After recognizing that technologies are socially constructed, questions arise concerning how technologies should be constructed, by what processes, and granting how much influence to whom. Because partisanship, uncertainty, and disagreement are inevitable in trying to answer these questions, reconstructivist scholarship should embrace the desirability of thoughtful partisanship, should focus on strategies for coping intelligently with uncertainties, and should make central the study of social processes for coping with disagreement regarding technoscience and its utilization. That often will entail siding with have-nots, (...) meaning that reconstructivist scholars often will be opposing the behaviors of government, business, and technoscientific elites. Because reconstructivists normally will be outnumbered, we need to devote more systematic professional attention to setting our collective agenda concerning what is most worth researching. (shrink)

The risk of creating cerebral organoids/assembloids conscious enough to suffer is a recurrent concern in organoid research ethics. On one hand, we should, apparently, avoid discovering how to distinguish between organoids that it would be permissible (non-conscious) and impermissible (conscious) to use in research, since if successful we would create organoids that suffer. On the other, if we do not, the risk persists that research might inadvertently continue to cause organoids to suffer. Moreover, since modeling some brain disorders may require (...) inducing stress in organoids, it is unclear how to eliminate the risk, if we want to develop effective therapies. We are committed to harm avoidance but hamstrung by a presumption that we should avoid research that might tell us clearly when suffering occurs. How can we negotiate this challenge and maximize the therapeutic benefits of cerebral organoid research? The author interrogates the challenge, suggesting a tentative way forward. (shrink)

The main issue addressed in this paper is to provide a reassessment of the role and relevance of the body in social cognition from a radical embodied cognitive science perspective. Initially, I provide a historical introduction of the traditional account of the body in cognitive science, which I here call the cognitivist view. I then present several lines of criticism raised against the cognitivist view advanced by more embodied, enacted and situated approaches in cognitive science, and related disciplines. Next, I (...) analyze several approaches under the umbrella of embodied social cognition. My line of argument is that some of these approaches, although pointing toward the right direction of conceiving that the social mind is not merely contained inside the head, still fail to fully acknowledge the radically embodied social mind. I argue that the failure of these accounts of embodied social cognition could be associated with so-called ‘simple embodiment’. The third part of this paper focuses on elaborating an alternative characterization of the radically embodied social mind that also tries to reduce the remaining problems with ‘simple embodiment’. I draw upon two turns in radically embodied cognitive science, the enactive turn, and the social turn. On the one hand, there is the risk of focusing too much on the individual level in social cognition that may result in new kinds of methodological individualism that partly neglect the social dimension. On the other hand, socially distributed and socially extended approaches that pay more attention to the dynamics within social interaction may encounter the risk of ignoring the individual during social interaction dynamics and simultaneously not emphasizing the role of embodiment. The approach taken is to consider several ways of describing and incorporating the (individual) social mind at the social level that also includes language. I outline some ideas and motivations for how to study and expand the field of radical embodied social cognition in the future, as well as pose the ubiquitous hazard of falling back into a cognitivism view in several ways. (shrink)

This article deals with the links between the enaction paradigm and artificial intelligence. Enaction is considered a metaphor for artificial intelligence, as a number of the notions which it deals with are deemed incompatible with the phenomenal field of the virtual. After explaining this stance, we shall review previous works regarding this issue in terms of artificial life and robotics. We shall focus on the lack of recognition of co-evolution at the heart of these approaches. We propose to explicitly integrate (...) the evolution of the environment into our approach in order to refine the ontogenesis of the artificial system, and to compare it with the enaction paradigm. The growing complexity of the ontogenetic mechanisms to be activated can therefore be compensated by an interactive guidance system emanating from the environment. This proposition does not however, resolve that of the relevance of the meaning created by the machine (sense-making). Such reflections lead us to integrate human interaction into this environment in order to construct relevant meaning in terms of participative artificial intelligence. This raises a number of questions with regards to setting up an enactive interaction. The article concludes by exploring a number of issues, thereby enabling us to associate current approaches with the principles of morphogenesis, guidance, the phenomenology of interactions and the use of minimal enactive interfaces in setting up experiments which will deal with the problem of artificial intelligence in a variety of enaction-based ways. (shrink)

Context: Society is faced with “wicked” problems of environmental sustainability, which are inherently multiperspectival, and there is a need for explicitly constructivist and perspectivist theories to address them. Problem: However, different constructivist theories construe the environment in different ways. The aim of this paper is to clarify the conceptions of environment in constructivist approaches, and thereby to assist the sciences of complex systems and complex environmental problems. Method: We describe the terms used for “the environment” in von Uexküll, Maturana & (...) Varela, and Luhmann, and analyse how their conceptions of environment are connected to differences of perspective and observation. Results: We show the need to distinguish between inside and outside perspectives on the environment, and identify two very different and complementary logics of observation, the logic of distinction and the logic of representation, in the three constructivist theories. Implications: Luhmann’s theory of social systems can be a helpful perspective on the wicked environmental problems of society if we consider carefully the theory’s own blind spots: that it confines itself to systems of communication, and that it is based fully on the conception of observation as indication by means of distinction. (shrink)

Science, like any other cognitive activity, is grounded in the sensorimotor interaction of our bodies with the environment. Human embodiment thus constrains the class of scientific concepts and theories which are accessible to us. The paper explores the possibility of doing science with artificial cognitive agents, in the framework of an interactivist-constructivist cognitive model of science. Intelligent robots, by virtue of having different sensorimotor capabilities, may overcome the fundamental limitations of human science and provide important technological innovations. Mathematics and nanophysics (...) are prime candidates for being studied by artificial scientists. (shrink)