Book Reviews by Susana Ramirez-Vizcaya
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Talks by Susana Ramirez-Vizcaya
Artificial Life Conference Proceedings, 2018
On March 23, 2016, Microsoft introduced Tay.ai, a Twitter
AI conversational bot. 16 hours later,... more On March 23, 2016, Microsoft introduced Tay.ai, a Twitter
AI conversational bot. 16 hours later, Tay was retired
because it became racist, sex addict and offensive. We use
Tay.ai failure as a motivation to argue, within a 4E and
philosophy of emotions approach, that the Web environment
conforms a landscape of affordances that are crucial for the
development of digital social interactions. A landscape of
affordances is a space of action possibilities available for
agents that share a form of life. Some affordances constitute
an affective arrangement, that is, a space that elicits emotionally
intense, meaningful, and normative interactions.We
suggest that affective arrangements contribute to the maintenance
of the identity of the agent within a history of coupling
with a social and cultural environment. Tay.ai failed to tell
right from wrong and behave accordingly because the normativity
that defined its behavior and interactions was only
linguistic but did not aim at maintaining any social and cultural
identity.
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Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2018
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.
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Articles by Susana Ramirez-Vizcaya
Frontiers in Psychology, 2019
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.
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Chapters by Susana Ramirez-Vizcaya
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.
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Papers by Susana Ramirez-Vizcaya
Andamios, 2024
Debido a la proliferación de investigaciones sobre el bienestar en distintas disciplina... more Debido a la proliferación de investigaciones sobre el bienestar en distintas disciplinas, es necesario desarrollar un modelo de investigación transdisciplinar para estudiarlo en toda su comple-jidad e integrar todos los temas y disciplinas. Argumentamos que el enfoque enactivo, junto con la teoría de red causal positiva del bienestar y la teoría de sistemas complejos ofrecen las herramientas necesarias para hacerlo. En este artículo esbozamos un programa de investigación a lo largo de 3 ejes: f ilogenético, sistémico y onto-genético. Nuestra propuesta nos permite: 1) desestancar el debate f ilosóf ico sobre la naturaleza de bienestar; 2) situar al bienestar como un fenómeno encarnado y embebido en un contexto comple-jo; 3) entender los mecanismos involucrados para diseñar mejores intervenciones; y 4) alejarnos del antropocentrismo.
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Adaptive Behavior
Sensorimotor theory of perception has been criticized for its ambiguity about the need for intern... more Sensorimotor theory of perception has been criticized for its ambiguity about the need for internal representations and the lack of a proper account of agency and subjective experience. The book under review offers a compelling non-representational, world-involving interpretation, and operationalization of this theory, showing that alternatives to representationalism are viable. It also provides a thought-provoking theory of sensorimotor agency and the pre-reflective experience of action that builds on the enactive notions of autonomy and sense-making. The account provided in this book fits into a radically embodied, enactive, and extended cognitive science. However, the notion of the environment requires further conceptual clarification by the enactive camp.
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Book Reviews by Susana Ramirez-Vizcaya
Talks by Susana Ramirez-Vizcaya
AI conversational bot. 16 hours later, Tay was retired
because it became racist, sex addict and offensive. We use
Tay.ai failure as a motivation to argue, within a 4E and
philosophy of emotions approach, that the Web environment
conforms a landscape of affordances that are crucial for the
development of digital social interactions. A landscape of
affordances is a space of action possibilities available for
agents that share a form of life. Some affordances constitute
an affective arrangement, that is, a space that elicits emotionally
intense, meaningful, and normative interactions.We
suggest that affective arrangements contribute to the maintenance
of the identity of the agent within a history of coupling
with a social and cultural environment. Tay.ai failed to tell
right from wrong and behave accordingly because the normativity
that defined its behavior and interactions was only
linguistic but did not aim at maintaining any social and cultural
identity.
Commentaries by Susana Ramirez-Vizcaya
Articles by Susana Ramirez-Vizcaya
Chapters by Susana Ramirez-Vizcaya
Papers by Susana Ramirez-Vizcaya
AI conversational bot. 16 hours later, Tay was retired
because it became racist, sex addict and offensive. We use
Tay.ai failure as a motivation to argue, within a 4E and
philosophy of emotions approach, that the Web environment
conforms a landscape of affordances that are crucial for the
development of digital social interactions. A landscape of
affordances is a space of action possibilities available for
agents that share a form of life. Some affordances constitute
an affective arrangement, that is, a space that elicits emotionally
intense, meaningful, and normative interactions.We
suggest that affective arrangements contribute to the maintenance
of the identity of the agent within a history of coupling
with a social and cultural environment. Tay.ai failed to tell
right from wrong and behave accordingly because the normativity
that defined its behavior and interactions was only
linguistic but did not aim at maintaining any social and cultural
identity.