. We therefore decided to publicly release a cross-cultural corpus of subjective reports of the first wave of COVID-19.
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The social brain hypothesis proposes that enlarged brains have evolved in response to the increasing cognitive demands that complex social life in larger groups places on primates and other mammals. However, this reasoning can be... more
The social brain hypothesis proposes that enlarged brains have evolved in response to the increasing cognitive demands that complex social life in larger groups places on primates and other mammals. However, this reasoning can be challenged by evidence that brain size has decreased in the evolutionary transitions from solitary to social larger groups in the case of Neolithic humans and some eusocial insects. Different hypotheses can be identified in the literature to explain this reduction in brain size. We evaluate some of them from the perspective of recent approaches to cognitive science, which support the idea that the basis of cognition can span over brain, body, and environment. Here we show through a minimal cognitive model using an evolutionary robotics methodology that the neural complexity, in terms of neural entropy and degrees of freedom of neural activity, of smaller-brained agents evolved in social interaction is comparable to the neural complexity of larger-brained agents evolved in solitary conditions. The nonlinear time series analysis of agents' neural activity reveals that the decoupled smaller neural network is intrinsically lower dimensional than the decoupled larger neural network. However, when smaller-brained agents are interacting, their actual neural complexity goes beyond its intrinsic limits achieving results comparable to those obtained by larger-brained solitary agents. This suggests that the smaller-brained agents are able to enhance their neural complexity through social interaction, thereby offsetting the reduced brain size.
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Serotonergic agonist psilocybin is a psychedelic with antidepressant potential. Sleep may interact with psilocybin's antidepressant properties like other antidepressant drugs via induction of neuroplasticity. The main aim of the study was... more
Serotonergic agonist psilocybin is a psychedelic with antidepressant potential. Sleep may interact with psilocybin's antidepressant properties like other antidepressant drugs via induction of neuroplasticity. The main aim of the study was to evaluate the effect of psilocybin on sleep architecture on the night after psilocybin administration. Regarding the potential antidepressant properties, we hypothesized that psilocybin, similar to other classical antidepressants, would reduce rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and prolong REM sleep latency. Moreover, we also hypothesized that psilocybin would promote slow-wave activity (SWA) expression in the first sleep cycle, a marker of sleep-related neuroplasticity. Twenty healthy volunteers (10 women, age 28-53) underwent two drug administration sessions, psilocybin or placebo, in a randomized, double-blinded design. Changes in sleep macrostructure, SWA during the first sleep cycle, whole night EEG spectral power across frequencies in non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and REM sleep, and changes in subjective sleep measures were analyzed. The results revealed prolonged REM sleep latency after psilocybin administration and a trend toward a decrease in overall REM sleep duration. No changes in NREM sleep were observed. Psilocybin did not affect EEG power spectra in NREM or REM sleep when examined across the whole night. However, psilocybin suppressed SWA in the first sleep cycle. No evidence was found for sleep-related neuroplasticity, however, a different dosage, timing, effect on homeostatic regulation of sleep, or other mechanisms related to antidepressant effects may play a role. Overall, this study suggests that potential antidepressant properties of psilocybin might be related to changes in sleep.
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The enactive theory of perception hypothesizes that perceptual access to objects depends on the mastery of sensorimotor contingencies, that is, on the know-how of the regular ways in which changes in sensations depend on changes in... more
The enactive theory of perception hypothesizes that perceptual access to objects depends on the mastery of sensorimotor contingencies, that is, on the know-how of the regular ways in which changes in sensations depend on changes in movements. This hypothesis can be extended into the social domain: perception of other minds is constituted by mastery of self-other contingencies, that is, by the know-how of the regular ways in which changes in others' movements depend on changes in one's movements. We investigated this proposal using the perceptual crossing paradigm, in which pairs of players are required to locate each other in an invisible one-dimensional virtual space by using a minimal haptic interface. We recorded and analyzed the real-time embodied social interaction of 10 pairs of adult participants. The results reveal a process of implicit perceptual learning: on average, clarity of perceiving the other's presence increased over trials and then stabilized. However, a clearer perception of the other was not associated with correctness of recognition as such, but with both players correctly recognizing each other. Furthermore, the moments of correct mutual recognition tended to happen within seconds. The fact that changes in social experience can only be explained by the successful performance at the level of the dyad, and that this veridical mutual perception tends toward synchronization, lead us to hypothesize that integration of neural activity across both players played a role.
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The association between neural oscillations and functional integration is widely recognized in the study of human cogni-tion. Large-scale synchronization of neural activity has also been proposed as the neural basis of consciousness.... more
The association between neural oscillations and functional integration is widely recognized in the study of human cogni-tion. Large-scale synchronization of neural activity has also been proposed as the neural basis of consciousness. Intriguingly, a growing number of studies in social cognitive neuroscience reveal that phase synchronization similarly appears across brains during meaningful social interaction. Moreover, this inter-brain synchronization has been associated with subjective reports of social connectedness, engagement, and cooperativeness, as well as experiences of social cohesion and 'self-other merging'. These findings challenge the standard view of human consciousness as essentially first-person singular and private. We therefore revisit the recent controversy over the possibility of extended consciousness and argue that evidence of inter-brain synchronization in the fastest frequency bands overcomes the hitherto most convincing sceptical position. If this proposal is on the right track, our understanding of human consciousness would be profoundly transformed , and we propose a method to test this proposal experimentally.
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Enactive cognitive science (ECS) and ecological psychology (EP) agree that active movement is important for perception, but they remain ambiguous regarding the precise role of agency. EP has focused on the notion of sensorimotor... more
Enactive cognitive science (ECS) and ecological psychology (EP) agree that active movement is important for perception, but they remain ambiguous regarding the precise role of agency. EP has focused on the notion of sensorimotor invariants, according to which bodily movements play an instrumental role in perception. ECS has focused on the notion of sensorimotor contingencies, which goes beyond an instrumental role because skillfully regulated movements are claimed to play a constitutive role. We refer to these two hypotheses as instrumental agency and constitutive agency, respectively. Evidence comes from a variety of fields, including neural, behavioral, and phenomenological research, but so far with confounds that prevent an experimental distinction between these hypotheses. Here we advance the debate by proposing a novel double-participant setup that aims to isolate agency as the key variable that distinguishes bodily movement in active and passive conditions of perception. We pilot this setup with a psychological study of width discrimination using the Enactive Torch, a haptic sensory substitution device. There was no evidence favoring the stronger hypothesis of constitutive agency over instrumental agency. However, we caution that during debriefing several participants reported using cognitive strategies that did not rely on spatial perception. We conclude that this approach is a viable direction for future research, but that greater care is required to establish and confirm the desired modality of first-person experience.
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Modeling of complex adaptive systems has revealed a still poorly understood benefit of unsupervised learning: when neural networks are enabled to form an associative memory of a large set of their own attractor configurations, they begin... more
Modeling of complex adaptive systems has revealed a still poorly understood benefit of unsupervised learning: when neural networks are enabled to form an associative memory of a large set of their own attractor configurations, they begin to reorganize their connectivity in a direction that minimizes the coordination constraints posed by the initial network architecture. This self-optimization process has been replicated in various neural network formalisms, but it is still unclear whether it can be applied to biologically more realistic network topologies and scaled up to larger networks. Here we continue our efforts to respond to these challenges by demonstrating the process on the connectome of the widely studied nematode worm C. elegans. We extend our previous work by considering the contributions made by hierarchical partitions of the connectome that form functional clusters, and we explore possible beneficial effects of inter-cluster inhibitory connections. We conclude that the self-optimization process can be applied to neural network topologies characterized by greater biological realism, and that long-range inhibitory connections can facilitate the generalization capacity of the process.
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Most of the little we know about the use of psychoactive plants in pre-Hispanic Mexico comes from post-contact sources, and from the occasional archaeological artefact that is suggestive of cultural continuity into the deeper past (Nesvig... more
Most of the little we know about the use of psychoactive plants in pre-Hispanic Mexico comes from post-contact sources, and from the occasional archaeological artefact that is suggestive of cultural continuity into the deeper past (Nesvig 2017). One of the most prominent genera in this context is Datura, which has significant implications for many indigenous cultures and remains widespread in traditional medicine. We know from accounts produced from the early 16th century onwards that the Aztecs considered several species sacred. However, it is unclear how much deeper into the pre-Hispanic past this role extends, because the prehistoric roots of Datura use are poorly understood throughout the Americas, and archaeobotanical evidence is scant (Rafferty 2018). Here it is proposed that botanical motifs in mural paintings of ancient Teotihuacan represent Datura thorn apples. This extends cultural continuity back to this urban center, which was at its height from about 150 to 550 CE (Cowgill 2015), and thus preceded the Aztec empire by a millennium.
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According to sensorimotor theory perceiving is a bodily skill involving exercise of an implicit know-how of the systematic ways that sensations change as a result of potential movements, that is, of sensorimotor contingencies. The theory... more
According to sensorimotor theory perceiving is a bodily skill involving exercise of an implicit know-how of the systematic ways that sensations change as a result of potential movements, that is, of sensorimotor contingencies. The theory has been most successfully applied to vision and touch, while perceptual modalities that rely less on overt exploration of the environment have not received as much attention. In addition, most research has focused on philosophically grounding the theory and on psychologically elucidating sensorimotor laws, but the theory's ramifications for neuroscience still remain underexamined. Here we sketch the beginnings of a research program that could address these two outstanding challenges in terms of auditory perception. We review the neuroscience literature on passive listening, which is defined as listening without overt bodily movement, and conclude that sensorimotor theory provides a unique perspective on the consistent finding of motor system activation. In contrast to competing theories, this activation is predicted to be involved not only in the perception of speech-and action-related sounds, but in auditory perception in general. More specifically, we propose that the auditory processing associated with supplementary motor areas forms part of the neural basis of the exercise of sensorimotor know-how: these areas' recognized role in (1) facilitating spontaneous motor responses to sound and (2) supporting flexible engagement of sensorimotor processes to guide auditory experience and enable auditory imagery, can be understood in terms of two key characteristics of sensorimotor interaction, its (1) "alerting capacity" (or "grabbiness") and (2) "corporality" (or "bodiliness"), respectively. We also highlight that there is more to the inside of the body than the brain: there is an opportunity to develop sensorimotor theory into new directions in terms of the still poorly understood active processes of the peripheral auditory system.
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In this review, we describe some of the central philosophical issues facing origins-of-life research and provide a targeted history of the developments that have led to the multidisciplinary field of origins-of-life studies. We outline... more
In this review, we describe some of the central philosophical issues facing origins-of-life research and provide a targeted history of the developments that have led to the multidisciplinary field of origins-of-life studies. We outline these issues and developments to guide researchers and students from all fields. With respect to philosophy, we provide brief summaries of debates with respect to (1) definitions (or theories) of life, what life is and how research should be conducted in the absence of an accepted theory of life, (2) the distinctions between synthetic, historical, and universal projects in origins-of-life studies, issues with strategies for inferring the origins of life, such as (3) the nature of the first living entities (the "bottom up" approach) and (4) how to infer the nature of the last universal common ancestor (the "top down" approach), and (5) the status of origins of life as a science. Each of these debates influences the others. Although there are clusters of researchers that agree on some answers to these issues, each of these debates is still open. With respect to history, we outline several independent paths that have led to some of the approaches now prevalent in origins-of-life studies. These include one path from early views of life through the scientific revolutions brought about by Linnaeus (von Linn.), Wöhler, Miller, and others. In this approach, new theories, tools, and evidence guide new thoughts about the nature of life and its origin. We also describe another family of paths motivated by a" circularity" approach to life, which is guided by such thinkers as Maturana & Varela, Gánti, Rosen, and others. These views echo ideas developed by Kant and Aristotle, though they do so using modern science in ways that produce exciting avenues of investigation. By exploring the history of these ideas, we can see how many of the issues that currently interest us have been guided by the contexts in which the ideas were developed. The disciplinary backgrounds of each of these scholars has influenced the questions they sought to answer, the experiments they envisioned, and the kinds of data they collected. We conclude by encouraging scientists and scholars in the humanities and social sciences to explore ways in which they can interact to provide a deeper understanding of the conceptual assumptions, structure, and history of origins-of-life research. This may be useful to help frame future research agendas and bring awareness to the multifaceted issues facing this challenging scientific question.
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Traditionally, the pedagogical design for teaching and learning practices has been characterized as a process during which an active expert supports passive learner for the accomplishment of a specific goal or task. Nowadays, however, the... more
Traditionally, the pedagogical design for teaching and learning practices has been characterized as a process during which an active expert supports passive learner for the accomplishment of a specific goal or task. Nowadays, however, the accessibility of information technologies and the understanding of the learner’s active role have caused that interactive, embodied and contextual learning perspectives have begun to gain room. Here, we contribute with a technical report of a pilot study based on the Enactive Torch, a tool for the scientific study of perception, which aimed to investigate the crucial role of embodied process in the generation of perceptual experience for sensory substitution. In using this technological scaffolding, a group of students, from various academic disciplines, have coordinated and conducted three projects using different methods, each of them analyzing quantitative and qualitative data recorded from the participants’ first- and third-person perspective. By means of this practical engagement, the students gained awareness of the transformative potential of technology and developed insights into the challenges of performing interdisciplinary research with their peers, in regard to embodied perception and cognition. The study, therefore, serves as a proof-of-concept for the Enactive Torch, as a technological scaffolding, that can facilitate the kind of interactive learning that students need to gain a deeper understanding of the complexity of human embodied cognition and its relationship with technology.
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The enactive approach conceives of cognition as acts of sense-making. A requirement of sense-making is adaptivity, i.e., the agent's capacity to actively monitor and regulate its own trajectories with respect to its viability constraints.... more
The enactive approach conceives of cognition as acts of sense-making. A requirement of sense-making is adaptivity, i.e., the agent's capacity to actively monitor and regulate its own trajectories with respect to its viability constraints. However, there are examples of sense-making, known as ultrafast cognition, that occur faster than the time physiologically required for the organism to centrally monitor and regulate movements, for example via long-range neural feedback mechanisms. These examples open a clarificatory challenge for the enactive approach with respect to how to operationalize monitoring and regulation, and with respect to the temporal scale of sense-making, which has traditionally been limited to the here-and-now in accordance with the axiom of structural determinism. We explore possible responses to this challenge and suggest that this axiom should be explicitly rejected: adaptivity is a property of organism-environment interactions over a time span that includes both present and past conditions. Therefore, ultrafast performances are no longer a challenge for the enactive approach because the constitutive basis of their normativity is spatiotemporally extensive. This is in accordance with recent developments in different varieties of enactivism, which all converge toward assigning a constitutive role to an agent's history of interactions.
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In this essay we critically evaluate the progress that has been made in solving the problem of meaning in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. We remain skeptical about solutions based on deep neural networks and cognitive robotics,... more
In this essay we critically evaluate the progress that has been made in solving the problem of meaning in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. We remain skeptical about solutions based on deep neural networks and cognitive robotics, which in our opinion do not fundamentally address the problem. We agree with the enactive approach to cognitive science that things appear as intrinsically meaningful for living beings because of their precarious existence as adaptive autopoietic individuals. But this approach inherits the problem of failing to account for how meaning as such could make a difference for an agent's behavior. In a nutshell, if life and mind are identified with physically deterministic phenomena, then there is no conceptual room for meaning to play a role in its own right. We argue that this impotence of meaning can be addressed by revising the concept of nature such that the macroscopic scale of the living can be characterized by physical indeterminacy. We consider the implications of this revision of the mind-body relationship for synthetic approaches.
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The concept of social interaction is at the core of embodied and enactive approaches to social cognitive processes, yet scientifically it remains poorly understood. Traditionally, cognitive science had relegated all behavior to being the... more
The concept of social interaction is at the core of embodied and enactive approaches to social cognitive processes, yet scientifically it remains poorly understood. Traditionally, cognitive science had relegated all behavior to being the end result of internal neural activity. However, the role of feedback from the interactions between agent and their environment has become increasingly important to understanding behavior. We focus on the role that social interaction plays in the behavioral and neural activity of the individuals taking part in it. Is social interaction merely a source of complex inputs to the individual, or can social interaction increase the individuals' own complexity? Here we provide a proof of concept of the latter possibility by artificially evolving pairs of simulated mobile robots to increase their neural complexity, which consistently gave rise to strategies that take advantage of their capacity for interaction. We found that during social interaction, the neural controllers exhibited dynamics of higher-dimensionality than were possible in social isolation. Moreover, by testing evolved strategies against unresponsive ghost partners, we demonstrated that under some conditions this effect was dependent on mutually responsive co-regulation, rather than on the mere presence of another agent's behavior as such. Our findings provide an illustration of how social interaction can augment the internal degrees of freedom of individuals who are actively engaged in participation.
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Habits are the topic of a venerable history of research that extends back to antiquity, yet they were originally disregarded by the cognitive sciences. They started to become the focus of interdisciplinary research in the 1990s, but since... more
Habits are the topic of a venerable history of research that extends back to antiquity, yet they were originally disregarded by the cognitive sciences. They started to become the focus of interdisciplinary research in the 1990s, but since then there has been a stalemate between those who approach habits as a kind of bodily automatism or as a kind of mindful action. This implicit mind-body dualism is ready to be overcome with the rise of interest in embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive (4E) cognition. We review the enactive approach and highlight how it moves beyond the traditional stalemate by integrating both autonomy and sense-making into its theory of agency. It defines a habit as an adaptive, precarious, and self-sustaining network of neural, bodily, and interactive processes that generate dynamical sensorimotor patterns. Habits constitute a central source of normativity for the agent. We identify a potential shortcoming of this enactive account with respect to bad habits, since self-maintenance of a habit would always be intrinsically good. Nevertheless, this is only a problem if, following the mainstream perspective on habits, we treat habits as isolated modules. The enactive approach replaces this atomism with a view of habits as constituting an interdependent whole on whose overall viability the individual habits depend. Accordingly, we propose to define a bad habit as one whose expression, while positive for itself, significantly impairs a person’s well-being by overruling the expression of other situationally relevant habits. We conclude by considering implications of this concept of bad habit for psychological and psychiatric research, particularly with respect to addiction research.
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Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be understood as a social interaction disorder. This requires researchers to take a “second-person” stance and to use experimental setups based on bidirectional interactions. The present work offers a... more
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be understood as a social interaction disorder. This requires researchers to take a “second-person” stance and to use experimental setups based on bidirectional interactions. The present work offers a quantitative description of movement patterns exhibited during computer-mediated real-time sensorimotor interaction in 10 dyads of adult participants, each consisting of one control individual (CTRL) and one individual with high-functioning autism (HFA). We applied time-series analyses to their movements and found two main results. First, multi-scale coordination between participants was present. Second, despite this dyadic alignment and our previous finding that individuals with HFA can be equally sensitive to the other’s presence, individuals’ movements differed in style: in contrast to CTRLs, HFA participants appeared less inclined to sustain mutual interaction and instead explored the virtual environment more generally. This finding is consistent with social motivation deficit accounts of ASD, as well as with hypersensitivity-motivated avoidance of overstimulation. Our research demonstrates the utility of time series analyses for the second-person stance and complements previous work focused on non-dynamical and performance-based variables.
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Experts remain divided about the nature of the sociopolitical system of ancient Teotihuacan, which was one of the earliest and largest urban civilizations of the Americas. Excavations hoping to find compelling evidence of powerful rulers,... more
Experts remain divided about the nature of the sociopolitical system of ancient Teotihuacan, which was one of the earliest and largest urban civilizations of the Americas. Excavations hoping to find compelling evidence of powerful rulers, such as a royal tomb, keep coming away empty-handed. But the alternative possibility of collective rule still remains poorly understood as well. Previously we used a computational model of this city's hypothetical sociopolitical network to show that in principle collective rule based on communal ritual could be an effective strategy of ensuring widespread social coordination, as long as we assume that the network's structure could be transformed via social learning and local leaders were not strongly subdivided. Here we extended this model to investigate whether increased social hierarchy could mitigate the negative effects of such strong divisions. We found a special synergy between social hierarchy and communal ritual: only their combination improved the extent of social coordination, whereas the introduction of centralization and top-down influence by themselves had no effect. This finding is consistent with portrayals of the Teotihuacan elite as religious specialists serving the public good, in particular by synchronizing the city's ritual calendar with the rhythms of the stars.
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Tasks encountered in daily living may have instabilities and more dimensions than are sampled by the senses such as when carrying a cup of coffee and only the surface motion and overall momentum are sensed, not the fluid dynamics.... more
Tasks encountered in daily living may have instabilities and more dimensions than are sampled by the senses such as when carrying a cup of coffee and only the surface motion and overall momentum are sensed, not the fluid dynamics. Anticipating non-periodic dynamics is difficult
but not impossible because mutual coordination allows for chaotic processes to synchronize to each other and become periodic. A chaotic oscillator with random period and amplitude affords being stabilized onto a periodic trajectory by a weak input if the driver incorporates information
about the oscillator. We studied synchronization with predictable and unpredictable stimuli where the unpredictable stimuli could be non-interactive or interactive. The latter condition required learning to control a chaotic system. We expected better overall performance with the
predictable but more learning and generalization with unpredictable interactive stimuli. Participants practiced an auditory-motor synchronization task by matching their sonified hand movements to sonified tutors: the Non-Interactive Predictable tutor (NI-P) was a sinusoid, the Non-Interactive Unpredictable (NI-U) was a chaotic system, the Interactive Unpredictable (I-U) was the same chaotic system with an added weak input from the participant’s movement. Different pre/post-practice stimuli evaluated generalization. Quick improvement was seen in NIP. Synchronization, dynamic similarity, and causal interaction increased with practice in I-U but not in NI-U. Generalization was seen for few pre-post stimuli in NI-P, none in NI-U, and most stimuli in I-U. Synchronization with novel chaotic dynamics is challenging but mutual interaction enables the behavioral control of such dynamics and the practice of complex motor skills.
but not impossible because mutual coordination allows for chaotic processes to synchronize to each other and become periodic. A chaotic oscillator with random period and amplitude affords being stabilized onto a periodic trajectory by a weak input if the driver incorporates information
about the oscillator. We studied synchronization with predictable and unpredictable stimuli where the unpredictable stimuli could be non-interactive or interactive. The latter condition required learning to control a chaotic system. We expected better overall performance with the
predictable but more learning and generalization with unpredictable interactive stimuli. Participants practiced an auditory-motor synchronization task by matching their sonified hand movements to sonified tutors: the Non-Interactive Predictable tutor (NI-P) was a sinusoid, the Non-Interactive Unpredictable (NI-U) was a chaotic system, the Interactive Unpredictable (I-U) was the same chaotic system with an added weak input from the participant’s movement. Different pre/post-practice stimuli evaluated generalization. Quick improvement was seen in NIP. Synchronization, dynamic similarity, and causal interaction increased with practice in I-U but not in NI-U. Generalization was seen for few pre-post stimuli in NI-P, none in NI-U, and most stimuli in I-U. Synchronization with novel chaotic dynamics is challenging but mutual interaction enables the behavioral control of such dynamics and the practice of complex motor skills.
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It is widely agreed that the standard genetic code must have been preceded by a simpler code that encoded fewer amino acids. How this simpler code could have expanded into the standard genetic code is not well understood because most... more
It is widely agreed that the standard genetic code must have been preceded by a simpler code that encoded fewer amino acids. How this simpler code could have expanded into the standard genetic code is not well understood because most changes to the code are costly. Taking inspiration from the recently synthesized six-letter code, we propose a novel hypothesis: the initial genetic code consisted of only two letters, G and C, and then expanded the number of available codons via the introduction of an additional pair of letters, A and U. Various lines of evidence, including the relative prebiotic abundance of the earliest assigned amino acids, the balance of their hydrophobicity, and the higher GC content in genome coding regions, indicate that the original two nucleotides were indeed G and C. This process of code expansion probably started with the third base, continued with the second base, and ended up as the standard genetic code when the second pair of letters was introduced into the first base. The proposed process is consistent with the available empirical evidence, and it uniquely avoids the problem of costly code changes by positing instead that the code expanded its capacity via the creation of new codons with extra letters.
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Body memory comprises the acquired dispositions that constitute an individual's present capacities and experiences. Phenomenological accounts of body memory describe its effects using dynamical metaphors: it is conceived of as curvatures... more
Body memory comprises the acquired dispositions that constitute an individual's present capacities and experiences. Phenomenological accounts of body memory describe its effects using dynamical metaphors: it is conceived of as curvatures in an agent-environment relational field, leading to attracting and repelling forces that shape ongoing sensorimotor interaction. This relational perspective stands in tension with traditional cognitive science, which conceives of the underlying basis of memory in representational-internal terms: it is the encoding and storing of informational content via structural changes inside the brain. We propose that this tension can be resolved by replacing the traditional approach with the dynamical approach to cognitive science. Specifically, we present three of our simulation models of embodied cognition that can help us to rethink the basis of several types of body memory. The upshot is that, at least in principle, there is no need to explain their basis in terms of content or to restrict their basis to neuroplasticity alone. Instead these models support the perspective developed by phenomenology: body memory is a relational property of a whole brain-body-environment system that emerges out of its history of interactions.
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Theories of the origin of the genetic code typically appeal to natural selection and/or mutation of hereditable traits to explain its regularities and error robustness, yet the present translation system presupposes high-fidelity... more
Theories of the origin of the genetic code typically appeal to natural selection and/or mutation of hereditable traits to explain its regularities and error robustness, yet the present translation system presupposes high-fidelity replication. Woese’s solution to this bootstrapping problem was to assume that code optimization had played a key role in reducing the effect of errors caused by the early translation system. He further conjectured that initially evolution was dominated by horizontal exchange of cellular components among loosely organized protocells (“progenotes”), rather than by vertical transmission of genes. Here we simulated such communal evolution based on horizontal transfer of code fragments, possibly involving pairs of tRNAs and their cognate aminoacyl tRNA synthetases or a precursor tRNA ribozyme capable of catalysing its own aminoacylation, by using an iterated learning model. This is the first model to confirm Woese’s conjecture that regularity, optimality, and (near) universality could have emerged via horizontal interactions alone.
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It is not yet well understood how we become conscious of the presence of other people as being other subjects in their own right. Developmental and phenomenological approaches are converging on a relational hypothesis: my perception of a... more
It is not yet well understood how we become conscious of the presence of other people as being other subjects in their own right. Developmental and phenomenological approaches are converging on a relational hypothesis: my perception of a “you” is primarily constituted by another subject’s attention being directed toward “me.” This is particularly the case when my body is being physically explored in an intentional manner. We set out to characterize the sensorimotor signature of the transition to being aware of the other by re-analyzing time series of embodied interactions between pairs of adults (recorded during a “perceptual crossing” experiment). Measures of turn-taking and movement synchrony were used to quantify social coordination, and transfer entropy was used to quantify direction of influence. We found that the transition leading to one’s conscious perception of the other’s presence was indeed characterized by a significant increase in one’s passive reception of the other’s tactile stimulations. Unexpectedly, one’s clear experience of such passive touch was consistently followed by a switch to active touching of the other, while the other correspondingly became more passive, which suggests that this intersubjective experience was reciprocally co-regulated by both participants.
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There exists a venerable tradition of interdisciplinary research into the origins and development of Paleolithic cave painting. In recent years this research has begun to be inflected by rapid advances in measurement techniques that are... more
There exists a venerable tradition of interdisciplinary research into the origins and development of Paleolithic cave painting. In recent years this research has begun to be inflected by rapid advances in measurement techniques that are delivering chronological data with unprecedented accuracy. Patterns are emerging from the accumulating evidence whose precise interpretation demands corresponding advances in theory. It seems that cave painting went through several transitions, beginning with the creation of simple lines, dots and disks, followed by hand stencils, then by outlined figures, and finally by naturalistic figures. So far the most systematic evidence comes from Europe, although there are also indications that this sequence could be a universal pattern. The shamanic hypothesis provides a useful theoretical starting point because of its emphasis on the role of performance and phenomenology in the creative process. However, it still tends to reduce this sequence to mere stylistic and thematic changes that were external products of an already fully formed modern mind. Here I show how key insights from semiotics and material engagement theory can advance this explanatory framework to the extent that we become able to postdict the major transitions in the chronology of Paleolithic cave painting. An intriguing implication is that this is at the same time a chronology of cognitive changes, namely from a performative-phenomenological to a reflective-representational mind.
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This paper considers questions about continuity and discontinuity between life and mind. It begins by examining such questions from the perspective of the free energy principle (FEP). The FEP is becoming increasingly influential in... more
This paper considers questions about continuity and discontinuity between life and mind. It begins by examining such questions from the perspective of the free energy principle (FEP). The FEP is becoming increasingly influential in neuroscience and cognitive science. It says that organisms act to maintain themselves in their expected biological and cognitive states, and that they can do so only by minimizing their free energy given that the long-term average of free energy is entropy. The paper then argues that there is no singular interpretation of the FEP for thinking about the relation between life and mind. Some FEP formulations express what we call an independence view of life and mind. One independence view is a cognitivist view of the FEP. It turns on information processing with semantic content, thus restricting the range of systems capable of exhibiting mentality. Other independence views exemplify what we call an overly generous non-cognitivist view of the FEP, and these appear to go in the opposite direction. That is, they imply that mentality is nearly everywhere. The paper proceeds to argue that non-cognitivist FEP, and its implications for thinking about the relation between life and mind, can be usefully constrained by key ideas in recent enactive approaches to cognitive science. We conclude that the most compelling account of the relationship between life and mind treats them as strongly continuous, and that this continuity is based on particular concepts of life (autopoiesis and adaptivity) and mind (basic and non-semantic).
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There is a growing consensus that a fuller understanding of social cognition depends on more systematic studies of real-time social interaction. Such studies require methods that can deal with the complex dynamics taking place at multiple... more
There is a growing consensus that a fuller understanding of social cognition depends on more systematic studies of real-time social interaction. Such studies require methods that can deal with the complex dynamics taking place at multiple interdependent temporal and spatial scales, spanning sub-personal, personal, and dyadic levels of analysis. We demonstrate the value of adopting an extended multi-scale approach by re-analyzing movement time series generated in a study of embodied dyadic interaction in a minimal virtual reality environment (a perceptual crossing experiment). Reduced movement variability revealed an interdependence between social awareness and social coordination that cannot be accounted for by either subjective or objective factors alone: it picks out interactions in which subjective and objective conditions are convergent (i.e. elevated coordination is perceived as clearly social, and impaired coordination is perceived as socially ambiguous). This finding is consistent with the claim that interpersonal interaction can be partially constitutive of direct social perception. Clustering statistics (Allan Factor) of salient events revealed fractal scaling. Complexity matching defined as the similarity between these scaling laws was significantly more pronounced in pairs of participants as compared to surrogate dyads. This further highlights the multi-scale and distributed character of social interaction and extends previous complexity matching results from dyadic conversation to nonverbal social interaction dynamics. Trials with successful joint interaction were also associated with an increase in local coordination. Consequently, a local coordination pattern emerges on the background of complex dyadic interactions in the PCE task and makes joint successful performance possible.
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We describe the content and outcomes of the First Workshop on Open-Ended Evolution: Recent Progress and Future Milestones (OEE1), held during the ECAL 2015 conference at the University of York, UK, in July 2015. We briefly summarize the... more
We describe the content and outcomes of the First Workshop on Open-Ended Evolution: Recent Progress and Future Milestones (OEE1), held during the ECAL 2015 conference at the University of York, UK, in July 2015. We briefly summarize the content of the workshopʼs talks, and identify the main themes that emerged from the open discussions. Two important conclusions from the discussions are: (1) the idea of pluralism about OEE—it seems clear that there is more than one interesting and important kind of OEE; and (2) the importance of distinguishing observable behavioral hallmarks of systems undergoing OEE from hypothesized underlying mechanisms that explain why a system exhibits those hallmarks. We summarize the different hallmarks and mechanisms discussed during the workshop, and list the specific systems that were highlighted with respect to particular hallmarks and mechanisms. We conclude by identifying some of the most important open research questions about OEE that are apparent in light of the discussions. The York workshop provides a foundation for a follow-up OEE2 workshop taking place at the ALIFE XV conference in Cancún, Mexico, in July 2016. Additional materials from the York workshop, including talk abstracts, presentation slides, and videos of each talk, are available at
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The role of altered states of consciousness in the production of geometric and figurative art by prehistoric cultures in Africa and Europe has been hotly debated. Helvenston and Bahn have tried to refute the most famous hypothesis,... more
The role of altered states of consciousness in the production of geometric and figurative art by prehistoric cultures in Africa and Europe has been hotly debated. Helvenston and Bahn have tried to refute the most famous hypothesis, Lewis-Williams' neuropsychological model, by claiming that appropriate visual hallucinations required the ingestion of LSD, psilocybin, or mescaline, while arguing that none of these compounds were available to the cultures in question. We present here mycological arguments that tell another story. A prehistoric worldwide distribution of the mushroom genus Psilocybe, and therefore of psilocybin, is supported by the existence of endemic species in America, Africa, and Europe, the disjunct distribution of sister species, and the possibility of long-distance spore dispersal. It is more difficult to point to instances of actual prehistoric ritual use in Africa and Europe, but there are a growing number of suggestive findings.
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> Context • In the past two decades, the so-called 4E approaches to the mind and cognition have been rapidly gaining in recognition and have become an integral part of various disciplines. > Problem • Recently, however, questions have... more
> Context • In the past two decades, the so-called 4E approaches to the mind and cognition have been rapidly gaining in recognition and have become an integral part of various disciplines. > Problem • Recently, however, questions have been raised as to whether, and to what degree, these different approaches actually cohere with one another. Specifically, it seems that many of them endorse mutually incompatible, perhaps even contradictory, epistemological and metaphysical presuppositions. > Method • By retracing the roots of an alternative conception of mind and cognition, as propounded by Varela, Thompson & Rosch, we provide an outline of the original philosophical framework of enactivism and neurophenomenology. We focus on its three central tenets – reflexivity, subject-world co-determination, and the construal of cognition as situated, skillful and embodied action – and show how they collectively add up to a radical change in attitude towards the age-old philosophical dilemmas. > Results • We show how contemporary enactivist and embodied approaches relate to the original Varelian conception, and argue that many of them, despite frequent claims to the contrary, adopt significantly less radical philosophical positions. Further, we provide some tentative suggestions as to why this dilution of the original impetus might have occurred, paying special attention to the deep-rooted disparities that span the field. > Implications • It is argued that more attention should be paid to epistemological and metaphysical tenets of different proposals within the 4E movement in general and enactivism in particular. Additionally, in emphasizing the inescapable multilayeredness and contextuality of scientific knowledge, enactivism and neurophenomenology accord with pluralist accounts of science and might provide important contributions to contemporary debates in the field. > Constructivist content • The epistemological odyssey, construed as a journey to find a middle way between realism and idealism, is a central tenet of anti-representationalist, non-dualist constructivist approaches aimed at avoiding age-old philosophical traps.
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Standard crossover operators are often omitted from simple genetic algorithms (GAs) used for optimizing artificial neural networks because of the traditional belief that they generally disrupt the distributed functionality of the evolving... more
Standard crossover operators are often omitted from simple genetic algorithms (GAs) used for optimizing artificial neural networks because of the traditional belief that they generally disrupt the distributed functionality of the evolving solutions. The notion that crossover will be especially disruptive when a genetic representation is used which has a many-to-one mapping between genotype and phenotype has become known as the ‘permutation problem’. In contrast, this paper argues that these problems do not normally
appear in practical use of simple GAs because populations converge quickly and then continue to move through search space in this converged manner until a fitness optimum is found. After convergence all individuals are genetically similar, and moreover, distinct genetic permutations of the same phenotypic solution are unlikely to co-exist in the population. Genetic convergence thus minimizes the possibility for disruption caused by crossover. We have termed this the ‘convergence argument’. This claim is investigated experimentally on standard benchmark problems and the results provide empirical support.
appear in practical use of simple GAs because populations converge quickly and then continue to move through search space in this converged manner until a fitness optimum is found. After convergence all individuals are genetically similar, and moreover, distinct genetic permutations of the same phenotypic solution are unlikely to co-exist in the population. Genetic convergence thus minimizes the possibility for disruption caused by crossover. We have termed this the ‘convergence argument’. This claim is investigated experimentally on standard benchmark problems and the results provide empirical support.
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There are some signs that a resurgence of interest in modeling constitutive autonomy is underway. This paper contributes to this recent development by exploring the possibility of using evolutionary robotics, traditionally only used as a... more
There are some signs that a resurgence of interest in modeling constitutive autonomy is underway. This paper contributes to this recent development by exploring the possibility of using evolutionary robotics, traditionally only used as a generative mechanism for the study of embodied-embedded cognitive systems, to generate simulation models of constitutively autonomous systems. Such systems, which are autonomous in the sense that they self-constitute an identity under precarious conditions, have so far been elusive. The challenges and opportunities involved in such an endeavor are explicated in terms of a concrete model. While we conclude that this model fails to fully satisfy all the organizational criteria that are required for constitutive autonomy, it nevertheless serves to illustrate that evolutionary robotics at least has the potential to become a valuable tool for generating such models.
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El cibernético mexicano Rosenblueth y sus colegas Wiener y Bigelow argumentaban que el comportamiento dirigido a metas puede ser explicado por la retroalimentación negativa. Esta propuesta revolucionaria implicaba que nuestra experiencia... more
El cibernético mexicano Rosenblueth y sus colegas Wiener y Bigelow argumentaban que el comportamiento dirigido a metas puede ser explicado por la retroalimentación negativa. Esta propuesta revolucionaria implicaba que nuestra experiencia al actuar intencionadamente podía hacerse compatible con una visión del mundo estrictamente científica, en la cual la naturaleza física no sigue ningún propósito. Años después, Wiener fundaría la cibernética bajo el principio de autogobierno, por ejemplo, con el uso de “bucles” de retroalimentación negativa para el control de máquinas. Sin embargo, los seres vivos no sólo son autogobernantes, sino que también, a través del metabolismo, son individuos físicamente autoproductivos. Esto es de importancia para el surgimiento de una nueva ciencia cognitiva que fundamenta el sentido de la existencia en el cuerpo biológico y, por lo tanto, en la mortalidad.
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The state space of a conventional Hopfield network typically exhibits many different attractors of which only a small subset satisfy constraints between neurons in a globally optimal fashion. It has recently been demonstrated that... more
The state space of a conventional Hopfield network typically exhibits many different attractors of which only a small subset satisfy constraints between neurons in a globally optimal fashion. It has recently been demonstrated that combining Hebbian learning with occasional alterations of normal neural states avoids this problem by means of self-organized enlargement of the best basins of attraction. However, so far it is not clear to what extent this process of self-optimization is also operative in real brains. Here we demonstrate that it can be transferred to more biologically plausible neural networks by implementing a self-optimizing spiking neural network model. In addition, by using this spiking neural network to emulate a Hopfield network with Hebbian learning, we attempt to make a connection between rate-based and temporal coding based neural systems. Although further work is required to make this model more realistic, it already suggests that the efficacy of the self-optimizing process is independent from the simplifying assumptions of a conventional Hopfield network. We also discuss natural and cultural processes that could be responsible for occasional alteration of neural firing patterns in actual brains.
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All political systems have limitations in their information processing and action capacities to face large-scale crises and challenges, but especially if they happen to be too hierarchically and centrally controlled systems. In contrast,... more
All political systems have limitations in their information processing and action capacities to face large-scale crises and challenges, but especially if they happen to be too hierarchically and centrally controlled systems. In contrast, some other cultures whose political structure is heterarchically organized, such as the Zenú, the Muiscas, and the Tayronas in pre-Hispanic Colombia, presented adaptiveness even without advanced scientific knowledge and without powerful centralized top-down control. We therefore propose that creating and analyzing computer models of their decentralized processes of management could provide a broader perspective on the possibilities of self-organized political systems. Our hope is that this approach will eventually go beyond the scope of basic science. It seeks to promote more computer model-based research of social systems that exhibit an adaptive balance of flexibility and robustness, i.e., systems that do not rely on the current ideal of rule-based control of all systemic aspects, with the practical aim of improving current social and political processes.
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Scientists have traditionally limited the mechanisms of social cognition to one brain, but recent approaches claim that interaction also realizes cognitive work. Experiments under constrained virtual settings revealed that interaction... more
Scientists have traditionally limited the mechanisms of social cognition to one brain, but recent approaches claim that interaction also realizes cognitive work. Experiments under constrained virtual settings revealed that interaction dynamics implicitly guide social cognition. Here we show that embodied social interaction can be constitutive of agency detection and of experiencing another’s presence. Pairs of participants moved their ‘‘avatars’’ along an invisible virtual line and could make haptic contact with three identical objects, two of which embodied the other’s motions, but only one, the other’s avatar, also embodied the other’s contact sensor and thereby enabled responsive interaction. Co-regulated interactions were significantly correlated with identifications of the other’s avatar and reports of the clearest awareness of the other’s presence. These results challenge folk psychological notions about the boundaries of mind, but make sense from evolutionary and developmental perspectives: an extendible mind can offload cognitive work into its environment.
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Due to recent advances in synthetic biology and artificial life, the origin of life is currently a hot topic of research. We review the literature and argue that the two traditionally competing replicator first and metabolism-first... more
Due to recent advances in synthetic biology and artificial life, the origin of life is currently a hot topic of research. We review the literature and argue that the two traditionally competing replicator first and metabolism-first approaches are merging into one integrated theory of individuation and evolution. We contribute to the maturation of this more inclusive approach by highlighting some problematic assumptions that still lead to an impoverished conception of the phenomenon of life. In particular, we argue that the new consensus has so far failed to consider the relevance of intermediate time scales. We propose that an adequate theory of life must account for the fact that all living beings are situated in at least four distinct time scales, which are typically associated with metabolism, motility, development, and evolution. In this view, self movement, adaptive behavior, and morphological changes could have already been present at the origin of life. In order to illustrate this possibility, we analyze a minimal model of lifelike phenomena, namely, of precarious, individuated, dissipative structures that can be found in simple reaction-diffusion systems. Based on our analysis, we suggest that processes on intermediate time scales could have already been operative in prebiotic systems. They may have facilitated and constrained changes occurring in the faster- and slower-paced time scales of chemical self-individuation and evolution by natural selection, respectively.
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In sociology, there has been a controversy about whether there is any essential difference between a human being and a tool, or if the tool–user relationship can be defined by co-actor symmetry. This issue becomes more complex when we... more
In sociology, there has been a controversy about whether there is any essential difference between a human being and a tool, or if the tool–user relationship can be defined by co-actor symmetry. This issue becomes more complex when we consider examples of AI and robots, and even more so following progress in the development of various bio-machine hybrid technologies, such as robots that include organic parts, human brain implants, and adaptive prosthetics. It is argued that a concept of autonomous agency based on organismic embodiment helps to clarify the situation. On this view, agency consists of an asymmetrical relationship between an organism and its environment, because the continuous metabolic and regulatory activity of the organism gives rise to its own existence, and hence its specific behavioral domain. Accordingly, most (if not all) of current technologies are excluded from the class of autonomous agents. Instead, they are better conceptualized as interfaces that mediate our interactions with the world. This has important implications for design: Rather than trying to help humans to achieve their goals by duplicating their agency in artificial systems, it would be better to empower humans directly by enhancing their existing agency and lived experience with technological interfaces that can be incorporated into their embodiment. This incorporation might be especially facilitated by bio-machine hybrid technology that is designed according the principles of biological autonomy and multi-agent coordination dynamics.
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It has been argued that the worldwide prevalence of certain types of geometric visual patterns found in prehistoric art can be best explained by the common experience of these patterns as geometric hallucinations during altered states of... more
It has been argued that the worldwide prevalence of certain types of geometric visual patterns found in prehistoric art can be best explained by the common experience of these patterns as geometric hallucinations during altered states of consciousness induced by shamanic ritual practices. And in turn the worldwide prevalence of these types of hallucinations has been explained by appealing to humanity’s shared neurobiological embodiment. Moreover, it has been proposed that neural network activity can exhibit similar types of spatiotemporal patterns, especially those caused by Turing instabilities under disinhibited, non-ordinary conditions. Altered states of consciousness thus provide a suitable pivot point from which to investigate the complex relationships between symbolic material culture, first-person experience, and neurobiology. We critique prominent theories of these relationships. Drawing inspiration from neurophenomenology, we sketch the beginnings of an alternative, enactive approach centered on the concepts of sense-making, value, and sensorimotor decoupling.
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Schizophrenia and high functioning autism-spectrum disorders (ASD) are neurodevelopmental conditions that mainly impair social competence, while general intelligence (IQ) is spared. Both disorders have a strong ancillary role in... more
Schizophrenia and high functioning autism-spectrum disorders (ASD) are neurodevelopmental conditions that mainly impair social competence, while general intelligence (IQ) is spared. Both disorders have a strong ancillary role in theoretical research on social cognition. Recently the debate has started to be inflected by embodied and phenomenological approaches, which claim that the standard portrayal of all social understanding as so-called ‘mindreading’, i.e. the attribution of mental states to others in the service of explaining and predicting their behavior, is misguided. Instead it is emphasized that we normally perceive others directly as conscious and goal-directed persons, without requiring any theorizing and/or simulation. This paper evaluates some of the implications of abnormal experiences reported by people with schizophrenia and ASD for the current debate in cognitive science. For these people the practice of explicit mindreading seems to be a compensatory strategy that ultimately fails to compensate for – and may even exacerbate – their impairment of intuitive and interactive social understanding. Phenomenological psychopathology thereby supports the emerging view that ‘mindreading’ is not the principal form of normal social understanding.
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We argue that progress in our scientific understanding of the ‘social mind’ is hampered by a number of unfounded assumptions. We single out the widely shared assumption that social behavior depends solely on the capacities of an... more
We argue that progress in our scientific understanding of the ‘social mind’ is hampered by a number of unfounded assumptions. We single out the widely shared assumption that social behavior depends solely on the capacities of an individual agent. In contrast, both developmental and phenomenological studies suggest that the personal-level capacity for detached ‘social cognition’ (conceived as a process of theorizing about and/or simulating another mind) is a secondary achievement that is dependent on more immediate processes of embodied social interaction. We draw on the enactive approach to cognitive science to further clarify this strong notion of ‘social interaction’ in theoretical terms. In addition, we indicate how this interaction theory (IT) could eventually be formalized with the help of a dynamical systems perspective on the interaction process, especially by making use of evolutionary robotics modeling. We conclude that bringing together the methods and insights of developmental, phenomenological, enactive and dynamical approaches to social interaction can provide a promising framework for future research.
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The concept of autopoiesis was conceived by Maturana and Varela as providing the necessary and sufficient conditions for distinguishing the living from the non-living (and, by extension, the cognitive from the non-cognitive). More... more
The concept of autopoiesis was conceived by Maturana and Varela as providing the necessary and sufficient conditions for distinguishing the living from the non-living (and, by extension, the cognitive from the non-cognitive). More recently however, there has been a growing consensus that their original conception of autopoiesis is necessary but insufficient for this task as it fails to meet a number of constructive, interactive, normative, and historical requirements. We argue that it also fails to satisfy crucial phenomenological requirements that are motivated by the ongoing appropriation of autopoiesis as a key concept in enactive cognitive science. The root of these problems can be traced to the abstract general systems framework in which the ideas were first formulated, as epitomized by Ashby’s cybernetics. While this abstract generality has helped the concept’s popularity in some circles, we insist that a restriction of autopoiesis to a radical embodiment in chemical self-production under far-from-equilibrium conditions is necessary if the concept is to live up to its original intentions.
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One of the recurring themes in Čapek's play is the existential question of whether the reductionist materialist worldview-the belief that we can fully explain the world, including ourselves, in terms of nothing but physical processes-can... more
One of the recurring themes in Čapek's play is the existential question of whether the reductionist materialist worldview-the belief that we can fully explain the world, including ourselves, in terms of nothing but physical processes-can accommodate all that is essential to the human being. The materialist worldview triumphed with the scientific revolution, which in turn laid the foundations for the military-industrial complex. This historical shift is represented in the play by the business-minded young Rossum inheriting the bio-engineering methodology from the mad scientist old Rossum. A key difference between the two is that old Rossum's materialist stance is an ideological commitment, whereas for young Rossum working within a materialist framework is more a matter of convenience: for him it is sufficient for most practical purposes to replicate the machine-like aspects of a person. Where does this leave the soul, or what we today might prefer to call consciousness? The question of whether human nature goes beyond its physical aspects, and whether these subjective aspects can also be artificially replicated, is extremely challenging to address in scientific theory and practice-100 years ago as much as now.
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The enactive approach to cognitive science has undergone a biophenomenologically inspired "normative turn" by characterizing an organism's activity as motivated by intrinsic value, where this value is grounded in adaptive self-production... more
The enactive approach to cognitive science has undergone a biophenomenologically inspired "normative turn" by characterizing an organism's activity as motivated by intrinsic value, where this value is grounded in adaptive self-production under precarious conditions. However, efforts in the field of artificial life to model this enactive conception of life have unwittingly revealed a case of what can be called the hard problem of efficacy (HPE): how could any intrinsic value as such make an effective difference to an organism's behavior, in particular if bodily activity is purely determined by valueless material-organizational factors? First, this theoretical challenge of the HPE is formulated in the context of the enactive account of motivated activity. Then, by critically analyzing Schrödinger's work on the methodological principles that define the scientific world image, it is argued that they can be revised to allow solutions to the HPE. This involves placing a limit on Schrödinger's principle of understandability. The key move is to operationalize this limit with the concept of irruption: an organism's motivations can make a physical difference to its bodily activity, but only indeterminately so, akin to a breakdown of its material-organizational constraints. Irruptions can thereby indirectly facilitate behavior-switching as well as long-term selforganization of adaptive behavior. Finally, it is proposed that the efficacy of motivated activity has its own specific energy cost due to the disordering effect of irruptions, which provides a new perspective on agency and the notion of mental work.
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Donald Hebb proposed in his 1949 book The Organization of Behavior that cell assemblies organized by temporallyasymmetric excitation form the basis of cognition. This basic idea has inspired a large body of research in neuroscience, and... more
Donald Hebb proposed in his 1949 book The Organization of Behavior that cell assemblies organized by temporallyasymmetric excitation form the basis of cognition. This basic idea has inspired a large body of research in neuroscience, and to a lesser extent in artificial intelligence. The modern manifestation of Hebb's principle is Spike-Timing Dependent Plasticity (STDP), and though we have a large body of experimental work investigating STDP, there is still little understanding of how networks of spiking neurons organize themselves into complex functional circuits, even though some progress has been made with models such as Liquid State Machines. Networks popular in artificial intelligence (e.g. MLPs) and in artificial life (e.g. CTRNNs) tend to eschew Hebb's insight and use error-backpropagation by gradient descent, in the case of AI, or an a-temporal Hebbian learning rule based on the outer product of neural activities, in the case of AL. Both of these approaches have greater interpretability than Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), but both lack the mechanism that Hebb claimed was fundamental to cognition. This paper proposes to use complex-valued neurons (CVNs) to address this limitation, simultaneously promoting biological interpretation and computational tractability. The CVNs encode the firing rate and spike-time of a spiking neuron in the magnitude and angle, respectively, of a complex number. We also introduce an unsupervised piecewise-linear STDP learning rule compatible with CVNs, which for brevity we call complex-valued STDP (CVSTDP). We demonstrate both learning through error-backpropagation, and the spontaneous formation and dissolution of cell assemblies via the CVSTDP rule.
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Prehistoric rock art is often analyzed predominantly as the product of artists' intentions to create public representations of their perceptual experiences and mental imagery. However, this representation-centered approach tends to... more
Prehistoric rock art is often analyzed predominantly as the product of artists' intentions to create public representations of their perceptual experiences and mental imagery. However, this representation-centered approach tends to overlook the performative role of much material engagement. Many forms of rock art are better conceived of as traces from artists' repeated engagement with a surface, including with previous traces. For these artists, a potentially more relevant intention was ritualized interaction, such as communion and petition, which were realized as materially mediated transactions with the agencies that were believed to animate specific areas of the environment. If so, we can expect the motifs to be strongly clustered on ritually attractive areas, rather than to be evenly distributed on canvas-like surfaces that would maximize their visibility as public representations. Here we propose a novel way of testing the interaction-centered approach in terms of preferential attachment, which is a concept from network science that describe the well-known social phenomenon that popular agents tend to attract more followers. We applied this approach to a case study of an archaic site in Chihuahua, Mexico, and found that its petroglyph distribution has the form of a power law, which is consistent with preferential attachment. We conclude that this approach could be developed into a measure of the entanglement between ritual processes and products in prehistoric material engagement.
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From an enactive approach, some previous studies have demonstrated that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the dynamics of neural and behavioral complexity of embodied agents. In particular, it has been shown that agents with... more
From an enactive approach, some previous studies have demonstrated that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the dynamics of neural and behavioral complexity of embodied agents. In particular, it has been shown that agents with a limited internal structure (2-neuron brains) that evolve in interaction can overcome this limitation and exhibit chaotic neural activity, typically associated with more complex dynamical systems (at least 3-dimensional). In the present paper we make two contributions to this line of work. First, we propose a conceptual distinction in levels of coupling between agents that could have an effect on neural and behavioral complexity. Second, we test the generalizability of previous results by testing agents with richer internal structure and evolving them in a richer, yet non-social, environment. We demonstrate that such agents can achieve levels of complexity comparable to agents that evolve in interactive settings. We discuss the significance of this result for the study of interaction.
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The nervous system of the nematode soil worm Caenorhabditis elegans exhibits remarkable complexity despite the worm's small size. A general challenge is to better understand the relationship between neural organization and neural activity... more
The nervous system of the nematode soil worm Caenorhabditis elegans exhibits remarkable complexity despite the worm's small size. A general challenge is to better understand the relationship between neural organization and neural activity at the system level, including the functional roles of inhibitory connections. Here we implemented an abstract simulation model of the C. ele-gans connectome that approximates the neurotransmit-ter identity of each neuron, and we explored the functional role of these physiological differences for neural activity. In particular, we created a Hopfield neural network in which all of the worm's neurons characterized by inhibitory neurotransmitters are assigned inhibitory outgoing connections. Then, we created a control condition in which the same number of inhibitory connections are arbitrarily distributed across the network. A comparison of these two conditions revealed that the biological distribution of inhibitory connections facilitates the self-optimization of coordinated neural activity compared with an arbitrary distribution of inhibitory connections .
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We provide conceptual clues for one promising Artificial Life (ALife) route to Artificial Intelligence (AI) based on the notion of habit. We draw from an enactive approach that considers habits as the building blocks for mental life and,... more
We provide conceptual clues for one promising Artificial Life (ALife) route to Artificial Intelligence (AI) based on the notion of habit. We draw from an enactive approach that considers habits as the building blocks for mental life and, consequently, as the foundation for a science of mind. By taking this standpoint, this approach departs from the conventional view of intelligence in AI, which is based on "higher-order" cognitive functions. The first part of the paper addresses the idea of taking habits as the foundation for modeling intelligent behavior. This requires us to consider the so-called "scaling up" problem and rethink the concept of intelligence that still pervades in mainstream cognitive science. In the second part, we present the enactive approach to habits, emphasizing their adaptive and complex nature, as well as their fundamental role in guiding behavior. Finally, we acknowledge some limitations in the current enactive models of habits: either they are disembodied and decoupled, but allow for a rich landscape of attractors, or they are embodied and coupled, but remain too minimal. We propose a bridge between existing models and point to the need to go beyond the individual to include a social domain. We conclude that to better model intelligent behavior, embodied and situated agents must be capable of developing an increasingly complex network of habits from which an intelligent self emerges.
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We propose to designate as dynamic interactive artificial intelligence (dAI) a cross-section of existing work in artificially designed and artificially evolved systems meant for minimal forms of interaction with human users. This approach... more
We propose to designate as dynamic interactive artificial intelligence (dAI) a cross-section of existing work in artificially designed and artificially evolved systems meant for minimal forms of interaction with human users. This approach borrows principles from artificial life and human movement science to avoid pitfalls of traditional AI. Counter to tradition, it prioritizes user-machine interdependence over autonomy. It starts small and relies on incremental growth instead of trying to implement advanced complete functionality. It assumes a perceptual ontology founded on movement coordination rather than object classification. Its development process is better described as reverse self-organization rather than reverse engineering. dAI can be viewed as a precursor to or precondition for enactive AI and an alternative to traditional frameworks grounded on information representation. We then give examples from our work in human movement science where we have used minimal dynamic interactive agents to induce specific beneficial effects in human par-ticipants' movement skills. We also show how dAI can be exploited by both connectionist and symbolic AI.
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Much of the characteristic symptomatology of schizophrenia can be understood as resulting from a pervasive sense of disembodiment. The body is experienced as an external machine that needs to be controlled with explicit intentional... more
Much of the characteristic symptomatology of schizophrenia can be understood as resulting from a pervasive sense of disembodiment. The body is experienced as an external machine that needs to be controlled with explicit intentional commands, which in turn leads to severe difficulties in interacting with the world in a fluid and intuitive manner. In consequence, there is a characteristic dissociality: Others become problems to be solved by intellectual effort and no longer present opportunities for spontaneous interpersonal alignment. This dissociality goes hand in hand with a progressive loss of the socially extended mind, which normally affords opportunities for co-regulation of cognitive and affective processes. However, at times people with schizophrenia report that they are confronted by the opposite of this dissociality, namely an unusual fluidity of the self-other boundary as expressed in experiences of ambiguous body boundaries, intrusions, and even merging with others. Here 2 the person has not lost access to the socially extended mind but has instead become lost in it, possibly due to a weakened sense of self. We argue that this neglected aspect of schizophrenic social dysfunction can be usefully approached via the concept of genuine intersubjectivity: We normally participate in a shared experience with another person by implicitly co-regulating how our interaction unfolds. This co-regulation integrates our respective experience's dynamical bases into one interpersonal process and gives the interaction an ambiguous second-person character. The upshot is that reports of abnormal self-other fluidity are not indicative of hallucinations without any basis in reality, but of a heightened sensitivity and vulnerability to processes of interpersonal alignment and mutual incorporation that form the normal basis of social life. We conclude by discussing implications of this view for both the science of consciousness as well as approaches to intervention and therapy.
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Social network analysis and agent-based modeling are two approaches used to study biological and artificial multi-agent systems. However, so far there is little work integrating these two approaches. Here we present a first step toward... more
Social network analysis and agent-based modeling are two approaches used to study biological and artificial multi-agent systems. However, so far there is little work integrating these two approaches. Here we present a first step toward integration. We developed a novel approach that allows the creation of a social network on the basis of measures of interactions in an agent-based model for purposes of social network analysis. We illustrate this approach by applying it to a minimalist case study in swarm robotics loosely inspired by ant foraging behavior. For simplicity, we measured a network's inter-agent connection weights as the total number of interactions between mobile agents. This measure allowed us to construct weighted directed networks from the simulation results. We then applied standard methods from social network analysis, specifically focusing on node centralities, to find out which are the most influential nodes in the network. This revealed that task allocation emerges and induces two classes of agents, namely foragers and loafers, and that their relative frequency depends on food availability. This finding is consistent with the behavioral analysis, thereby showing the compatibility of these two approaches.
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It has recently been demonstrated that a Hopfield neural network that learns its own attractor configurations, for instance by repeatedly resetting the network to an arbitrary state and applying Hebbian learning after convergence, is able... more
It has recently been demonstrated that a Hopfield neural network that learns its own attractor configurations, for instance by repeatedly resetting the network to an arbitrary state and applying Hebbian learning after convergence, is able to form an associative memory of its attractors and thereby facilitate future convergences on better attractors. This process of structural self-optimization has so far only been demonstrated on relatively small artificial neural networks with random or highly regular and constrained topologies, and it remains an open question to what extent it can be generalized to more biologically realistic topologies. In this work, we therefore test this process by running it on the connectome of the widely studied nematode worm, C. elegans, the only living being whose neural system has been mapped in its entirety. Our results demonstrate, for the first time, that the self-optimization process can be generalized to bigger and biologically plausible networks. We conclude by speculating that the reset-convergence mechanism could find a biological equivalent in the sleep-wake cycle in C. elegans.
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Referential communication is a "representation-hungry" behavior , and the bee waggle dance is a classical example of ref-erential communication in nature. We used an evolutionary robotics approach to create a simulation model of a... more
Referential communication is a "representation-hungry" behavior , and the bee waggle dance is a classical example of ref-erential communication in nature. We used an evolutionary robotics approach to create a simulation model of a minimalist example of this situation. Two structurally identical agents engage in embodied interaction such that one of them can find a distant target in 2D space that only the other could perceive. This is a challenging task: during their interaction the agents must disambiguate translational and communicative movements, allocate distinct behavioral roles (sender versus receiver), and switch behaviors from communicative to target seeking behavior. We found an evolutionary convention with compositionality akin to the waggle dance, correlating duration and angle of interaction with distance and angle to target, respectively. We propose that this behavior is more appropriately described as interactive mindshaping, rather than as the transfer of informational content.
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Homeostatic systems tend to have a preferred state that it can be referred as a healthy state in traditionally-known systems such as the cardiovascular system. Any deviation from this state has been linked to disease. Different types of... more
Homeostatic systems tend to have a preferred state that it can be referred as a healthy state in traditionally-known systems such as the cardiovascular system. Any deviation from this state has been linked to disease. Different types of variables interact within homeostatic systems. Recently it has been described 2; “regulated” and “regulating” variables both of them with specific statistics that correlate to their function in maintaining homeostasis. We stated in this study that perception and mastery of a task with a sensory substitution system can be viewed and studied in a similar manner as traditionally-known homeostatic systems. We propose and exemplified with 2 cases of study that the state of mastery, from a time series perspective, share similarities between the statistics of their variables with healthy states in traditionally-known homeostatic systems, and that variations from that state of mastery share similarities with disease processes in traditionally-known homeostatic systems.
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Dexterous assistive devices constitute one of the frontiers for hybrid human-machine systems. Manipulating unstable systems requires task-specific anticipatory dynamics. Learning this dynamics is more difficult when tasks, such as... more
Dexterous assistive devices constitute one of the frontiers for hybrid human-machine systems. Manipulating unstable systems requires task-specific anticipatory dynamics. Learning this dynamics is more difficult when tasks, such as carrying liquid or riding a horse, produce unpredictable, irregular patterns of feedback and have hidden dimensions not projected as sensory feedback. We addressed the issue of coordination with complex systems producing irregular behaviour, with the assumption that mutual coordination allows for non-periodic processes to synchronize and in doing so to become regular. Chaos control gives formal expression to this: chaos can be stabilized onto periodic trajectories provided that the structure of the driving input takes into account the causal structure of the controlled system. Can we learn chaos control in a sensorimotor task? Three groups practiced an auditory-motor synchronization task by matching their continuously sonified hand movements to sonified tutors: a sinusoid served as a Non-Interactive Predictable tutor (NIP), a chaotic system stood for a Non-Interactive Unpredictable tutor (NI-U), and the same system weakly driven by the participant's movement stood for an Interactive Unpredictable tutor (I-U). We found that synchronization, dynamic similarity, and causal interaction increased with practice in I-U. Our findings have implications for current efforts to find more adequate ways of controlling complex adaptive systems.
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Artificial life has been developing a behavior-based perspective on the origins of life, which emphasizes the adaptive potential of agent-environment interaction even at that initial stage. So far this perspective has been closely aligned... more
Artificial life has been developing a behavior-based perspective on the origins of life, which emphasizes the adaptive potential of agent-environment interaction even at that initial stage. So far this perspective has been closely aligned to metabolism-first theories, while most researchers who study life's origins tend to assign an essential role to RNA. An outstanding challenge is to show that a behavior-based perspective can also address open questions related to the genetic system. Accordingly, we have recently applied this perspective to one of science's most fascinating mysteries: the origins of the standard genetic code. We modeled horizontal transfer of cellular components in a population of protocells using an iterated learning approach and found that it can account for the emergence of several key properties of the standard code. Here we further investigated the diachronic emergence of artificial codes and discovered that the model's most frequent sequence of amino acid assignments overlaps significantly with the predictions in the literature. Our explorations of the factors that favor early incorporation into an emerging artificial code revealed two aspects: an amino acid's relative probability of horizontal transfer, and its relative ease of discriminability in chemical space.
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Hopfield networks can exhibit many different attractors of which most are local optima. It has been demonstrated that combining states randomization and Hebbian learning enlarges the basin of attraction of globally optimal attractors. The... more
Hopfield networks can exhibit many different attractors of which most are local optima. It has been demonstrated that combining states randomization and Hebbian learning enlarges the basin of attraction of globally optimal attractors. The procedure is called self-modeling and it has been applied in symmetric Hopfield networks with discrete states and without self-recurrent connections. We are interested in knowing which topological constraints can be relaxed. So, the self-modeling process is tested in asymmetric Hopfield networks with continuous states and self-recurrent connections. The best results are obtained in networks with modular structure.
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Referential communication is a complex form of social interaction whereby agents manage to coordinate behavior with respect to features that are not immediately present during the interaction. A famous example from nature is the bee... more
Referential communication is a complex form of social interaction whereby agents manage to coordinate behavior with respect to features that are not immediately present during the interaction. A famous example from nature is the bee waggle dance. The authors used an minimal cognitive approach to create a model of referential communication that is sufficiently minimal to permit a full dynamical analysis, and yet still complex enough so that the results provide a useful perspective onto the processes that could be involved in natural referential communication. The task is for two embodied agents to interact in a “hive” area such that one of the agents (the receiver) is able to move to a specific “target”, the location of which is only available to the other agent (the sender). The task implicitly requires adopting the right role (sender vs. receiver), disambiguating between translational and communicative motion, and switching from communicative to target seeking behavior. Similar to the waggle dance, the best solution involved a correlation between duration of contact and distance to be traveled. Dynamical analysis revealed that this behavior cannot be attributed to the sender in isolation.
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Enactivists are searching for the conditions of genuine intersubjectivity. Theory of mind approaches to social cognition have come a long way from folk psychological theorizing by paying more attention to neuroscientific evidence and... more
Enactivists are searching for the conditions of genuine intersubjectivity. Theory of mind approaches to social cognition have come a long way from folk psychological theorizing by paying more attention to neuroscientific evidence and phenomenological insights. This has led to hybrid accounts that incorporate automatic processing and allow an instrumental role for perception and interaction. However, two foundational assumptions remain unquestioned. First, the cognitive unconscious: explanations assume there is a privileged domain of subpersonal mechanisms that operate in terms of representational personal-level concepts (belief, desire, inference, pretense, etc.), albeit unconsciously. Second, methodological individualism: explanations of social capacities are limited to mechanisms contained within the individual. The enactive approach breaks free from these representationalist-internalist constraints by integrating personal-level phenomenology with multi-scale dynamics occurring within and between subjects. This formal and empirical research on social interaction supports the possibility of genuine intersubjectivity: we can directly participate in the unfolding of each other’s experience.
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Computationalism aspires to provide a comprehensive theory of life and mind. It fails in this task because it lacks the conceptual tools to address the problem of meaning. I argue that a meaningful perspective is enacted by an individual... more
Computationalism aspires to provide a comprehensive theory of life and mind. It fails in this task because it lacks the conceptual tools to address the problem of meaning. I argue that a meaningful perspective is enacted by an individual with a potential that is intrinsic to biological existence: death. Life matters to such an individual because it must constantly create the conditions of its own existence, which is unique and irreplaceable. For that individual to actively adapt, rather than to passively disintegrate, expresses a value inherent in its way of life, which is the ultimate source of more refined forms of normativity. This response to the problem of meaning will not satisfy those searching for a functionalist or logical solution, but on this view such a solution will not be forthcoming. As an intuition pump for this alternative perspective I introduce two ancient foreign worldviews that assign a constitutive role to death. Then I trace the emergence of a similar conception of mortality from the cybernetics era to the ongoing development of enactive cognitive science. Finally, I analyze why orthodox computationalism has failed to grasp the role of mortality in this constitutive way.
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Ideas related to the creation of life have a long history in the Old World, reaching back to the times of classical antiquity, and are expressed in a diverse range of intersecting fields jointly known as artificial life today. It has been... more
Ideas related to the creation of life have a long history in the Old World, reaching back to the times of classical antiquity, and are expressed in a diverse range of intersecting fields jointly known as artificial life today. It has been argued that the modern sciences of the artificial could learn something from these classical myths. What is less well known is that ancient Mesoamerican cultures also possessed a rich corpus of
myths related to what we would now refer to as artificial life. In other words, although this is the first time that an ALife conference takes place in Mesoamerica, in a sense the central concept of the field, i.e. the creation of life via artificial means, has already been around the region for centuries if not for over a millennium. In the following we will focus on the specific case of the Maya, from whom several myths related to this concept have survived.
myths related to what we would now refer to as artificial life. In other words, although this is the first time that an ALife conference takes place in Mesoamerica, in a sense the central concept of the field, i.e. the creation of life via artificial means, has already been around the region for centuries if not for over a millennium. In the following we will focus on the specific case of the Maya, from whom several myths related to this concept have survived.
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Cooperation in scale-free networks has proven to be very robust against removal of randomly selected nodes (error) but highly sensitive to removal of the most connected nodes (attack). In this paper we analyze two comparable types of node... more
Cooperation in scale-free networks has proven to be very robust against removal of randomly selected nodes (error) but highly sensitive to removal of the most connected nodes (attack). In this paper we analyze two comparable types of node removal in which the removal selection is based on tournaments where the fittest (raids) or the least fit (battles) nodes are chosen. We associate the two removals to two types of Maya warfare offences during the Classic period. During this period of at least 500 years, political leaders were able to sustain social order in spite of attack-like offences to their social networks. We present a computational model with a population fluctuation mechanism that operates under an evolutionary game theoretic approach using the Prisoner's Dilemma as a metaphor of cooperation. We find that paradoxically battles are able to uphold cooperation under moderate levels of raids, although raids do have a strong impact on the network structure. We infer that cooperation does not depend as much on the structure as it does on the underlying mechanism that allows the network to readjust. We relate the results to the Maya Classic period, concluding that Mayan warfare by itself cannot entirely explain the Maya political collapse without appealing to other factors that increased the pressures against cooperation.
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Following on from the philosophy of embodiment by Merleau Ponty, Jonas and others, enactivism is a pivot point from which various areas of science can be brought into a fruitful dialogue about the nature of subjectivity. In this chapter... more
Following on from the philosophy of embodiment by Merleau Ponty, Jonas and others, enactivism is a pivot point from which various areas of science can be brought into a fruitful dialogue about the nature of subjectivity. In this chapter we present the enactive conception of agency, which, in contrast to current mainstream theories of agency, is deeply and strongly embodied. In line with this thinking we argue that anything that ought to be considered a genuine agent is a biologically embodied (even if distributed) agent, and that this embodiment must be affectively lived. However, we also consider that such an affective agent is not necessarily also an agent imbued with an explicit sense of subjectivity. To support this contention we outline the interoceptive foundation of basic agency and argue that there is a qualitative difference in the phenomenology of agency when it is instantiated in organisms which, due to their complexity and size, require a nervous system to underpin their physiological and sensorimotor processes. We argue that this interoceptively grounded agency not only entails affectivity but also forms the necessary basis for subjectivity.
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One problem in the origins of life is how parasitic side-reactions can be mitigated. It is known that spatial self-organisation can help with this, making autocatalytic chemical systems more robust to invasion by parasitic species. In... more
One problem in the origins of life is how parasitic side-reactions can be mitigated. It is known that spatial self-organisation can help with this, making autocatalytic chemical systems more robust to invasion by parasitic species. In previous work we have shown that in such scenarios parasitic reactions can actually be beneficial. Here we demonstrate for the first time a system in which the presence of a parasitic autocatalytic cycle is not only beneficial but actually necessary for the persistence of its host. This occurs due to the effect the parasite has on the spatial organisation of the system; the host-parasite system is more stable than the host alone, despite the fact that the parasite’s direct effect on its host is purely negative. We briefly discuss the implications for the origins of life.
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In the origin of life community there has been a dispute about whether metabolism or replication came first. Yet both of these approaches are in implicit agreement that the first forms of life were basically passive. That shared... more
In the origin of life community there has been a dispute about whether metabolism or replication came first. Yet both of these approaches are in implicit agreement that the first forms of life were basically passive. That shared assumption has begun to be challenged by a new generation of metabolism-first approaches, emphasizing that movement and adaptive behavior could have played an important role right from the start. After introducing recent research on this behavior-based approach to the origin of life, I offer a preliminary assessment of what this new approach implies for the origins of the genetic system.
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Whether collective agency is a coherent concept depends on the theory of agency that we choose to adopt. We argue that the enactive theory of agency developed by Barandiaran, Di Paolo and Rohde (2009) provides a principled way of... more
Whether collective agency is a coherent concept depends on the theory of agency that we choose to adopt. We argue that the enactive theory of agency developed by Barandiaran, Di Paolo and Rohde (2009) provides a principled way of grounding agency in biological organisms. However the importance of biological embodiment for the enactive approach might lead one to be skeptical as to whether artificial systems or collectives of individuals could instantiate genuine agency. To explore this issue we contrast the concept of collective agency with multi-agent systems and multi-system agents, and argue that genuinely collective agents instantiate agency at both the collective level and at the level of the component parts. Developing the enactive model, we propose understanding agency - both at the level of the individual and of the collective - as spectra that are constituted by dimensions that vary across time. Finally, we consider whether collectives that are not merely metaphorically 'agents' but rather are genuinely agentive also instantiate subjectivity at the collective level. We propose that investigations using the perceptual crossing paradigm suggest that a shared lived perspective can indeed emerge but this should not be conflated with a collective first person perspective, for which material integration in a living body may be required.
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A range of studies in the past decade and a half indicate significant impacts of tool use on body image. In cases of intentional action, contractions of near space or experienced extensions of limbs have been shown when using tools such... more
A range of studies in the past decade and a half indicate significant impacts of tool use on body image. In cases of intentional action, contractions of near space or experienced extensions of limbs have been shown when using tools such as rakes. It remains unclear whether the changes in body image are effected by the tool enabling perception at a distance or action/manipulation of the environment at a distance. We studied this issue using a new research tool, the Enactive Torch, a sensory substitution device specifically designed for research into perception and bodily action. The Enactive Torch allows perception at a distance without the capacity for distal action. We report a first experiment indicating that its use on a navigation task has no effect on body image.
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There is a growing community of cognitive scientists who are interested in developing a systematic understanding of the experiential or ‘lived’ aspects of the mind. We argue that this shift from cognitive science to consciousness science... more
There is a growing community of cognitive scientists who are interested in developing a systematic understanding of the experiential or ‘lived’ aspects of the mind. We argue that this shift from cognitive science to consciousness science presents a novel challenge to the fields of AI, robotics and related synthetic approaches. AI has traditionally formed the central foundation of cognitive science, and progress in artificial life has helped to pioneer a new understanding of cognition as embodied, situated and dynamical. However, in the current experiential turn toward the phenomenological aspects of mind, the role of these fields still remains uncertain. We propose that one way of dealing with the challenge of phenomenology is to make use of artificial life principles in the design of systems that include human observers inside the technologically mediated sensorimotor loops. Human-computer interfaces enable us to artificially vary the embodiment of the participants, and can therefore be used as novel tools to systematically investigate the embodied mind ‘as-it-could-be’ from the first-person perspective. We illustrate this methodology of artificial embodiment by drawing on our research in sensory substitution, virtual reality, and interactive installation.
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We used an evolutionary robotics methodology to generate pairs of simulated agents capable of reliably establishing and maintaining a coordination pattern under noisy conditions. The agents were only evolved for this ability and not for... more
We used an evolutionary robotics methodology to generate pairs of simulated agents capable of reliably establishing and maintaining a coordination pattern under noisy conditions. The agents were only evolved for this ability and not for their capacity to detect social contingency. However, when they were made to interact with a previously recorded, successful behavioral sequence, the coordination pattern could not be maintained. An analysis of the system’s underlying dynamics revealed (i) that stability of the coordination pattern requires mutuality of interaction, and (ii) that the interaction process is not only constituted by but also constitutive of individual behavior. We suggest that such termination of interaction is a general property of a certain class of interactively coupled dynamical systems, and conclude that psychological explanations of an individual’s sensitivity to social contingency need to take into account the role of the interaction process.
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Does the dynamical regime in which a system engages when it is coping with a situation A change after adaptation to a new situation B? Is homeostatic instability a generic mechanism for flexible switching between dynamical regimes? We... more
Does the dynamical regime in which a system engages when it is coping with a situation A change after adaptation to a new situation B? Is homeostatic instability a generic mechanism for flexible switching between dynamical regimes? We develop a model to approach these questions where a simulated agent that is stable and performing phototaxis has its vision field inverted so that it becomes unstable; instability activates synaptic plasticity changing the agent’s simulated nervous system attractor landscape towards a configuration that accommodates stable dynamics under normal and inverted vision. Our results show that: 1) the dynamical regime in which the agent engages under normal vision changes after adaptation to inverted vision; 2) homeostatic instability is not necessary for switching between dynamical regimes. Additionally, during the dynamical system analyses we also show that: 3) qualitatively similar behaviours (phototaxis) can be generated by different dynamics; 4) the agent’s simulated nervous system operates in transient dynamic towards an attractor that continuously move on the phase space; and 5) plasticity moves and reshapes the attractor landscape in order to accommodate a stable dynamical regimes to deal with inverted vision.
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There is a growing trend in the cognitive sciences to conceive of cognitive behavior as being distributed across brain, body and environment. However, the implications of such distribution for our understanding of biological robustness,... more
There is a growing trend in the cognitive sciences to conceive of cognitive behavior as being distributed across brain, body and environment. However, the implications of such distribution for our understanding of biological robustness, which so far has been related to individual-based mechanisms alone, has rarely been discussed in the literature. We used the Evolutionary Robotics technique to examine the relationship between distributed behavioral mechanisms and behavioral robustness. Two kinds of model agents were evolved for a mobile object-tracking task and tested to see whether they can sustain their behavior despite sensorimotor perturbations. The results indicate that a highly distributed realization of behavior can be (i) detrimental, if it is mostly based on factors that are necessary for the behavior, or (ii) beneficial, if it is mostly based on factors that are sufficient for the behavior. Accordingly, we suggest that future discussions of distributed cognition should take into account that there are at least two different possible modes of realizing distributed behavior and that these have a qualitatively different effect on behavioral robustness.
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We report on a set of minimalist modeling experiments that extends previous work on the dynamics of social interaction. We used an evolutionary robotics approach to fine-tune the design of a recent psychological experiment,as well as to... more
We report on a set of minimalist modeling experiments that extends previous work on the dynamics of social interaction. We used an evolutionary robotics approach to fine-tune the design of a recent psychological experiment,as well as to synthesize a solution that gives clues about how humans might perform under these novel conditions. In this manner we were able to generate a number of hypotheses that are open to verification by future experiments in social psychology. In particular, the results indicate some of the advantages and disadvantages of relying on social factors for solving behavioral tasks.
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We argue that the signi cance of the spatial boundary in autopoiesis has been overstated. It has the important task of distinguishing a living system as a unity in space but should not be seen as playing the additional role of delimiting... more
We argue that the signi cance of the spatial boundary in autopoiesis has been overstated. It has the important task of distinguishing a living system as a unity in space but should not be seen as playing the additional role of delimiting the processes that make up the autopoietic system. We demonstrate the relevance of this to a current debate about the compatibility of the extended mind hypothesis with the enactive approach and show that a radically extended interpretation of autopoiesis was intended in one of the original works on the subject. Additionally we argue that the de nitions of basic terms in the autopoietic literature can and should be made more precise, and we make some progress towards such a goal.
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This paper reports an exploratory study designed to clarify whether the Enactive Torch, a custom-built minimalist distance-to-tactile perceptual supplementation device, can be used to investigate the role of embodied action in the... more
This paper reports an exploratory study designed to clarify whether the Enactive Torch, a custom-built minimalist distance-to-tactile perceptual supplementation device, can be used to investigate the role of embodied action in the perception of external spatiality. By constraining the kind of exploratory movements available to the participants, we create an experimental setup in which it is possible to study the relationship between bodily degrees of freedom and spatial perception. We present a preliminary investigation of the strategies used by minimally trained participants to locate various objects placed in front of them by engaging in active exploration under constrained conditions.
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This paper supports the view that the ongoing shift from orthodox to embodied-embedded cognitive science has been significantly influenced by the experimental results generated by AI research. Recently, there has also been a noticeable... more
This paper supports the view that the ongoing shift from orthodox to embodied-embedded cognitive science has been significantly influenced by the experimental results generated by AI research. Recently, there has also been a noticeable shift toward enactivism, a paradigm which radicalizes the embodied-embedded approach by placing autonomous agency and lived subjectivity at the heart of cognitive science. Some first steps toward a clarification of the relationship of AI to this further shift are outlined. It is concluded that the success of enactivism in establishing itself as a mainstream cognitive science research program will depend less on progress made in AI research and more on the development of a phenomenological pragmatics.
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The enactive approach to perception is generating an extensive amount of interest and debate in the cognitive sciences. One particularly contentious issue has been how best to characterize the perceptual experiences reported by subjects... more
The enactive approach to perception is generating an extensive amount of interest and debate in the cognitive sciences. One particularly contentious issue has been how best to characterize the perceptual experiences reported by subjects who have mastered the skillful use of a perceptual supplementation (PS) device. This paper argues that this issue cannot be resolved with the use of third-person methodologies alone, but that it requires the development of a phenomenological pragmatics. In particular, it is necessary that the experimenters become skillful in the use of PS devices themselves. The ‘Enactive Torch’ is proposed as an experimental platform which is cheap, non-intrusive and easy to replicate, so as to enable researchers to corroborate reported experiences with their own phenomenology more easily.
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In the field of artificial life there is no agreement on what defines ‘autonomy’. This makes it difficult to measure progress made towards understanding as well as engineering autonomous systems. Here, we review the diversity of... more
In the field of artificial life there is no agreement on what defines ‘autonomy’. This makes it difficult to measure progress made towards understanding as well as engineering autonomous systems. Here, we review the diversity of approaches and categorize them by introducing a conceptual distinction between behavioral and constitutive autonomy. Differences in the autonomy of artificial and biological agents tend to be marginalized for the former and treated as absolute for the latter. We argue that with this distinction the apparent opposition can be resolved.
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We argue that the phenomenon of life is best understood as a process of open-ended becoming and that this potentiality for continuous change is expressed over a variety of timescales, in particular in the form of metabolism, behavior,... more
We argue that the phenomenon of life is best understood as a process of open-ended becoming and that this potentiality for continuous change is expressed over a variety of timescales, in particular in the form of metabolism, behavior, development, and evolution. We make use of a minimal synthetic approach that attempts to model this potentiality of life in terms of simpler dissipative structures, using reaction-diffusion systems to produce models that exhibit these characteristics. An analysis of the models shows that its structures exhibit some instances of relevant changes, but we do not consider them open-ended enough to be called alive. Still, the models shed light on current debates about the origins of life, especially by highlighting the potential role of motility in metabolism-first evolution.
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We argue that all primates primarily perceive the actions of conspecifics as meaningful expressions of agency. Social understanding is a perceptual capacity that does not require human reason or imagination. Conversely, only humans have... more
We argue that all primates primarily perceive the actions of conspecifics as meaningful expressions of agency. Social understanding is a perceptual capacity that does not require human reason or imagination. Conversely, only humans have an additional, sophisticated ability to decontextualize and objectify actions into abstract movements. We thereby turn the traditional consensus on its head: what distinguishes humans from other primates is not the ability to perceive other agents. Humans are different because they can detach from the goal-oriented and meaning-laden presence of their natural and social world in order to bring abstract physical details into focus. This objectifying stance is necessary for genuine innovation and fine-grained imitation, especially of opaque instrumental and symbolic gestures, and therefore has implications for the origins of tool use and language.
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Prehistoric art from all over the world is often characterised by similar kinds of abstract geometric patterns. There is an abundance of spirals, zigzag patterns, crosses, grids, and other visual forms. Many of these motifs are repeated... more
Prehistoric art from all over the world is often characterised by similar kinds of abstract geometric patterns. There is an abundance of spirals, zigzag patterns, crosses, grids, and other visual forms. Many of these motifs are repeated across independent cultural contexts, yet they do not appear to be images of natural phenomena. One possibility is that they symbolise some of the essential visual features of altered states of consciousness, which can be induced by shamanic trance.
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Most researchers in the science of the origin of life assume that the process of living is nothing but computation in the chemical domain, i.e. information processing of a genetic code. This has had the effect of restricting research to... more
Most researchers in the science of the origin of life assume that the process of living is nothing but computation in the chemical domain, i.e. information processing of a genetic code. This has had the effect of restricting research to the problem of stability, as epitomized by the concept of the hypercycle and its potential vulnerability against parasites. Stability is typically assumed to be ensured by a rigid compartment, but spatial self-structuring is a viable alternative. We further develop this alternative by proposing that some instability can actually be beneficial under certain conditions. We show that instability can lead to adaptive behavior even in the case of simple prebiotic reaction-diffusion systems. We demonstrate for the first time that a parasitic sidereaction on the metabolic level can lead to self-motility on the behavioral level of the chemical system as a whole. Moreover, self-motility entails advantages on an evolutionary level, thus constituting a symbiotic, behavior-based hypercycle. We relate this novel finding to several issues in the science of the origin of life, and conclude that more attention should be given to the possibility of a movement-first scenario.
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The extended mind hypothesis has stimulated much interest in cognitive science. However, its core claim, i.e. that the process of cognition can extend beyond the brain via the body and into the environment, has been heavily criticized. A... more
The extended mind hypothesis has stimulated much interest in cognitive science. However, its core claim, i.e. that the process of cognition can extend beyond the brain via the body and into the environment, has been heavily criticized. A prominent critique of this claim holds that when some part of the world is coupled to a cognitive system this does not necessarily entail that the part is also constitutive of that cognitive system. This critique is known as the “coupling-constitution fallacy”. In this paper we respond to this reductionist challenge by using an evolutionary robotics approach to create a minimal model of two acoustically coupled agents. We demonstrate how the interaction process as a whole has properties that cannot be reduced to the contributions of the isolated agents. We also show that the neural dynamics of the coupled agents has formal properties that are inherently impossible for those neural networks in isolation. By keeping the complexity of the model to an absolute minimum, we are able to illustrate how the coupling-constitution fallacy is in fact based on an inadequate understanding of the constitutive role of nonlinear interactions in dynamical systems theory.
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The enactive approach is a growing movement in cognitive science that replaces the classical computer metaphor of the mind with an emphasis on biological embodiment and social interaction as the sources of our goals and concerns. Mind is... more
The enactive approach is a growing movement in cognitive science that replaces the classical computer metaphor of the mind with an emphasis on biological embodiment and social interaction as the sources of our goals and concerns. Mind is viewed as an activity of making sense in embodied interaction with our world. However, if mind is essentially a concrete activity of sense-making, then how do we account for the more typically human forms of cognition, including those involving the abstract and the patently nonsensical? To address this crucial challenge this collection brings together new contributions from the sciences of the mind that draw on a wide variety of disciplines, including psychopathology, phenomenology, primatology, gender studies, quantum physics, immune biology, anthropology, philosophy of mind, and linguistics. This book is required reading for anyone who is interested in how the latest scientific insights are changing how we think about the human mind and its limits.
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Deacon develops a minimal model of a nonparasitic virus to explore how nucleotide sequences came to be characterized by a code-like informational codependence at the origin of life. The model serves to problematize the concept of... more
Deacon develops a minimal model of a nonparasitic virus to explore how nucleotide sequences came to be characterized by a code-like informational codependence at the origin of life. The model serves to problematize the concept of biological normativity because it highlights two common yet typically implicit assumptions: (1) that life could consist as an inert form, were it not for extrinsic sources of physical instability, and (2) that life could have originated as a singular self-contained individual. I propose that the origin of life, the genetic code, and biological normativity more generally, lead us to reject this passive individualism.
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In 2012, John Stewart contributed a book manuscript entitled ''Questioning Life and Cognition: Some Foundational Issues in the Paradigm of Enaction'' to the Enaction Series in Online Collaborative Publishing, edited by Olivier Gapenne and... more
In 2012, John Stewart contributed a book manuscript entitled ''Questioning Life and Cognition: Some Foundational Issues in the Paradigm of Enaction'' to the Enaction Series in Online Collaborative Publishing, edited by Olivier Gapenne and Bruno Bachimont. Along with Mattéo Mossio, I was invited by Olivier to serve as a glossator of this text. The purpose was to thereby continue our long and fruitful dialogues with John that began when we were both students. I took advantage of the opportunity to also express my gratitude to John for his participation in that formative stage of my personal academic journey. My reflections were included as an epilogue to his book. In memoriam, the epilogue is reproduced in this report unchanged. I will always be grateful to John for making the research community of enaction feel like family to me and for helping me recognize that there is a place for my diverse interests in the continued pursuit of an academic career.
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One of our children, age 7 years, was asked if he wanted to talk to his friends online. "No!" he replied angrily, "what's the point if I can't touch them!?" While his exasperation may not be shared by all of us, it concerns something... more
One of our children, age 7 years, was asked if he wanted to talk to his friends online. "No!" he replied angrily, "what's the point if I can't touch them!?" While his exasperation may not be shared by all of us, it concerns something basic to human life: embodied interaction with other people. Many aspects of our lives that were once taken for granted have been profoundly altered by lockdowns and social distancing measures that are part of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Things as simple as hugging a friend, talking face-to-face, socialising freely, and travelling have been restricted in many countries. Even as social distancing measures are slowly relaxed, hesitation and anxiety remain. The situation has had a profound effect on our social relations. How might we better understand how people have experienced this seismic shift?
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Temporality is a foundational topic in phenomenological psychopathology, and it plays an especially important role in its analysis of depression and melancholia (e.g., Fuchs, 2001; Fuchs, 2013; Gallagher, 2012; Ratcliffe, 2015). An... more
Temporality is a foundational topic in phenomenological psychopathology, and it plays an especially important role in its analysis of depression and melancholia (e.g., Fuchs, 2001; Fuchs, 2013; Gallagher, 2012; Ratcliffe, 2015). An intuitive strategy is to explain abnormal experiences of time by appealing to a fundamental disruption of the temporal structure of consciousness, yet Lenzo and Gallagher (this volume) highlight that this strategy is problematic.
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We applaud Tsuboi et al. for assembling the most extensive brain-body-mass dataset to date and making it publicly available. However, care must be taken when comparing static allometry between lineages exhibiting indeterminate versus... more
We applaud Tsuboi et al. for assembling the most extensive brain-body-mass dataset to date and making it publicly available. However, care must be taken when comparing static allometry between lineages exhibiting indeterminate versus determinate growth. It makes little sense to compare the continuous brain-body growth trajectories of adult fish, reptiles, and amphibians with the brain-body weight variability of adult birds and mammals whose growth has ceased. Instead, we agree with Deacon 2: 260 that "comparing ontogenetic curves is ultimately the only way to provide some assurance that we are not comparing apples and oranges". We therefore doubt that smaller slopes of static allometry in adult birds and mammals, which reflect weight variability across individuals whose brains have ceased growing, can help to explain their encephalization.
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Embodied, embedded, extended and enactive (4EC) perspectives on cognition have gained epistemic legitimacy during the last 25 years in the international arena. They have encouraged new ways to understand the mind. Mexico has not been an... more
Embodied, embedded, extended and enactive (4EC) perspectives on cognition have gained epistemic legitimacy during the last 25 years in the international arena. They have encouraged new ways to understand the mind. Mexico has not been an exception; rather, it has the potential to provide a fertile ground for the development of 4EC perspectives, as shown by the variety of contributions in this special issue. In this editorial introduction, we discuss recent concerns about a lack of coherence in the interrelations between these perspectives, and we propose that it is more appropriate to view 4EC as an emerging pluralistic research tradition that shares crucial commitments. Furthermore, we show that this pluralistic tradition has been gaining ground in the specific research context of Mexico, because of the country's distinctive historical, scientific and philosophical development. We finish by describing the promising research potential of the current heterogeneous explanations as evidenced by the papers in this issue.
El mejor antídoto para la manipulación por parte de intereses creados es una combinación de conocer los hechos y el pensamiento crítico. Sin embargo, en lugar de usar la educación como la principal estrategia de defensa contra la... more
El mejor antídoto para la manipulación por parte de intereses creados es una combinación de conocer los hechos y el pensamiento crítico. Sin embargo, en lugar de usar la educación como la principal estrategia de defensa contra la interferencia en el proceso democrático, los gobiernos de todo el mundo han estado ocupados desmantelando el sistema educativo. La educación superior es siempre el primer sector al cual se reduce su ya limitado presupuesto, y el objetivo declarado de muchas universidades ha dejado de ser el de capacitar a las personas para el pensamiento crítico. El objetivo principal se ha convertido en la producción de trabajadores que sean útiles para que las empresas obtengan beneficios económicos. Se están cerrando departamentos en las universidades que no encajan fácilmente dentro de este esquema. Los campos más afectados por estos cierres y cortes son precisamente los que estarían en la mejor posición para inocular a los ciudadanos contra la manipulación: las ciencias sociales, las humanidades y, en particular, la filosofía.
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We propose to consider an approach that takes into account the embodied, situated, dynamic, and phenomenological aspects of mental processes. Addiction in this context can be conceptualized as a habit, understood as a distributed network... more
We propose to consider an approach that takes into account the embodied, situated, dynamic, and phenomenological aspects of mental processes. Addiction in this context can be conceptualized as a habit, understood as a distributed network of mental, behavioral, and social processes, which not only shapes the addict's perceptions and actions, but also has a tendency to self-maintain. Such an approach may help to develop and integrate psychopathological and neurobiological research and practice of addictions.
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There is growing dissatisfaction with the traditional approach to the evolution of complex societies, which treated it principally as a sequence of transformations toward political centralization driven by the construction of increasingly... more
There is growing dissatisfaction with the traditional approach to the evolution of complex societies, which treated it principally as a sequence of transformations toward political centralization driven by the construction of increasingly vertical hierarchies by a powerful elite. In Mesoamerica the evidence is more consistent with a variety of alternative pathways to social complexity, and these are fruitfully approached from theoretical perspectives based on social heterarchy (Crumley 2003), collective action (Fargher et al. 2011), and, so I will suggest, ritual anti-structure (Turner 1969).
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After a hiatus of several decades there has been a resurgence of studies into the therapeutic potential of serotonergic psychedelics. When administered in controlled settings, they have been reported to induce a wide variety of... more
After a hiatus of several decades there has been a resurgence of studies into the therapeutic potential of serotonergic psychedelics. When administered in controlled settings, they have been reported to induce a wide variety of long-lasting positive psychological changes. However, the mechanisms by which psychedelics impart these long-lasting benefits remain poorly understood. Here we highlight one possibility that has remained underexplored: a beneficial interaction with the self-optimizing functions of sleep.
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The study and simulation of adaptive behavior in natural and artificial systems have always involved the convergence of several disciplines, interests, and methods. Since its inception, the pages of this journal have reflected a... more
The study and simulation of adaptive behavior in natural and artificial systems have always involved the convergence of several disciplines, interests, and methods. Since its inception, the pages of this journal have reflected a cross-fertilization between the sciences of the artificial, the sciences of living systems, and the sciences of the mind. As a result, Adaptive Behavior has been, and continues to be, a forum for innovative, creative , yet rigorous, work on complex adaptive systems, robotic and computational investigations of behavior and cognition, as well as novel theoretical developments and applications.
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Open peer commentary on the article “Interactivity and Enaction in Human Cognition” by Matthew Isaac Harvey, Rasmus Gahrn Andersen & Sune Vork Steffensen. Upshot: Enaction is a diverse research program and some of its texts can be... more
Open peer commentary on the article “Interactivity and Enaction in Human Cognition” by Matthew Isaac Harvey, Rasmus Gahrn Andersen & Sune Vork Steffensen. Upshot: Enaction is a diverse research program and some of its texts can be interpreted in terms of a critical contrast to interactivity. Yet much of the former has already started to move in a direction favored by the latter: toward systematic studies of how human activity is shaped by social, cultural, and technological influences. Interactivity could therefore help enaction to provide a better account of such highly mediated and augmented forms of sense-making.
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Synthetic approaches to social interaction support the development of a second-person neuroscience. Agent-based models and psychological experiments can be related in a mutually informing manner. Models have the advantage of making the... more
Synthetic approaches to social interaction support the development of a second-person neuroscience. Agent-based models and psychological experiments can be related in a mutually informing manner. Models have the advantage of making the nonlinear brain–body–environment–body–brain system as a whole accessible to analysis by dynamical systems theory. We highlight some general principles of how social interaction can partially constitute an individual’s behavior.
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We respond to the commentaries by Hodgson and Lewis-Williams by clarifying the novelty of our theory. We argue that whenever Turing instabilities of neural activity play a role in generating visual hallucinations, they do more than shape... more
We respond to the commentaries by Hodgson and Lewis-Williams by clarifying the novelty of our theory. We argue that whenever Turing instabilities of neural activity play a role in generating visual hallucinations, they do more than shape the geometric patterns. Their relatively autonomous self-organization is a source of intrinsic value related to their self-maintenance as a pattern of activity, and they would also thereby decouple ‘‘higher-level’’ stages of neural processing from external stimulation, thus facilitating a more abstract mode of cognition. These additional features of our proposal support Hodgson and Lewis-Williams in their respective theories about the very first origins of human artistic activity. We also evaluate the critical literature regarding the possibility of ritualized enaction of altered states of consciousness (ASC) in early prehistory. We conclude that ASC were indeed possible, and suggest that they were likely involved in
facilitating the social development of more symbolic forms of life and mind.
facilitating the social development of more symbolic forms of life and mind.
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The work of Ezequiel Di Paolo and Hanne De Jaegher has helped to transform the enactive approach from relative obscurity into a hotly debated contender for the future science of social cognition and cognitive science more generally. In... more
The work of Ezequiel Di Paolo and Hanne De Jaegher has helped to transform the enactive approach from relative obscurity into a hotly debated contender for the future science of social cognition and cognitive science more generally. In this short introduction I situate their contributions in what I see as important aspects of the bigger picture that is motivating and inspiring them as well as the rest of this young community. In particular, I sketch some of the social issues that go beyond mere academic debate, including how the methods and assumptions that inform orthodox cognitive science are intrinsically related to the critical state of affairs in our world today. I conclude with some personal recollections in order to give an idea of the context in which their ideas, and mine as well, came to fruition.
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John Stewart and I wrote a response to Maturana’s commentary on our 2010 paper, in which we clarify our position and offer some further reflections on the similarities and differences between Maturana’s biology of cognition and the... more
John Stewart and I wrote a response to Maturana’s commentary on our 2010 paper, in which we clarify our position and offer some further reflections on the similarities and differences between Maturana’s biology of cognition and the enactive approach to cognitive science. We agree that Maturana’s work is an improvement over Ashby’s approach to biological function, but we also suggest that the enactive approach is in important respects an improvement over the biology of cognition.
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In response to some GOFAI nostalgia published in issue 133 of the AISB Quarterly, I wrote a short commentary outlining an alternative view of the situation.
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In important ways, Clark’s “hierarchical prediction machine” (HPM) approach parallels the research agenda we have been pursuing. Nevertheless, we remain unconvinced that the HPM offers the best clue yet to the shape of a unified science... more
In important ways, Clark’s “hierarchical prediction machine” (HPM) approach parallels the research agenda we have been pursuing. Nevertheless, we remain unconvinced that the HPM offers the best clue yet to the shape of a unified science of mind and action. The apparent convergence of research interests is offset by a profound divergence of theoretical starting points and ideal goals.
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The ever-increasing precision of brain measurement brings with it a demand for more reliable and fine-grained measures of conscious experience. However, introspection has long been assumed to be too limited and fallible. This skepticism... more
The ever-increasing precision of brain measurement brings with it a demand for more reliable and fine-grained measures of conscious experience. However, introspection has long been assumed to be too limited and fallible. This skepticism is primarily based on a series of classic psychological experiments, which suggested that more is seen than can be retrospectively reported (Sperling, 1960), and that we can be easily fooled into retrospectively describing intentional choices that we have never made (Johansson, Hall, Silkström, & Olsson, 2005; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). However, the work by Petitmengin, Remillieux, Cahour, and Carter-Thomas (2013) could resolve this dilemma. They showed that subjects can be interactively guided to become better aware of their past experience, thereby overturning the “choice blindness” results of Johansson et al. (2005). Although some more fine-tuning of the experimental protocol is needed, interactively guided introspection may well become the most reliable and exhaustive measure of consciousness.
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Franchi argues that Ashby’s homeostat can be usefully understood as a thought experiment to explore the theory that life is fundamentally heteronomous. While I share Franchi’s interpretation, I disagree that this theory of life is a... more
Franchi argues that Ashby’s homeostat can be usefully understood as a thought experiment to explore the theory that life is fundamentally heteronomous. While I share Franchi’s interpretation, I disagree that this theory of life is a promising alternative that is at odds with most of the Western philosophical tradition. On the contrary, heteronomy lies at the very core of computationalism, and this is precisely what explains its persistent failure to construct life-like agents.
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Sato and colleagues make use of an innovative method that combines robotics modeling and psychological experimentation to investigate how tool use affects our living and lived embodiment. I situate their approach in a general shift from... more
Sato and colleagues make use of an innovative method that combines robotics modeling and psychological experimentation to investigate how tool use affects our living and lived embodiment. I situate their approach in a general shift from robotics to human-computer interface studies in enactive cognitive science, and speculate about the necessary conditions for the bodily incorporation of tools.
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Seth extends predictive processing with counterfactuals: Encoded probabilities of what would occur given a repertoire of possible (but unexecuted) actions. He thereby provides a neat mathematical formulation of the sensorimotor account of... more
Seth extends predictive processing with counterfactuals: Encoded probabilities of what would occur given a repertoire of possible (but unexecuted) actions. He thereby provides a neat mathematical formulation of the sensorimotor account of perceptual presence, i.e., of the fact that we perceive a whole object while being limited to seeing it from a perspective. Synesthetic concurrents are explained in terms of impoverished counterfactuals. I argue that this explanation misses its target, because it only accounts for a lack of objecthood. Enactive theory is better suited to explain concurrents’ lack of subjectivity veridicality. The world itself shapes experience only during veridical perception.
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Three kinds of hallucinations have repeatedly been identified in the literature on altered states of consciousness (ASCs): visions of (1) geometric forms, (2) figures and objects, and (3) complete scenes. Lewis-Williams’... more
Three kinds of hallucinations have repeatedly been identified in the literature on altered states of consciousness (ASCs): visions of (1) geometric forms, (2) figures and objects, and (3) complete scenes. Lewis-Williams’ neuropsychological model draws on these reports to gain insights into the minds of Paleolithic people, on the basis of shared neurobiology and given comparative ethnographic data on ritualized ASCs. Helvenston has long rejected this model because in many ASCs hallucinations do not always adhere to a strict 1-2-3 sequence, because they do not always feature animals, and because people do not always lose their critical faculties. She is right, but she is attacking a straw man because these criteria are her own. Helvenston’s claims about the effects of psychoactive compounds and sensory deprivation are also questionable. It remains an open question how our Turing pattern model relates to more figurative forms of hallucinations.
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This article was originally motivated by a couple of critical commentaries about my work (Helvenston 2014, and above). However, I quickly came to realise that, to be able to adequately respond to the specific concerns that were raised, I... more
This article was originally motivated by a couple of critical commentaries about my work (Helvenston 2014, and above). However, I quickly came to realise that, to be able to adequately respond to the specific concerns that were raised, I would have to present some general considerations. It is only with this context in place that it becomes clear why I think that these details are worth arguing over in the first place. Thus, before anything else, the overarching question is: when it comes to the formidable task of understanding human pre-History, why should we care about altered states of consciousness?
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This MIT Press volume edited by Durt et al. (2017) is concerned with investigating how people bring about a shared sociocultural world through participatory and broader collective sense-making processes, while at the same time... more
This MIT Press volume edited by Durt et al. (2017) is concerned with investigating how people bring about a shared sociocultural world through participatory and broader collective sense-making processes, while at the same time highlighting how the participants in these social processes are themselves transformed by the world they help to bring forth. The key insight that runs through this interdisciplinary collection of 20 chapters is the irreducible nature of this interdependence between individual and collective processes: participation in, and hence the cultural reproduction of, patterned practices of the social world is only realizable via a thorough transformation of individual embodied minds.
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Fuchs (2018) book starts with a wake-up call. We are facing social and ecological crises that threaten the flourishing of future generations. Ideally, therefore, the sciences of the mind should help us to better understand on what basis a... more
Fuchs (2018) book starts with a wake-up call. We are facing social and ecological crises that threaten the flourishing of future generations. Ideally, therefore, the sciences of the mind should help us to better understand on what basis a person can take responsible action, and thereby contribute to empowering people in their capacity to make a difference. Yet mainstream human neuroscience confronts us with the hypothesis that our self, free will, consciousness, and hence also our conscience, are nothing but internal fictions fabricated by patterns of nervous activity. Fuchs' book is a valuable reminder of the high price of this sort of reductionism, which realizes the ideal of naturalizing the mind at the cost of leaving no theoretical room for people to genuinely make a difference for others in the world. It is a scientific worldview that implicitly legitimizes todays widespread sense of isolation and apathy. A key motivation for Fuchs is to shore up resistance against this encroachment upon our personal lifeworld, but he wisely refrains from overplaying this appeal to our conscience. The book's main contribution lies in demonstrating that doing justice to the complexities and ambiguities of human existence actually leads to a more mature cognitive science and a more coherent philosophy of mind.
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> Context • There is a growing recognition in consciousness science of the need for rigorous methods for obtaining accurate and detailed phenomenological reports of lived experience, i.e., descriptions of experience provided by the... more
> Context • There is a growing recognition in consciousness science of the need for rigorous methods for obtaining accurate and detailed phenomenological reports of lived experience, i.e., descriptions of experience provided by the subject living them in the “first-person.” > Problem • At the moment although introspection and debriefing interviews are sometimes used to guide the design of scientific studies of the mind, explicit description and evaluation of these methods and their results rarely appear in formal scientific discourse. > Method • The recent publication of an edited book of papers dedicated to the exploration of first-and second-person methods, Ten Years of Viewing from Within: The Legacy of Francisco Varela, serves as a starting point for a discussion of how these methods could be integrated into the growing discipline of consciousness science. We complement a brief review of the book with a critical analysis of the major pilot studies in Varela’s neurophenomenology, a research program that was explicitly devised to integrate disciplined experiential methods with the latest advances in neuroscience. > Results • The book is a valuable resource for those who are interested in impressive recent advances in first- and second person methods, as applied to the phenomenology of lived experience. However, our review of the neurophenomenology literature concludes that there is as yet no convincing example of these specialized techniques being used in combination with standard behavioral and neuroscientific approaches in consciousness science to produce results that could not have also been achieved by simpler methods of introspective reporting. > Implications • The end of behaviorism and the acceptance of verbal reports of conscious experience have already enabled the beginning of a science of consciousness. It can only be of benefit if new first- and second-person methods become well-known across disciplines. > Constructivist content • Constructivism has long been interested in the role of the observer in the constitution of our sense of reality, so these developments in the science of consciousness may open new avenues of constructivist research. More specifically, one of the ways in which the insights from first- and second person methods are being validated is by recursively applying the methods to themselves; a practical application of an epistemological move that will be familiar to constructivists from the second-order cybernetics tradition.
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Critics of the paradigm of enaction have long argued that enactive principles will be unable to account for the traditional domain of orthodox cognitive science, namely “higher-level” cognition and specifically human cognition. Moreover,... more
Critics of the paradigm of enaction have long argued that enactive principles will be unable to account for the traditional domain of orthodox cognitive science, namely “higher-level” cognition and specifically human cognition. Moreover, even many of the paradigm’s “lower-level” insights into embodiment and situatedness appear to be amenable to a functionalist reinterpretation. In this review, I show on the basis of the recently published collection of papers, Enaction, that the paradigm of enaction has (a) a unique foundation in the notion of sense-making that places fundamental limits on the scope of functionalist appropriation; (b) a unique perspective on higher-level cognition that sets important new research directions without the need for the concept of mental representation; (c) a new concept of specifically human cognition in terms of second-order sense-making; and (d) a rich variety of approaches to explain the evolutionary, historical, and developmental origins of this sophisticated human ability. I also indicate how studies of the role of embodiment for abstract human cognition can strengthen their position by reconceiving their notion of embodiment in enactive terms.
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Increasing numbers of philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists are jumping on the embodied cognition bandwagon. Accordingly, mind is no longer viewed as locked away in some Platonic realm of pure logic, as the computational theory of... more
Increasing numbers of philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists are jumping on the embodied cognition bandwagon. Accordingly, mind is no longer viewed as locked away in some Platonic realm of pure logic, as the computational theory of mind has traditionally proposed. Instead, mind has become identified with purposeful activity in the world, an activity that is realized by the body, extended by usage of tools, and scaffolded by a sociocultural environment.
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I review The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind by Giovanna Colombetti (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2014, 288 pages, $40.00 hardcover). In this book Colombetti draws on the enactive theory of organismic... more
I review The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind by Giovanna Colombetti (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2014, 288 pages, $40.00 hardcover). In this book Colombetti draws on the enactive theory of organismic embodiment and its key concept of sense-making in order to critically evaluate various aspects of mainstream affective science, including basic emotions and alternative constructionist approaches, as well as the cognitivist approach to emotion and appraisal theory. She defends and develops a dynamical systems approach to emotions and emphasizes the need for including more first-person methods of consciousness science in mainstream affective neuroscience. These are valuable contributions to affective science, and they also advance enactive theory. Colombetti’s proposal goes further than standard neurophenomenology in that she appeals to the bodily basis of feeling, thereby requiring a new sort of neuro-physio-phenomenology. Even more radically, she allows that all living beings are essentially affective beings, even those without a nervous system, and that emotional forms could be co-constituted by more than one person.
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Pessoa’s The Cognitive-Emotional Brain (2013) is an integrative approach to neuroscience that complements other developments in cognitive science, especially enactivism. Both accept complexity as essential to mind; both tightly integrate... more
Pessoa’s The Cognitive-Emotional Brain (2013) is an integrative approach to neuroscience that complements other developments in cognitive science, especially enactivism. Both accept complexity as essential to mind; both tightly integrate perception, cognition, and emotion, which enactivism unifies in its foundational concept of sense-making; and both emphasize that the spatial extension of mental processes is not reducible to specific brain regions and neuroanatomical connectivity. An enactive neuroscience is emerging.
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The ALife conferences are the major meeting of the artificial life research community since 1987. For its 15th edition in 2016, it was held in Latin America for the first time, in the Mayan Riviera, Mexico, from July 4 -8. The special... more
The ALife conferences are the major meeting of the artificial life research community since 1987. For its 15th edition in 2016, it was held in Latin America for the first time, in the Mayan Riviera, Mexico, from July 4 -8. The special them of the conference: How can the synthetic study of living systems contribute to societies: scientifically, technically, and culturally? The goal of the conference theme is to better understand societies with the purpose of using this understanding for a more efficient management and development of social systems.
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The enactive approach is a growing movement in cognitive science that replaces the classical computer metaphor of the mind with an emphasis on biological embodiment and social interaction as the sources of our goals and concerns. Mind is... more
The enactive approach is a growing movement in cognitive science that replaces the classical computer metaphor of the mind with an emphasis on biological embodiment and social interaction as the sources of our goals and concerns. Mind is viewed as an activity of making sense in embodied interaction with our world. However, if mind is essentially a concrete activity of sense-making, how do we account for the more typically human forms of cognition, including those involving the abstract and the patently nonsensical? To address this crucial challenge, this collection brings together new contributions from the sciences of the mind that draw on a wide variety of disciplines, including psychopathology, phenomenology, primatology, gender studies, quantum physics, immune biology, anthropology, philosophy of mind, and linguistics. This book is required reading for anyone who is interested in how the latest scientific insights are changing how we think about the human mind and its limits.
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The life-mind continuity thesis holds that mind is prefigured in life and that mind belongs to life. Its biggest challenge is the problem of scalability: how can the same explanatory framework that accounts for basic phenomena of life and... more
The life-mind continuity thesis holds that mind is prefigured in life and that mind belongs to life. Its biggest challenge is the problem of scalability: how can the same explanatory framework that accounts for basic phenomena of life and mind be extended to incorporate the highest reaches of human cognition? So far there has been little systematic response to this „cognitive gap‟. The main argument of this thesis is that the problem appears insurmountable because of the prevalent focus on the individual agent alone, and that it can start to be addressed by an appreciation of the constitutive role of sociality for mind and behavior. This argument is developed in a theoretical, experimental, and phenomenological manner. In terms of theory, the enactive paradigm of cognitive science is developed in a novel direction by highlighting the specific manner in which the dynamics of the interaction process opens up new behavioral domains. This provides the motivation for using an evolutionary robotics methodology to synthesize a set of minimalist simulation models that are based on experiments in social psychology. A detailed dynamical analysis of these models supports the enactive approach; the behavior of the agents is not an individual achievement alone but rather co-determined by their mutual interaction and organized effectively by this multi-agent interaction process. Some phenomenological observations complement these results by indicating that the detached perceptual attitude that is characteristic of adult human perception is essentially an intersubjective and socially mediated ability. Finally, the systemic and phenomenological insights are combined to provide the beginnings of a novel perspective on the origins of cumulative cultural development that gives further support to the main argument of this thesis. It is concluded that the life-mind continuity thesis is a viable working hypothesis even when accounting for specifically human abilities, and that an appreciation of the constitutive role of sociality for life and mind confirms it to be a serious contender for a unified theory of cognitive science.
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Tradicionalmente, el diseño pedagógico para las prácticas de enseñanza y aprendizaje ha estado caracterizado por procesos donde un experto activo se torna en el sostén del aprendiz pasivo mientras éste último completa de manera exitosa su... more
Tradicionalmente, el diseño pedagógico para las prácticas de enseñanza y aprendizaje ha estado caracterizado por procesos donde un experto activo se torna en el sostén del aprendiz pasivo mientras éste último completa de manera exitosa su meta o tarea. No obstante, a partir de la accesibilidad actual a las tecnologías de la información y al entendimiento del rol activo que juega el aprendiz, perspectivas más interactivas, corporeizadas, y contextualizadas, han comenzado a ganar espacios. En este artículo, contribuimos con un informe técnico de un estudio piloto basado en el Enactive Torch, una herramienta para el estudio científico de la percepción, la cual fue desarrollada para investigar el rol de los procesos corporeizados en la generación de experiencias perceptuales de sustitución sensorial.
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El presente texto considera cuestiones en torno a la continuidad y la discontinuidad entre la vida y la mente. Inicia examinando dichas cuestiones desde la perspectiva del principio de energía libre (PEL). El PEL se ha vuelto... more
El presente texto considera cuestiones en torno a la continuidad y la discontinuidad entre la vida y la mente. Inicia examinando dichas cuestiones desde la perspectiva del principio de energía libre (PEL). El PEL se ha vuelto considerablemente influyente tanto en la neurociencia como en la ciencia cognitiva. Postula que los organismos actúan para conservarse a sí mismos en sus estados biológicos y cognitivos esperados, y que lo logran al minimizar su energía libre, dado que el promedio de energía libre a largo plazo es entropía. El texto, por lo tanto, argumenta que no existe una sola interpretación del PEL para pensar la relación entre la vida y la mente. Algunas formulaciones del PEL dan cuenta de lo que llamamos una perspectiva de independencia entre la vida y la mente. Una perspectiva de independencia es la perspectiva cognitivista del PEL, misma que depende del procesamiento de información con contenido semántico, y por ende, restringe el rango de sistemas capaces de exhibir mentalidad. Otras perspectivas de independencia ejemplifican lo que llamamos la demasiado generosa perspectiva no-cognitivista del PEL, que parecen ir en dirección opuesta: sugieren que la mentalidad se encuentra casi en cualquier lugar. El texto continúa argumentando que el PEL no-cognitivista y sus implicaciones para pensar la relación entre la vida y la mente puede ser útilmente delimitado por las recientes aproximaciones enactivas a la ciencia cognitiva. Concluimos que la versión más contundente de la relación vida-mente las considera fuertemente continuas, y esta continuidad se basa en conceptos particulares de vida (autopoiesis y adaptabilidad) y mente (básica y no-semántica).
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El computacionalismo aspira a ofrecer una teoría unificadora de la vida y la mente. Fracasa en esta tarea debido a que carece de las herramientas conceptuales para abordar el problema del significado. Argumento que una postura... more
El computacionalismo aspira a ofrecer una teoría unificadora de la vida y la mente. Fracasa en esta tarea debido a que carece de las herramientas conceptuales para abordar el problema del significado. Argumento que una postura significativa es enactuada por un individuo con el potencial intrínseco a toda existencia biológica: la muerte. Para este individuo la vida importa a fin de adaptarse activamente, en lugar de desintegrarse pasivamente. Introduciré dos cosmovisiones antiguas y extranjeras que asignan a la muerte un rol constitutivo. Posteriormente, trazaré la emergencia de una concepción similar de mortalidad, derivada desde la era cibernética al desarrollo actual enfoque enactivo de la ciencia cognitiva. Finalmente, se analiza por qué el computacionalismo ortodoxo ha fracasado en atisbar de esta manera constitutiva el papel de la mortalidad.
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De acuerdo al enfoque enactivo de las ciencias cognitivas, la percepción es esencialmente una forma habilidosa de abordar al mundo. Aprender como abordarlo mediante interfaces humano-computadora, (IHC) puede por lo tanto ser visto como... more
De acuerdo al enfoque enactivo de las ciencias cognitivas, la percepción es esencialmente una forma habilidosa de abordar al mundo. Aprender como abordarlo mediante interfaces humano-computadora, (IHC) puede por lo tanto ser visto como una forma de desarrollar un nuevo modo de experiencia. De forma similar, se ha teorizado que la percepción social está constituida por una forma hábil de abordarse entre personas, lo que implica que es posible investigar los orígenes y desarrollo de la conciencia social utilizando IHCs multiusuario. En el presente artículo analizamos los cambios objetivos y subjetivos ensayo-a-ensayo en la socialización que tuvo lugar durante un experimento de cruce perceptual, en el cual, la interacción corporeizada entre pares de adultos fue mediada por una IHC háptica minimalista. Dado que el estudio requirió que los participantes reaprendieran implícitamente cómo abordarse entre sí para percibir las presencias el uno del otro, hipotetizamos que habría indicaciones de que los estadios iniciales de la conciencia social eran de hecho recapitulados. Resultados preliminares revelan que, pese a una carencia de retroalimentación explicita sobre el desempeño de la tarea, había una tendencia de la conciencia social a incrementar a través del tiempo. Discutimos los desafíos metodológicos implicados en evaluar si esta tendencia fue causada por distintos estadios del desarrollo de conducta objetiva y experiencia subjetiva.
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W artykule tym opowiadam się za zunifikowaną kognitywistyką, przyjmując dla swej argumentacji niecodzienny punkt wyjścia: stanowisko określane czasem jako " teza o kontinuum życia-umysłu ". Zamiast więc traktować jako pewnik powszechnie... more
W artykule tym opowiadam się za zunifikowaną kognitywistyką, przyjmując dla swej argumentacji niecodzienny punkt wyjścia: stanowisko określane czasem jako " teza o kontinuum życia-umysłu ". Zamiast więc traktować jako pewnik powszechnie akcep-towane założenia początkowe, a następnie proponować odpowiedzi na pewne do-brze określone pytania, muszę najpierw dowieść, że koncepcja kontinuum życia-u-mysłu może w ogóle stanowić właściwy punkt startowy. Zacznę zatem od oceny poję-ciowych narzędzi, odpowiednich do budowania teorii umysłu na tej podstawie. Czer-piąc spostrzeżenia z wielu różnych dziedzin – szczególnie z połączenia egzystencja-listycznej fenomenologii ze skoncentrowaną na organizmie biologią – dowodzę, że można pojmować umysł jako zakorzeniony w życiu, ale tylko wtedy, gdy równocze-śnie zgodzimy się, że interakcja społeczna gra konstytutywną rolę w naszych zdolno-ściach poznawczych.
Praca Ezequiel Di Paolo i Hanne De Jaegher przyczyniła się do tego, że względnie niezrozumiałe podejście enaktywistyczne stało się przedmiotem ożywionych dyskusji i wyzwaniem dla przyszłych nauk o poznaniu społecznym, a ogólniej – dla... more
Praca Ezequiel Di Paolo i Hanne De Jaegher przyczyniła się do tego, że względnie niezrozumiałe podejście enaktywistyczne stało się przedmiotem ożywionych dyskusji i
wyzwaniem dla przyszłych nauk o poznaniu społecznym, a ogólniej – dla nauk kognitywnych. W tym krótkim wstępie przedstawiam istotny moim zdaniem wkład w tę
szerszą perspektywę, która motywuje i inspiruje zarówno ich samych, jak i resztę tej
młodej wspólnoty. W szczególności zaś nakreślam pewne kwestie społeczne, które
wykraczają poza zwykłą akademicką debatę. Biorę przy tym pod nierozerwalne połączenie metod i założeń wspierających ortodoksyjne nauki poznawcze z dzisiejszym
kryzysem. Tekst podsumowuję paroma osobistymi wspomnieniami, aby lepiej nakreślić
kontekst, w jakim urzeczywistniły się pomysły Di Paolo i De Jaegher, które są po
części także moimi pomysłami.
wyzwaniem dla przyszłych nauk o poznaniu społecznym, a ogólniej – dla nauk kognitywnych. W tym krótkim wstępie przedstawiam istotny moim zdaniem wkład w tę
szerszą perspektywę, która motywuje i inspiruje zarówno ich samych, jak i resztę tej
młodej wspólnoty. W szczególności zaś nakreślam pewne kwestie społeczne, które
wykraczają poza zwykłą akademicką debatę. Biorę przy tym pod nierozerwalne połączenie metod i założeń wspierających ortodoksyjne nauki poznawcze z dzisiejszym
kryzysem. Tekst podsumowuję paroma osobistymi wspomnieniami, aby lepiej nakreślić
kontekst, w jakim urzeczywistniły się pomysły Di Paolo i De Jaegher, które są po
części także moimi pomysłami.
We argue that progress in our scientific understanding of the 'social mind' is hampered by a number of unfounded assumptions. We single out the widely shared assumption that social behavior depends solely on the capacities of an... more
We argue that progress in our scientific understanding of the 'social mind' is hampered by a number of unfounded assumptions. We single out the widely shared assumption that social behavior depends solely on the capacities of an individual agent. In contrast, both developmental and phenomenological studies suggest that the personal-level capacity for detached 'social cognition' (conceived as a process of theorizing about and/or simulating another mind) is a secondary achievement that is dependent on more immediate processes of embodied social interaction. We draw on the enactive approach to cognitive science to further clarify this strong notion of 'social interaction' in theoretical terms. In addition, we indicate how this interaction theory (IT) could eventually be formalized with the help of a dynamical systems perspective on the interaction process, especially by making use of evolutionary robotics modeling. We conclude that bringing together the methods and insights of developmental, phenomenological, enactive and dynamical approaches to social interaction can provide a promising framework for future research.
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This paper considers questions about continuity and discontinuity between life and mind. It begins by examining such questions from the perspective of the free energy principle (FEP). The FEP is becoming increasingly influential in... more
This paper considers questions about continuity and discontinuity between life and mind. It begins by examining such questions from the perspective of the free energy principle (FEP). The FEP is becoming increasingly influential in neuroscience and cognitive science. It states that organisms act to maintain themselves in their expected biological and cognitive states, and that they can do so only by minimizing their free energy given that the long-term average of free energy is entropy. The paper then argues that there is no singular account of the FEP for thinking about the relation between life and mind. Some formulations associate minds with computational processes with semantic (i.e. contentful) properties. This cognitivist articulation of the FEP places the origins of mind at a later evolutionary stage than the origins of life. We call this the post-life view. The paper then shows that other less or even anti-cognitivist formulations of the FEP threaten to go in the opposite direction, implying that mentality is nearly everywhere. We call this the pre-life view. The paper proceeds to argue that this version of the FEP, and its implications for thinking about the relation between life and mind, can be usefully constrained by key ideas in recent enactive approaches to cognitive science. We conclude that the most compelling account of the relationship between life and mind treats them as strongly continuous, and that this continuity is based on particular concepts of basic life (autopoiesis and adaptivity) and basic mind (intentionally directed but non-semantic).
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Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be understood as a social interaction disorder. This makes the emerging " second-person approach " to social cognition a more promising framework for studying ASD than classical approaches focusing on... more
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be understood as a social interaction disorder. This makes the emerging " second-person approach " to social cognition a more promising framework for studying ASD than classical approaches focusing on mindreading capacities in detached, observer-based arrangements. According to the second-person approach, embodied, perceptual, and embedded or interactive capabilities are also required for understanding others, and these are hypothesized to be compromised in ASD. We therefore recorded the dynamics of real-time sensorimotor interaction in pairs of control participants and participants with High-Functioning Autism (HFA), using the minimalistic human-computer interface paradigm known as " perceptual crossing " (PC). We investigated whether HFA is associated with impaired detection of social contingency, i.e., a reduced sensitivity to the other's responsiveness to one's own behavior. Surprisingly, our analysis reveals that, at least under the conditions of this highly simplified, computer-mediated, embodied form of social interaction, people with HFA perform equally well as controls. This finding supports the increasing use of virtual reality interfaces for helping people with ASD to better compensate for their social disabilities. Further dynamical analyses are necessary for a better understanding of the mechanisms that are leading to the somewhat surprising results here obtained.
En este libro presentamos una serie de trabajos pioneros en alguna rama de las ciencias cognitivas. Cada uno de ellos es sin duda una aportación novedosa y muy actual a su campo. Incluimos diversas colaboraciones que van desde la... more
En este libro presentamos una serie de trabajos pioneros en alguna rama de las ciencias cognitivas. Cada uno de ellos es sin duda una aportación novedosa y muy actual a su campo. Incluimos diversas colaboraciones que van desde la conciencia y el razonamiento desde un enfoque clásico en ciencias cognitivas, hasta la cuestión de la cognición social, los sentimientos epistémicos, los trastornos mentales y el autismo. La mayoría de ellas desde visiones corporizadas y situadas de la cognición.
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Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Computation, Back Propagation, Neural Networks, Wavelet processing, and 10 moreNeural Network, Genetic Algorithm, Discriminant Analysis, Wavelet Transform, Multi-layer Perceptron, Discrete wavelet transform, Arrhythmia, Time Domain, Electrical And Electronic Engineering, and Classification Accuracy
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For millennia people have wondered what makes the living different from the non-living. Beginning in the mid-1980s, artificial life has studied living systems using a synthetic approach: build life in order to understand it better, be it... more
For millennia people have wondered what makes the living different from the non-living. Beginning in the mid-1980s, artificial life has studied living systems using a synthetic approach: build life in order to understand it better, be it by means of software, hardware, or wetware. This review provides a summary of the advances that led to the development of artificial life, its current research topics, and open problems and opportunities. We classify artificial life research into 14 themes: origins of life, autonomy, self-organization, adaptation (including evolution, development, and learning), ecology, artificial societies, behavior, computational biology, artificial chemistries, information, living technology, art, and philosophy. Being interdisciplinary, artificial life seems to be losing its boundaries and merging with other fields.
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The life–mind continuity thesis holds that mind is prefigured in life and that mind belongs to life. The biggest challenge faced by proponents of this thesis is to show how an explanatory framework that accounts for basic biological... more
The life–mind continuity thesis holds that mind is prefigured in life and that mind belongs to life. The biggest challenge faced by proponents of this thesis is to show how an explanatory framework that accounts for basic biological processes can be systematically extended to incorporate the highest reaches of human cognition. We suggest that this apparent ‘cognitive gap’ between minimal and human forms of life appears insurmountable largely because of the methodological individualism that is prevalent in cognitive science. Accordingly, a twofold strategy is used to show how a consideration of sociality can address both sides of the cognitive gap: (1) it is argued from a systemic perspective that inter-agent interactions can extend the behavioral domain of even the simplest agents and (2) it is argued from a phenomenological perspective that the cognitive attitude characteristic of adult human beings is essentially intersubjectively constituted, in particular with respect to the possibility of perceiving objects as detached from our own immediate concerns. These two complementary considerations of the constitutive role of inter-agent interactions for mind and cognition indicate that sociality is an indispensable element of the life–mind continuity thesis and of cognitive science more generally.
Keywords Enaction.Life-mind continuity. Phenomenology. Intersubjectivity. Agency. Social cognition
Keywords Enaction.Life-mind continuity. Phenomenology. Intersubjectivity. Agency. Social cognition
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There is a small but growing community of researchers spanning a spectrum of disciplines which are united in rejecting the still dominant computationalist paradigm in favor of the enactive approach. The framework of this approach is... more
There is a small but growing community of researchers spanning a spectrum of disciplines which are united in rejecting the still dominant computationalist paradigm in favor of the enactive approach. The framework of this approach is centered on a core set of ideas, such as autonomy, sense-making, emergence, embodiment, and experience. These concepts are finding novel applications in a diverse range of areas. One hot topic has been the establishment of an enactive approach to social interaction. The main purpose of this paper is to serve as an advanced entry point into these recent developments. It accomplishes this task in a twofold manner: (i) it provides a succinct synthesis of the most important core ideas and arguments in the theoretical framework of the enactive approach, and (ii) it uses this synthesis to refine the current enactive approach to social interac- tion. A new operational definition of social interaction is proposed which not only emphasizes the cognitive agency of the individuals and the irreducibility of the interaction process itself, but also the need for jointly co-regulated action. It is suggested that this revised conception of ‘socio-cognitive interaction’ may provide the necessary middle ground from which to understand the confluence of biological and cultural values in personal action.
Keywords: adaptivity, autonomy, cognition, enaction, sense-making, social interaction
Keywords: adaptivity, autonomy, cognition, enaction, sense-making, social interaction
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Is an individual agent constitutive of or constituted by its social interactions? This question is typically not asked in the cognitive sciences, so strong is the consensus that only individual agents have constitutive efficacy. In this... more
Is an individual agent constitutive of or constituted by its social interactions? This question is typically not asked in the cognitive sciences, so strong is the consensus that only individual agents have constitutive efficacy. In this article we challenge this methodological solipsism and argue that interindividual relations and social context do not simply arise from the behavior of individual agents, but themselves enable and shape the individual agents on which they depend. For this, we define the notion of autonomy as both a characteristic of individual agents and of social interaction processes. We then propose a number of ways in which interactional autonomy can influence individuals. Then we discuss recent work in modeling on the one hand and psychological investigations on the other that support and illustrate this claim. Finally, we discuss some implications for research on social and individual agency.
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There is a growing trend in the cognitive sciences to conceive of cognitive behavior as being distributed across brain, body and environment. However, the implications of such distribution for our understanding of biological robustness,... more
There is a growing trend in the cognitive sciences to conceive of cognitive behavior as being distributed across brain, body and environment. However, the implications of such distribution for our understanding of biological robustness, which so far has been related to individual-based mechanisms alone, has rarely been discussed in the literature. We used the Evolutionary Robotics technique to examine the relationship between distributed behavioral mechanisms and behavioral robustness. Two kinds of model agents were evolved for a mobile object-tracking task and tested to see whether they can sustain their behavior despite sensorimotor perturbations. The results indicate that a highly distributed realization of behavior can be (i) detrimental, if it is mostly based on factors that are necessary for the behavior, or (ii) beneficial, if it is mostly based on factors that are sufficient for the behavior. Accordingly, we suggest that future discussions of distributed cognition should take into account that there are at least two different possible modes of realizing distributed behavior and that these have a qualitatively different effect on behavioral robustness.
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The Santuario de Tlaloc on the summit of Cerro del Patlachique was likely the site of rainfall petitioning rituals during Teotihuacano times. Although four different archaeological projects have visited the site, each of them calls it by... more
The Santuario de Tlaloc on the summit of Cerro del Patlachique was likely the site of rainfall petitioning rituals during Teotihuacano times. Although four different archaeological projects have visited the site, each of them calls it by a different name—Santuario de Tlaloc, Cerro Patlachique, TC-100, and Cerro Xoconoch—complicating a cohesive perspective on the shrine. In this research note, we recount the complete history of research at the site while providing a summary of the interpretation of the site as one devoted to water worship. We then describe a newly discovered carved stone monument, presenting it within its artistic, archaeological, and historical context. The monument is from the Early Classic and shows the storm god wearing a year-sign headdress. Due to the specific headdress, and the monument’s central placement on the main platform and next to its reservoir, we propose that the monument was a primus inter pares of Storm Gods or tlaltoques in spiritual pilgrimage to the Sanctuary—paralleling the physical pilgrimage of Teotihuacan’s political leaders to the same structures.