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. (shrink)

In “Slowing the slide down the slippery slope of Medical Assistance in Dying: Mutual Learnings for Canada and the US,” Daryl Pullman (2023) gets a variety of empirical, logical and legal things wro...

There is an overlooked similarity between three classic accounts of the conditions of object experience from three distinct disciplines. Sociology: the “inversion” that accompanies discovery in the natural sciences, as local causes of effects are reattributed to an observed object. 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. 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. (shrink)

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’ 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 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. Keywords: theory of mind; cognitive science; phenomenology; embodied cognition; dynamical systems theory; enactive approach; social cognition; interaction theory; evolutionary robotics. (shrink)

This book analyzes Western and Chinese philosophical texts to determine why laughter and the comic have not been a major part of philosophical discourse. Katrin Froese maintains that many philosophical accounts of laughter try to unearth laughter's purpose, thereby rendering it secondary to the intentional and purposive aspects of human nature that impel us to philosophize. Froese also considers texts that take laughter and the comic as starting points, attempting to philosophize out of laughter rather than merely trying (...) to unearth reasons for laughter. The book proposes that continuously unraveling philosophical assumptions through the comic and laughter may be necessary to live well. (shrink)

Varela's enactive approach to cognitive science has been elaborated into a theoretical framework of agency, sense-making, and sociality, while his key methodological innovation — neurophenomenology (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 multi-scalar 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. (shrink)

The question of whether problems with the social determinants of health that might impact decision-making justify denying eligibility for assisted dying has recently come to the fore in debates about the legalisation of assisted dying. For example, it was central to critiques of the 2021 amendments made to Canada’s assisted dying law. The question of whether changes to a country’s assisted dying legislation lead to descents down slippery slopes has also come to the fore—as it does any time a jurisdiction (...) changes its laws. We explore these two questions through the lens of Canada’s experience both to inform Canada’s ongoing discussions and because other countries will confront the same questions if they contemplate changing their assisted dying law. Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying law has evolved through a journey from the courts to Parliament, back to the courts, and then back to Parliament. Along this journey the eligibility criteria, the procedural safeguards, and the monitoring regime have changed. In this article, we focus on the eligibility criteria. First, we explain the evolution of the law and what the eligibility criteria were at the various stops along the way. We then explore the ethical justifications for Canada’s new criteria by looking at two elements of the often-corrosive debate. First, we ask whether problems with the social determinants of health that might impact decision-making justify denying eligibility for assisted dying of decisionally capable people with mental illnesses and people with disabilities as their sole underlying medical conditions. Second, we ask whether Canada’s journey supports slippery slope arguments against permitting assisted dying. All data relevant to the study are included in the article. (shrink)

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 end by considering implications of this concept of bad habit for psychological and psychiatric research, in particular with respect to addiction research. (shrink)

Machine learning-based AI algorithms lack transparency. In this article, I offer an interpretation of AI’s explainability problem and highlight its ethical saliency. I try to make the case for the legal enforcement of a strong explainability requirement: human organizations which decide to automate decision-making should be legally obliged to demonstrate the capacity to explain and justify the algorithmic decisions that have an impact on the wellbeing, rights, and opportunities of those affected by the decisions. This legal duty can be derived (...) from the demands of Rawlsian public reason. In the second part of the paper, I try to show that the argument from the limitations of human cognition fails to get AI off the hook of public reason. Against a growing trend in AI ethics, my main argument is that the analogy between human minds and artificial neural networks fails because it suffers from an atomistic bias which makes it blind to the social and institutional dimension of human reasoning processes. I suggest that developing interpretive AI algorithms is not the only possible answer to the explainability problem; social and institutional answers are also available and in many cases more trustworthy than techno-scientific ones. (shrink)

Is an individual agent constitutive of or constituted by its social interactions? This question is typically not asked in the cognitive sciences, so strong is the consensus that only individual agents have constitutive efficacy. In this article we challenge this methodological solipsism and argue that interindividual relations and social context do not simply arise from the behavior of individual agents, but themselves enable and shape the individual agents on which they depend. For this, we define the notion of autonomy as (...) both a characteristic of individual agents and of social interaction processes. We then propose a number of ways in which interactional autonomy can influence individuals. Then we discuss recent work in modeling on the one hand and psychological investigations on the other that support and illustrate this claim. Finally, we discuss some implications for research on social and individual agency. (shrink)

Qu'est-ce que la perception? Par elle, que nous disent les sens du monde, de l'autre et de nous-mêmes? Rien! Les sens sont muets. Ils n'ont rien à nous dire! Telle est la réponse de Jocelyn Benoist. Il est essentiel, pourtant, que nous puissions en parler. Seulement c'est nous qui parlons, non eux. Et si, voulant faire droit à la réalité de notre expérience sensible. nous commencions par renoncer à la traiter d'abord comme un discours? Le mutisme des sens demeure (...) traversé de bruits. Jocelyn Benoist, envers et contre un certain traitement philosophique de la perception - qui la confond avec la connaissance que nous pouvons en tirer ou le sens que nous pouvons lui donner -, nous invite à écouter en elle le bruissement du sensible. Selon lui, pour rendre celui-ci pleinement audible. il faut congédier ce que la philosophie aujourd'hui appelle le "problème de la perception" et, peut-être, renoncer au concept même de "perception" tel que nous l'héritons de la philosophie moderne, au profit d'une enquête sur la texture réelle et poétique du sensible. (shrink)

The the question whether the generality of thinking precludes mtentions drrected to smgular objects as such. After characterizing in what teirns thinking is. shows that this generality does not prevent us of having singular thoughts, i.e.,.intentions that are not only directed, but apprehend the singular in its own singularity.

Most of the essays collected here are essaysinmetaethics seeking in exacting and interesting ways to resolve problems raised by the familiar options in metaethics we outlined in our Introduction. Richard Brandt, for example, forcefully argues, going much against the at least modestly holistic grain of our time, for a foundationalism (noncognitivist though it be) which would be foundational in both metaethics and normative ethics. R.M. Hare makes a brief but systematic defense, which is both spirited and clear, of his prescriptivism (...) (a species of what we, following tradition, have called ‘noncognitivism,’ but which he argues should instead be called ‘nondescriptivism’). His arguments here for his position - call it nondescriptivism or noncognitivism- are directed forcefully against ethical naturalism (descriptivism) and specifically against the naturalism of Philippa Foot. Nicholas Sturgeon and David Copp contribute elaborate and rigorously argued defenses of ethical naturalism, or, as they might prefer to call it, ‘moral realism.’. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Jocelyn Maclure and Charles Taylor provide a clearly reasoned, articulate account of the two main principles of secularism—equal respect, and freedom of conscience—and argue that in our religiously diverse, politically interconnected world, secularism, properly understood, may offer the only path to religious and philosophical freedom.

Esteemed philosopher Jocelyn Benoist argues for a renewed realism that takes seriously the context in which intention occurs. "What there is"-the traditional subject of metaphysics-can be determined only in context, Benoist contends, carving out a new path that rejects acontextual ontologies and approaches to the mind.

Context: In the past two decades, the so-called 4E approaches to the mind and cognition have been rapidly gaining in recognition and have become an integral part of various disciplines. Problem: Recently, however, questions have been raised as to whether, and to what degree, these different approaches actually cohere with one another. Specifically, it seems that many of them endorse mutually incompatible, perhaps even contradictory, epistemological and metaphysical presuppositions. Method: By retracing the roots of an alternative conception of mind and (...) cognition, as propounded by Varela, Thompson & Rosch, we provide an outline of the original philosophical framework of enactivism and neurophenomenology. We focus on its three central tenets - reflexivity, subject-world co-determination, and the construal of cognition as situated, skillful and embodied action - and show how they collectively add up to a radical change in attitude towards the age-old philosophical dilemmas. Results: We show how contemporary enactivist and embodied approaches relate to the original Varelian conception, and argue that many of them, despite frequent claims to the contrary, adopt significantly less radical philosophical positions. Further, we provide some tentative suggestions as to why this dilution of the original impetus might have occurred, paying special attention to the deep-rooted disparities that span the field. Implications: It is argued that more attention should be paid to epistemological and metaphysical tenets of different proposals within the 4E movement in general and enactivism in particular. Additionally, in emphasizing the inescapable multilayeredness and contextuality of scientific knowledge, enactivism and neurophenomenology accord with pluralist accounts of science and might provide important contributions to contemporary debates in the field. Constructivist content: The epistemological odyssey, construed as a journey to find a middle way between realism and idealism, is a central tenet of anti-representationalist, non-dualist constructivist approaches aimed at avoiding age-old philosophical traps. (shrink)

Following the philosophy of embodiment of Merleau-Ponty, Jonas and others, enactivism is a pivot point from which various areas of science can be brought into a fruitful dialogue about the nature of subjectivity. In this chapter we present the enactive conception of agency, which, in contrast to current mainstream theories of agency, is deeply and strongly embodied. In line with this thinking we argue that anything that ought to be considered a genuine agent is a biologically embodied (even if distributed) (...) agent, and that this embodiment must be affectively lived. However, we also consider that such an affective agent is not necessarily also an agent imbued with an explicit sense of subjectivity. To support this contention we outline the interoceptive foundation of basic agency and argue that there is a qualitative difference in the phenomenology of agency when it is instantiated in organisms which, due to their complexity and size, require a nervous system to underpin their physiological and sensorimotor processes. We argue that this interoceptively grounded agency not only entails affectivity but also forms the necessary basis for subjectivity. (shrink)

Deacon develops a minimal model of a nonparasitic virus to explore how nucleotide sequences came to be characterized by a code-like informational at the origin of life. The model serves to problematize the concept of biological normativity because it highlights two common yet typically implicit assumptions: that life could consist as an inert form, were it not for extrinsic sources of physical instability, and 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. (shrink)

David Hume; Enactivism; Cognitive Science; Phenomenology; Philosophy of mind.

David Hume; Enactivism; Cognitive Science; Phenomenology; Philosophy of mind.

A study of how public service has changed in this new era of interconnectedness.

The theories of reproduction that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century exhibited a range in experimental thinking about concepts of gender and sexuality. This essay focuses on the work of a writer who proposed an unusual alternative to polarity-based ideas of reproduction. Johann Wilhelm Ritter was a physicist and friend to the German Romantics and someone whose writing also shares many interests with German Naturphilosophie. The essay discusses how, inspired by ideas from the alchemical tradition, Ritter challenged conventional (...) thinking about reproduction in two significant ways: by linking it to the idea of rotation, and by using the figure of the androgyne to understand reproductive models in terms of triads, rather than oppositional pairings. A further objective of this essay is to consider which aspects of the alchemical tradition proved the most useful for Ritter’s experimental thinking and to show how he integrated them with reflections on contemporary scientific developments around 1800. (shrink)

To date, ethics discussions about stem cell research overwhelmingly have centered on the morality and acceptability of using human embryonic stem cells. Governments in many jurisdictions have now answered these “first-level questions” and many have now begun to address ethical issues related to the donation of cells, gametes, or embryos for research. In this commentary, we move beyond these ethical concerns to discuss new themes that scientists on the forefront of NRM development anticipate, providing a preliminary framework for further discussion (...) between scientists and ethicists. Fostering strong partnerships between neuroscientists and ethicists that operate and collaborate within this evolving framework will maximize the translation of NRM discoveries on the brain into cures that are safe and address the needs of science and society. (shrink)

Le normalien Tran Duc Thao (1917-1993), ne fut pas seulement le premier agrégé de philosophie vietnamien, il a aussi été un des premiers en France à traverser toute la pensée de Husserl, jusqu'à ses zones les moins fréquentées. Il campe un Husserl entier, pris dans toutes les ramifications de sa réflexion. La physionomie de ce qu'est Husserl pour nous, aujourd'hui, dépend encore largement de la synthèse qu'il a effectuée. En même temps on ne saurait le comprendre sans tenir compte du (...) passage entre cultures qu'il incarne, de sa langue maternelle vietnamienne, de son effort pour trouver une solution de continuité entre la phénoménologie et ce qu'il considère comme l'outil essentiel dans les luttes anticoloniales, à savoir une forme personnelle de marxisme. Au moment où son ouvrage sur la phénoménologie husserlienne, version étendue d'un mémoire présenté à Jean Cavaillès, paraît chez un éditeur confidentiel en 1951, son intérêt s'est déplacé vers le Vietnam et les mouvements annonciateurs des luttes pour l'indépendance en Indochine. Tran Duc Thao qui, d'Althusser à Derrida en passant par Kojève ou Sartre, a marqué tant de philosophes de l'après-guerre a également été un des premiers intellectuels du Vietnam indépendant. (shrink)

Virtue and vice remain at the margins of feminist conceptual analysis although both establish a dualism that denies women full citizenship. To make this argument, this analysis explores the historical case of the Lowell mill girls – the first nearly all-female labour force in the United States between 1826 and 1850. Their public debate illustrates how virtue aligns some women with the economic and political status quo while society affiliates those who challenge its dominant beliefs with vice. This moral location (...) reveals the ‘virtues of vice’ or the political benefits that women may derive from vice which places them outside traditional moral and political discourse, enabling them to question existing moral paradigms, consider alternatives, and politically organize against the status quo. As such, the Lowell mill girl debate can inform contemporary feminist theory by raising serious questions about virtue and suggesting how vice opens up a critical space for ideological innovation, referred to here as a moral middle ground, that may result in a more democratic, feminist ethics. (shrink)