Coordinator of the Embodied Cognitive Science Unit. See our website at: https://groups.oist.jp/ecsu Address: 1919-1 Tancha, Onna-son, Okinawa 904-0495, Japan
Biological processes are end-directed, that is, teleological. Explaining the physical efficacy of... 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.
Varela's enactive approach to cognitive science has been elaborated into a theoretical framework ... 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.
Cognitive science is lacking conceptual tools to describe how an agent’s motivations, as such, ca... 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.
There is an overlooked similarity between three classic accounts of the conditions of object expe... 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.
Historical archives show us that past pandemics were relatively poorly documented, but this time ... 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.
The social brain hypothesis proposes that enlarged brains have evolved in response to the increas... 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.
Serotonergic agonist psilocybin is a psychedelic with antidepressant potential. Sleep may interac... 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.
The enactive theory of perception hypothesizes that perceptual access to objects depends on the m... 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.
The association between neural oscillations and functional integration is widely recognized in th... 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.
Enactive cognitive science (ECS) and ecological psychology (EP) agree that active movement is imp... 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.
Modeling of complex adaptive systems has revealed a still poorly understood benefit of unsupervis... 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.
Most of the little we know about the use of psychoactive plants in pre-Hispanic Mexico comes from... 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.
According to sensorimotor theory perceiving is a bodily skill involving exercise of an implicit k... 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.
In this review, we describe some of the central philosophical issues facing origins-of-life resea... 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.
Traditionally, the pedagogical design for teaching and learning practices has been characterized ... 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.
The enactive approach conceives of cognition as acts of sense-making. A requirement of sense-maki... 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.
In this essay we critically evaluate the progress that has been made in solving the problem of me... 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.
The concept of social interaction is at the core of embodied and enactive approaches to social co... 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.
Habits are the topic of a venerable history of research that extends back to antiquity, yet they ... 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.
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be understood as a social interaction disorder. This requires ... 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.
Biological processes are end-directed, that is, teleological. Explaining the physical efficacy of... 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.
Varela's enactive approach to cognitive science has been elaborated into a theoretical framework ... 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.
Cognitive science is lacking conceptual tools to describe how an agent’s motivations, as such, ca... 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.
There is an overlooked similarity between three classic accounts of the conditions of object expe... 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.
Historical archives show us that past pandemics were relatively poorly documented, but this time ... 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.
The social brain hypothesis proposes that enlarged brains have evolved in response to the increas... 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.
Serotonergic agonist psilocybin is a psychedelic with antidepressant potential. Sleep may interac... 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.
The enactive theory of perception hypothesizes that perceptual access to objects depends on the m... 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.
The association between neural oscillations and functional integration is widely recognized in th... 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.
Enactive cognitive science (ECS) and ecological psychology (EP) agree that active movement is imp... 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.
Modeling of complex adaptive systems has revealed a still poorly understood benefit of unsupervis... 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.
Most of the little we know about the use of psychoactive plants in pre-Hispanic Mexico comes from... 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.
According to sensorimotor theory perceiving is a bodily skill involving exercise of an implicit k... 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.
In this review, we describe some of the central philosophical issues facing origins-of-life resea... 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.
Traditionally, the pedagogical design for teaching and learning practices has been characterized ... 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.
The enactive approach conceives of cognition as acts of sense-making. A requirement of sense-maki... 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.
In this essay we critically evaluate the progress that has been made in solving the problem of me... 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.
The concept of social interaction is at the core of embodied and enactive approaches to social co... 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.
Habits are the topic of a venerable history of research that extends back to antiquity, yet they ... 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.
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be understood as a social interaction disorder. This requires ... 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.
Karel Capek’s R.U.R. and the Vision of Artificial Life, 2024
One of the recurring themes in Čapek's play is the existential question of whether the reductioni... 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.
Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2023 (ALIFE 2023), 2023
The enactive approach to cognitive science has undergone a biophenomenologically inspired "normat... 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.
Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2021, 2021
Donald Hebb proposed in his 1949 book The Organization of Behavior that cell assemblies organized... 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.
Prehistoric rock art is often analyzed predominantly as the product of artists' intentions to cre... 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.
IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence, 2020
From an enactive approach, some previous studies have demonstrated that social interaction plays ... 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.
The nervous system of the nematode soil worm Caenorhabditis elegans exhibits remarkable complexit... 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 .
ALIFE 2020: The 2020 Conference on Artificial Life, 2020
We provide conceptual clues for one promising Artificial Life (ALife) route to Artificial Intelli... 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.
ALIFE 2020: The 2020 Conference on Artificial Life, 2020
We propose to designate as dynamic interactive artificial intelligence (dAI) a cross-section of e... 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.
Much of the characteristic symptomatology of schizophrenia can be understood as resulting from a ... 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.
Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2019, 2019
Social network analysis and agent-based modeling are two approaches used to study biological and ... 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.
Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2019, 2019
It has recently been demonstrated that a Hopfield neural network that learns its own attractor co... 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.
Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2019, 2019
Referential communication is a "representation-hungry" behavior , and the bee waggle dance is a c... 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.
Homeostatic systems tend to have a preferred state that it can be referred as a healthy state in ... 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.
Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2018, 2018
Dexterous assistive devices constitute one of the frontiers for hybrid human-machine systems. Man... 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.
Proceedings of the Artificial Life Conference 2018, 2018
Artificial life has been developing a behavior-based perspective on the origins of life, which em... 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.
Hopfield networks can exhibit many different attractors of which most are local optima. It has be... 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.
Referential communication is a complex form of social interaction whereby agents manage to coordi... 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.
Enactivists are searching for the conditions of genuine intersubjectivity. Theory of mind approac... 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.
Representation and Reality in Humans, Animals and Machines, 2017
Computationalism aspires to provide a comprehensive theory of life and mind. It fails in this tas... 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.
Deacon develops a minimal model of a nonparasitic virus to explore how nucleotide sequences came ... 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.
In 2012, John Stewart contributed a book manuscript entitled ''Questioning Life and Cognition: So... 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.
One of our children, age 7 years, was asked if he wanted to talk to his friends online. "No!" he ... 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?
Time and Body: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Approaches, 2020
Temporality is a foundational topic in phenomenological psychopathology, and it plays an especial... 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.
We applaud Tsuboi et al. for assembling the most extensive brain-body-mass dataset to date and ma... 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.
Embodied, embedded, extended and enactive (4EC) perspectives on cognition have gained epistemic l... 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 conoc... 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.
We propose to consider an approach that takes into account the embodied, situated, dynamic, and p... 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.
There is growing dissatisfaction with the traditional approach to the evolution of complex societ... 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).
After a hiatus of several decades there has been a resurgence of studies into the therapeutic pot... 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.
We welcome Gallotti et al. 's (2017) proposal to shift the study of social cognition from focusin... more We welcome Gallotti et al. 's (2017) proposal to shift the study of social cognition from focusing on types of representation to types of interaction. This aligns with the enactive approach to social cognition (e.g., Froese and Di Paolo, 2011), which has long been arguing for this kind of shift (e.g., Varela, 2000; De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007). We offer some clarifications from this latter perspective, which will hopefully benefit the development of their proposal.
The study and simulation of adaptive behavior in natural and artificial systems have always invol... 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.
Open peer commentary on the article “Interactivity and Enaction in Human Cognition” by Matthew Is... 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.
Synthetic approaches to social interaction support the development of a second-person neuroscienc... 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.
We respond to the commentaries by Hodgson and Lewis-Williams by clarifying the novelty of our the... 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.
The work of Ezequiel Di Paolo and Hanne De Jaegher has helped to transform the enactive approach ... 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.
John Stewart and I wrote a response to Maturana’s commentary on our 2010 paper, in which we clari... 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.
In response to some GOFAI nostalgia published in issue 133 of the AISB Quarterly, I wrote a short... more 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.
In important ways, Clark’s “hierarchical prediction machine” (HPM) approach parallels the researc... 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.
This MIT Press volume edited by Durt et al. (2017) is concerned with investigating how people bri... 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.
Fuchs (2018) book starts with a wake-up call. We are facing social and ecological crises that thr... 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.
Consciousness, with its irreducible subjective character, was almost exclusively a philosophical ... more Consciousness, with its irreducible subjective character, was almost exclusively a philosophical topic until relatively recently. Today, however, the problem of explaining the felt quality of experience has also become relevant to science and engineering, including robotics and AI: “What would we have to build into a robot so that it really felt the touch of a finger, the redness of red, or the hurt of a pain?” (O’Regan, 2014, p. 23). Yet a practical response still requires an adequate theory of consciousness, which brings us back to the hard problem: how can we account, from a scientific point of view, for the phenomenological character of experience? Over a decade ago, O’Regan and Noë (2001) proposed a new approach to these questions, the so-called sensorimotor approach to perceptual experience. How far has this approach come and what are its outstanding challenges? The volume Contemporary Sensorimotor Theory, edited by Bishop and Martin, takes stock of the current state of the field.
> Context • There is a growing recognition in consciousness science of the need for rigorous meth... 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.
Critics of the paradigm of enaction have long argued that enactive principles will be unable to a... 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.
Increasing numbers of philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists are jumping on the embodied c... 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.
I review The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind by Giovanna Colombetti (Camb... 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.
Pessoa’s The Cognitive-Emotional Brain (2013) is an integrative approach to neuroscience that com... 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.
The ALife conferences are the major meeting of the artificial life research community since 1987.... 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.
The enactive approach is a growing movement in cognitive science that replaces the classical comp... 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.
The life-mind continuity thesis holds that mind is prefigured in life and that mind belongs to li... 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.
Pasos para una Ecología Cognitiva de la Educación, 2019
Tradicionalmente, el diseño pedagógico para las prácticas de enseñanza y aprendizaje ha estado ca... 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.
El presente texto considera cuestiones en torno a la continuidad y la discontinuidad entre la vid... 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).
El computacionalismo aspira a ofrecer una teoría unificadora de la vida y la mente. Fracasa en es... 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.
De acuerdo al enfoque enactivo de las ciencias cognitivas, la percepción es esencialmente una for... 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.
W artykule tym opowiadam się za zunifikowaną kognitywistyką, przyjmując dla swej argumentacji nie... 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 po... 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.
The study of real-time social interaction provides ecologically valid insight into social behavio... more The study of real-time social interaction provides ecologically valid insight into social behavior. The objective of the current research is to experimentally assess real-time social contingency detection in an adolescent population, using a shortened version of the Perceptual Crossing Experiment (PCE). Pairs of 148 adolescents aged between 12 and 19 were instructed to find each other in a virtual environment interspersed with other objects by interacting with each other using tactile feedback only. Across six rounds, participants demonstrated increasing accuracy in social contingency detection, which was associated with increasing subjective experience of the mutual interaction. Subjective experience was highest in rounds when both participants were simultaneously accurate in detecting each other's presence. The six-round version yielded comparable social contingency detection outcome measures to a ten-round version of the task. The shortened six-round version of the PCE has therefore enabled us to extend the previous findings on social contingency detection in adults to an adolescent population, enabling implementation in prospective research designs to assess the development of social contingency detection over time.
We argue that progress in our scientific understanding of the 'social mind' is hampered by a numb... 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.
Experts remain divided about the nature of the sociopolitical system of ancient Teotihuacan, whic... 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 centraliza-tion 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.
This paper considers questions about continuity and discontinuity between life and mind. It begin... 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).
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can be understood as a social interaction disorder. This makes the... 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 cognitiva... 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.
For millennia people have wondered what makes the living different from the non-living. Beginning... 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.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Jan 1, 2009
The life–mind continuity thesis holds that mind is prefigured in life and that mind belongs to li... 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
There is a small but growing community of researchers spanning a spectrum of disciplines which ar... 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
The Santuario de Tlaloc on the summit of Cerro del Patlachique was likely the site of rainfall pe... 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.
Uploads
Articles by Tom Froese
facilitating the social development of more symbolic forms of life and mind.
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.
Keywords Enaction.Life-mind continuity. Phenomenology. Intersubjectivity. Agency. Social cognition
Keywords: adaptivity, autonomy, cognition, enaction, sense-making, social interaction