Seminar #59: Enaction and extended cognition: from non-representationalism to sociality

All welcome!

Enaction and extended cognition: from non-representationalism to sociality

Pierre Steiner
Université de Technologie de Compiègne, COSTECH/CRED

Date: 03/02/2010
Time: 4:30-6:00
Room: ARUN 401 (The usual Alergic Room)

http://sites.google.com/site/pierresteinerweb/

There is a relatively clear consensus in enactive (Maturana-Varela style) cognitive science for rejecting representationalism, i.e. the idea that cognition includes the manufacture, retrieval and use of mental representations (be they ontologically real or mere explanatory posits).

But there is no consensus on what the most efficient arguments against representationalism may be (metaphysical arguments, conceptual arguments, epistemological arguments, phenomenological arguments, empirical arguments, arguments coming from engineering practices…). This is somehow problematic, especially if one considers how representationalism has gained some new strength during the recent decade, in conjunction with many embodied, embedded and extended accounts of cognition. Fodorian representationalism is not the only game in town anymore.

Seminar #58: Do zombie robots have rights?

Do zombie robots have rights? Towards a social-relational justification of moral consideration

Mark Coeckelbergh

Date: 27/01/2010
Time: 4:30-6:00
Room: ARUN 401 (The usual Alergic Room)

Should we grant moral consideration to artificially intelligent robots? Current robots do not meet the hard criteria set by current theories of moral status (consciousness, sentience, etc.) This is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. At most, we will have ‘robot zombies’ that imitate consciousness, intentionality, sentience, emotions and other human features. Moreover, existing theories incur problems of consistency (comparable to the argument from marginal cases in animal ethics) and invite epistemological scepticism: How can we know for sure that an entity possesses a particular mental feature?

In response to these difficulties, I offer an argument for moral consideration based on social relations. This can justify the intuition that we should grant some degree of moral consideration to artificially intelligent robots that participate in the social life. However, I also show that in order to further support this argument we need to we revise our existing ontological and social-political frameworks. A social-relational perspective cannot simply be added to existing accounts but challenges basic concepts such as intrinsic properties, the individual, and the natural/artificial distinction. Exploring the idea of a social ecology, I suggest an alternative approach to moral consideration that may assist us in shaping our relations to intelligent robots and, by extension, our relations to all artificial and biological entities that appear to us as more than instruments for our human purposes.

A unified brain theory?

This article may be of interest:

The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? by Karl Friston. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11, 127-138 (February 2010) | doi:10.1038/nrn2787:

Friston, who is a key player in neuroscience/imaging, pairs up lingo, ideas and results that share grounds with dynamical and enactive approaches, but presents them in a reductionist interpretation.

He talks about the free energy principle, which broadly translates to sensorimotor entropy minimization, about how brain function self-organises according to homeostatic principles, etc. – ideas that you would not necessarily expect to read about in Nature. He argues how many major theories of brain function can be seen as a special case of this principle (Bayesian brain, theory of neuronal group selection, optimal control theory, …). An interesting review of cognitive neuroscience with sharp observations and bold claims.

The problem I see is that the issues enactivists typically raise are not addressed. In his view, agents are heteronomous: value is defined as the opposite of surprise (entropy minimization), rather than autonomously generated in interaction with the environment. Friston talks about organisms as self-organising systems, but he never addresses the problem of the  distinction between the system and its environment and boundary construction. Similarly, in his conclusion he proposes that the brain is a “generative model of the world it inhabits”, keeping up a Cartesian divide between an observer-independent reality and its recration in the the brain, home to the mind.

Any thoughts?

Painful finding: Kicking the Kohler habit

Xabier started an e-mail discussion by sending the following abstract around. Since this might be of more general interest I thought it would be best to copy the discussion here:

Klein, C. (2007). Kicking the Kohler Habit. Philosophical Psychology, 20, 609-619

ABSTRACT: Kohler’s experiments with inverting goggles are often thought to support enactivism by showing that visual re-inversion occurs simultaneous with the return of sensorimotor skill. Closer examination reveals that Kohler’s work does not show this. Recent work by Linden et al. shows that re-inversion, if it occurs at all, does not occur when the enactivist predicts. As such, the empirical evidence weighs against enactivism.

http://tigger.uic.edu/~cvklein/papers/KohlerPhilPsy.pdf

Conference: Embodiment, Intersubjectivity and Psychopathology, 30th Sept-2nd Oct 2010, Heidelberg

The Department of General Psychiatry, Centre for Psychosocial Medicine, Heidelberg, and the Interdisciplinary Forum for Biomedicine and the Humanities, Heidelberg present:

___________________________________________________________________

Embodiment, Intersubjectivity and Psychopathology

International Conference, Heidelberg, 30 September – 2 October, 2010___________________________________________________________________

First announcement

During the last decade, the concept of embodiment has become a key paradigm of interdisciplinary approaches from the areas of philosophy, psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience. The body is no longer merely considered as an interesting input for the brain or mind. The new trend is to link embodiment, cognition and emotion in a deeper way, and this has particular repercussions for understanding our social engagements. This in turn has implications for psychopathology and psychotherapy, because embodied and intersubjective views on mental illness can offer new insights useful for diagnosis and remediation.

The conference is aimed at creating an interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of ideas on the themes of embodiment, intersubjectivity and their role in psychopa­thology. It brings together worldwide experts from the fields of developmental psy­chology, philosophy, and psychopathology, in order to advance on some key ques­tions for this research area, among them:

• What is embodied intersubjectivity? In how far is our relationships with others mediated by the body?
• What is the role that embodied intersubjectivity plays for the development of social cognition?
• How can mental illness be conceived from an embodied and enactive point of view?
• What is the use of the notion of embodiment for therapy and training?

Main Speakers:

• Ezequiel Di Paolo, Matthew Ratcliffe, Beata Stawarska, Dan Zahavi
  (Philosophy)

• Peter Hobson, Vasu Reddy, Colwyn Trevarthen, Ed Tronick
  (Developmental Psychology)

• Jonathan Cole, George Downing, Giovanni Stanghellini
  (Neurology, Psychology, Psychiatry)

The conference is conceived as an event that is more-than-usually intersubjective in its organisation. Apart from the keynote presentations delivered by experts, we have  dedicated about half the time to specialised workshops. This will allow all participants to actively engage with and discuss the topics of the main talks.

We are looking forward to an interesting exchange of views on one of the key questions of current research.

Thomas Fuchs
Professor of Psychiatry, Heidelberg

Call for posters: Deadline 15 March, 2010
Contact: eip-conference2010@uni-heidelberg.de
Further information: www.eip-conference2010.unitt.de
Venue: Old Lecture Hall, University of Heidelberg