[Cognitive Immunity, Reflexive Ignition, and Epistemic Adaptation] -/- This paper represents Version 2.0 of the Aperture framework — a continued development following the foundational release in Aperture Science. While the original introduced aperture as a recursive archi- tecture of epistemic framing, the current version implements key structural patches derived from further theoretical and clinical synthesis.
Current approaches in psychology have replaced the idea of a centralized, self-present identity with that of a diffuse system of contextually changing states distributed ecologically as psychologically embodied and socially embedded. However, the failure of contemporary perspectives to banish the lingering notion of a literal, if fleeting, status residing within the parts of a psycho-bio-social organization may result in the covering over of a rich, profoundly intricate process of change within the assumed frozen space of each part. In this paper (...) I show how Heidegger, Derrida and Gendlin help us think from this more intimate process to transform current views of metaphor, the unconscious, and the relation between affect and cognition. (shrink)
This paper proposes Selective Reality Theory (SRT), a unified metaphysical frame-work addressing the ”Hard Problem” of consciousness and the measurement prob-lem in quantum mechanics. We argue for a strict physical-mathematical isomor-phism between Explicit-Implicit Ontology and Embodied Cognition. The central thesis posits that the ”Faddeev-Popov ghost fields” in quantum gauge field theory are not merely mathematical tools for eliminating redundancy, but constitute the ontological correlate of Agency at the fundamental physical level. By redefining ”embodiment” as a topological Gauge Fixing operation within (...) the Moduli Space, SRT reveals con-sciousness not as an epiphenomenon of neural computation, but as an active opera-tor that ”prunes” deterministic Existence (Explicit Order) from the infinite possibil-ities of Chaos (Implicit Order/Gauge Redundancy). We detail this mechanism across four scales—quantum micro-dynamics, enzymatic biology, neural cognition, and so-cial macro-structures—and propose falsifiable experimental protocols based on the Information-Mass Equivalence Principle and Quantum Biology. (shrink)
We propose a unified framework to model human working memory (WM) dynamics using **Markovian Parallax Denigrate (MPD)** writing tasks, convexity of WM trajectories, and the formation of **mental logic circuits** (flip-flops, MUX, classical and quantum gates). This framework captures three phases: -/- 1. **MPD-induced convex WM growth** 2. **Transition to logic-based WM under cognitive fatigue** 3. **Dynamic feedback loops enabling online object manipulation** -/- We show both **neuroscientific and mathematical evidence** for convexity, Markovian O(1) computations, and the generalization to complex (...) classical and quantum mental circuits. (shrink)
This paper proposes a radical reconceptualization of perception as *functional reconstruction* rather than *representational mirroring*. Drawing on a reinterpretation of the camera obscura not as an imaging device but as a constraint-satisfying transformation schema, I develop a framework in which vision operates as a general-purpose function that yields values only upon query—never as pre-formed content. Color, traditionally treated as either a physical property or a quale, emerges instead as a functional proxy for thermo-reproductive relevance: a query-dependent output of a multi-purpose (...) perceptual function shaped by evolutionary constraints. Crucially, the mind does not construct representations of the world; it constructs *functions* that solve survival problems under perturbation. Using the Jenga metaphor—where blocks represent constraints, configurations represent temporary functional instantiations, and tower collapse represents reorganization without functional loss—I formalize perception as continuous reconstruction under siege. The self is reconceptualized not as a subject or agent but as the *optimization residue* of repeatedly reconstructed configurations that have survived perturbation. Memory deforms the functional landscape rather than storing states; representation emerges as sedimented bias from repeated reconstruction, not as cognitive substrate. Language and tools transmit long-lived functional instantiations ("variable selves") across generations. Finally, I demonstrate why organisms lack perceptual HUDs (heads-up displays): dimensional explosion makes explicit representation computationally lethal; survival demands aggressive dimensional collapse from high-dimensional sensory flux to low-dimensional action affordances. This framework bridges enactivism, ecological psychology, and anti-representational computationalism while dissolving the hard problem of consciousness into the dynamics of constraint-satisfying reconstruction. (shrink)
Collective memory researchers predominantly in the cultural and social sciences have commonly understood the concept of collective memory as a mere metaphor, as something not existing in itself as memory but useful only as a tool for referring to the way groups construct shared representations of their past. Few have however addressed the question of whether it is a metaphor or literal in its own right. This paper looks at the plausibility of the claim that collective memory is a mere (...) metaphor by probing its presuppositions, where the representationalist theory of mind emerges as the ground for such a claim. Then appealing to the externalist model of the mind championed in recent studies of mind in disciplines as varied as philosophy, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and collective intentionality studies, we try to expose the presuppositions of that claim, opening up possibilities for conceiving collective memory as not merely metaphorical but literal and naturally existing as memory. (shrink)
Gestures are usually regarded as a casual element of communication processes between logicians. By contrast, we aim to show that gestures have played a significant role in logic. We argue that the development of communication techniques and their standardization have led to the rise of formal notation systems commonly used in logic today. In order to substantiate this claim, the historical development of the use of gestures in (early) modern logic is investigated. This investigation uncovers exemplary communication and proof techniques (...) that illustrate the efficacy of gestures as representational media in formal logic. Revisiting the tradition of gestures in logic offers promising paths and insights for today’s logic as a communication practice in the digital age. (shrink)
Behavioural and neuroscientific research has provided evidence for a strong functional link between the neural motor system and lexical?semantic processing of action-related language. It remains unclear, however, whether the impact of motor actions is restricted to online language comprehension or whether sensorimotor codes are also important in the formation and consolidation of persisting memory representations of the word's referents. The current study now demonstrates that recognition performance for action words is modulated by motor actions performed during the retention interval. Specifically, (...) participants were required to learn words denoting objects that were associated with either a pressing or a twisting action (e.g., piano, screwdriver) and words that were not associated to actions. During a 6?8-minute retention phase, participants performed an intervening task that required the execution of pressing or twisting responses. A subsequent recognition task revealed a better memory for words that denoted objects for which the functional use was congruent with the action performed during the retention interval (e.g., pepper mill?twisting action, doorbell?pressing action) than for words that denoted objects for which the functional use was incongruent. In further experiments, we were able to generalize this effect of selective memory enhancement of words by performing congruent motor actions to an implicit perceptual (Experiment 2) and implicit semantic memory test (Experiment 3). Our findings suggest that a reactivation of motor codes affects the process of memory consolidation and emphasizes therefore the important role of sensorimotor codes in establishing enduring semantic representations. The authors thank Pascal de Water and Gerard van Oijen for technical support and Markus van Ackeren for help in creating stimulus material. The authors would also like to thank Eelco van Dongen, Michael Masson, Art Glenberg, and Diane Pecher for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. The study was supported by the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research NWO-VICI grant (453-05-001) to the third author and NWO-VENI grant (016-094-053) to the last author. (shrink)
This paper asks whether local optimization of the present body can contract the space of future bodily possibilities. Rather than evaluating bodily organization solely by current performance, efficiency, strength, stability, or task success, it analyzes how repeated optimization can alter the set of bodily regimes that remain reachable later. The Xeno-14 Body Principles provide a test framework for examining posture, balance, gait, tension distribution, breathing, sensory organization, movement initiation, whole-body coordination, and long-duration bodily sedimentation without assuming that one optimized bodily (...) state should dominate all others. The paper introduces the reachability of unexpressed regimes to designate bodily organizations that are not currently manifested but remain accessible under alternative configurations. Latent body suppression occurs when repeated stabilization of one regime raises the transition cost or removes the conditions required for alternative regimes to ignite. Regime lock-in describes the resulting persistence of a locally successful organization after its advantages have become configuration-specific, while Fragility Transfer identifies cases in which increased robustness or performance in one bodily dimension relocates vulnerability to another movement, scale, temporal interval, or future configuration. The broader claim is that bodily optimization should be evaluated not only by present performance but by its effects on the topology of future bodily reachability: an intervention can improve the current body while simultaneously reducing the diversity, reversibility, and adaptability of bodies that the same configuration could later become. (shrink)
This paper argues that fungal mycelial networks exhibit minimal cognition through memory-integrated adaptive regulation. Drawing on cybernetic and enactivist frameworks, I develop a non-representational account of memory as the organism's capacity to modulate behavior based on temporally extended environmental coupling. I propose four operational criteria for minimal cognition: feedback-guided regulation of behavior, maintenance of internal viability conditions, structural modulation based on past environmental interactions, and plasticity across time scales that supports anticipatory adaptivity. Empirical evidence demonstrates that fungi meet all four (...) criteria through distributed memory mechanisms: fungal networks exhibit directional regrowth toward previously encountered resources even after spatial displacement; stress priming persists across multiple cell divisions; Spitzenkörper-mediated directional persistence in constrained environments; and transgenerational memory through spore imprinting. These findings challenge representationalist assumptions in cognitive science by showing that memory and cognition can emerge from morphodynamic, biochemical, and electrophysiological processes without necessary neural substrates or symbolic representations. Fungal cognition demonstrates that the organizational principles underlying cognition – feedback-driven adaptation, norm-preservation, and historical coupling – can be realized in radically different material substrates, expanding our understanding of what counts as a cognitive system. (shrink)
The present volume investigates the growing tension between emergent forms of world-binding and a society increasingly organizing reality through stabilization, simulation, administrative legibility, and functional reproducibility. Its point of departure is the observation that modern systems have developed enormous capacities for control, prediction, and technical organization, while simultaneously placing under increasing pressure precisely those conditions necessary for real emergence, embodied world-relation, long-term coherence, and open-ended processes of knowledge formation. -/- At the center of the volume lies the concept of operatoric (...) world-binding. Cognition is not understood primarily as the processing of representations within already stabilized systems, but as an irreversible process of relational condensation through which world itself becomes bound, displaced, and reorganized. From this perspective, knowledge does not appear as static possession or mere information processing, but as something that can only emerge within Eigenzeit, movement, conflict, difference, and recursive stabilization. -/- The investigations assembled here bring together neurodivergent epistemology, labour critique, emergence theory, systems analysis, artistic research, and institutional field research. The volume argues that many phenomena currently interpreted as individual dysfunctions or psychological deficits — including work incapacity, communicative mismatch, overcomplexity, withdrawal, institutional escalation, or recursive conflict dynamics — may instead point toward deeper structural incompatibilities between different modes of societal world-organization. -/- Particular attention is given to forms of eigenzeit-bound cognition that remain only partially compatible with modern institutional regimes organized around standardization, reversibility, administrative control, and simulation-based productivity. Within this framework, neurodivergent forms of perception and cognition appear not merely as individual deviations, but potentially as contact zones in which suppressed conditions of emergence, irreversibility, and real world-formation become visible again. -/- The investigations draw upon long-term autoethnographic research conducted across labour systems, institutional conflicts, artistic practice, neurodivergent embodiment, and recursive theory production. The volume therefore deliberately operates within a boundary zone between personal experience, theoretical condensation, and structural analysis. Conflict, emotional intensity, institutional friction, overload, and destabilization are not treated merely as subjective disturbances external to knowledge production, but as part of the empirical field itself. -/- At the same time, the volume critiques an increasingly simulation-based organization of society in which reality becomes progressively managed through statistical models, algorithmic prediction, administrative abstraction, and functional controllability. The investigations propose that modern societies may thereby gradually lose the capacity to integrate real difference, open emergence, and forms of human existence that cannot be fully formatted into simulation-compatible structures. Contemporary conflicts surrounding neurodivergence, labour, psychological exhaustion, social fragmentation, institutional violence, and AI-driven governance therefore appear not as isolated crises, but as expressions of a deeper conflict between emergent world-formation and simulative stabilization. -/- The volume explicitly rejects both closed explanatory systems and universalizing claims. The concepts developed here function instead as heuristic operatoric structures intended to render visible tensions that appear to be intensifying within modern societies. At the center of the investigations lies the question of what happens when societies increasingly organize their stability through simulation while simultaneously losing the open, irreversible, and embodied processes from which real world-binding emerges in the first place. (shrink)
The present volume develops the thesis that neurodivergent development cannot be adequately understood as long as research asks only which biological, neural, or cognitive elements differ. What may be decisive instead is that development changes the relational order within which the same elements can become effective at all. A gene can remain the same gene, a stimulus the same stimulus, a behaviour outwardly the same behaviour — and yet, within a differently formed developmental order, mean something different, be weighted differently, (...) and enable different continuations. What is meant by this, however, is not merely more complex causality. Displacement, distortion, and deformation are understood here not only as additional influences upon an otherwise unchanged development. Rather, form that has already emerged changes the relational conditions under which further differences can become effective. Development therefore not only leaves behind results, but changes the space of further development. Autism would then not necessarily be what causes a divergent development, nor an isolable object that arises at the end of this development. It could instead become visible as a boundary phenomenon of relational displacement. The first contribution, Autism as an Operatoric Boundary Phenomenon, develops for this purpose a morphogenetic and operatoric model of autistic development. Different developmental orders can produce highly similar human forms without converging on the same internal developmental structure or the same world-relation. What is therefore decisive is not only that similar diagnostic surfaces can emerge from different generative structures. The unity of this surface could itself partly arise only where differently formed world-relations encounter the same dominant Raster and become non-coincident in similar ways at its boundary. Autism thus appears not primarily as a common internal object, but as a possible operatoric boundary phenomenon. From this perspective, monotropism, Double Empathy, incommensurability, and masking can be re-examined as different relational consequences of such non-coincidence. The second contribution, AuDHD as a Boundary Case of Non-Stabilizable Cognition, extends this relational question to the level of scientific categories. AuDHD is not understood as another stable hybrid category, but as a boundary case at which it becomes visible that categorical models may become unstable precisely where they attempt to translate open relational dynamics into fixed diagnostic objects. The difficulty of classification is thus treated not only as a taxonomic problem, but as a possible finding concerning the limits of the underlying models of cognition and neurodivergence. The third contribution, Neurodivergence and the Geometry of Masking, develops a three-dimensional spatial field model of masking. Masking is no longer understood primarily as a property, strategy, or burden of an individual person, but as a position within a relational field. The model distinguishes three dimensions: structural distance or possible incommensurability, asymmetry of the necessary Compatibility Work, and operative viability or resonance. As a result, outwardly similar forms of masking can occupy different positions within the field and have different causes. The model thus opens the possibility of investigating masking not only through intensity or exhaustion, but through its spatial-relational structure. Unmasking also changes its meaning within this model. A reduction in masking does not necessarily have to mean the uncovering of an original self beneath a social mask. It can equally arise from a change in the field geometry: expectations change, translation work is distributed differently, different temporal and relational conditions are permitted, normative Raster are opened. Unmasking can thereby be understood as a Redistribution of Compatibility Work and Morphogenetic Pressure. Together, the three contributions develop a coherent research movement: differently formed developmental orders can enter into relational non-coincidence with one another; at scientific and diagnostic boundaries, this can become visible as categorical non-stabilizability, while in social fields it can generate Compatibility Work and Morphogenetic Pressure. The volume thereby connects developmental biology, autism theory, cognitive and diagnostic research, and relational social theory on a common level, without presupposing a homogeneous neurodivergent structure. Its central research contribution therefore does not lie in a new definition of autism, AuDHD, or masking. It lies in the proposal to investigate three problems that have so far often been treated separately — developmental heterogeneity, categorical instability, and the social distribution of compatibility work — as different manifestations of a common relational problem. (shrink)
This chapter introduces the idea that remembering, as a cognitive process, is spread or ‘distributed’ over bodily and worldly resources as well as the brain. It sets this claim, natural enough in cultural memory studies, within a ‘situated cognition’ movement that has transformed the cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind from within over 40 years. After critically surveying broader debates in contemporary philosophy of memory, the chapter focusses on this ‘distributed remembering’ framework in theory and application. The approach demands insistently (...) interdisciplinary methods, because the material, technological, and environmental resources that compose disparate ecologies of memory are heterogeneous and dynamic. Research on socially distributed remembering challenges assumptions in cognitive psychology that other people are sources of error or distortion in memory, instead identifying groups and microprocesses that produce benefits in collaborative recall. Our mnemonic interdependence with others and with diverse external scaffolding is one key source of our cognitive-affective vulnerability. (shrink)
This article examines how repetition produces déjà vu-like recognition in non-deterministic narrative cinema. Focusing on David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), it argues that the film’s repetitions do not lead to conventional repetition–resolution, but instead organise an entangled binary narrative structure: two discontinuous diegetic modules remain distinct while becoming mutually implicated through recurring elements. Drawing on theories of repetition, modular narrative, impossible puzzle films, Nochimson’s account of entanglement, and psychological models of implicit memory, the article develops déjà vu-like recognition as a (...) formal and phenomenological mechanism rather than as a literal empirical claim about spectators’ cognitive experience. Through episodic experience, single-element familiarity, and Gestalt familiarity, recurring phrases, figures, objects, spaces, and situations encourage viewers to perceive non-causal linkages between narrative fragments that resist stable resolution. The article’s contribution lies in reconceptualizing repetition, doubling, and ambiguity in Lost Highway not merely as textual motifs, but as mechanisms that sustain interpretive oscillation between recognition and uncertainty. A brief discussion of Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues (2015) serves as a limited comparative case, suggesting that this framework may also clarify other non-deterministic narrative structures in which repetition connects narrative modules without producing causal closure. (shrink)
This paper develops a radical enactive account of memory errors. We first outline the radical enactive approach to memory, which rejects explaining remembering as a way of representing the past, and formulate three necessary conditions for successful remembering. We then identify five potential candidates of memory errors that any comprehensive theory must address: misremembering, false confabulation, veridical confabulation, the lost in the mall case and relearning. Using this framework, we classify various memory errors based on which conditions they satisfy or (...) fail to satisfy. Our analysis shows that the radical enactive account can accommodate acknowledged memory errors (misremembering, false confabulation and veridical confabulation) while providing new insights into controversial cases: the implanted memory and relearning. We argue that the implanted memory cases should be classified as false confabulation and suggest that relearning should not be considered a distinct type of memory error but rather encompasses various possibilities depending on which conditions are met, ranging from successful remembering and misremembering to different types of confabulations. Additionally, our formulation makes room for logically possible cases: experience-involved confabulation, coincidental confabulation, non-experiential accurate memory error and non-experiential inaccurate memory error. (shrink)
This is a paper on the philosophical clinical psychology of PTSD. How best to improve our treatment plans for the disorder is the primary imperative in the clinical literature. Our failure to properly treat those suffering from PTSD up until now could be either the result of merely a problem in practice or, more seriously, a problem in principle. In this essay, I explore three possible accounts consistent with the supposition that what we have here is a problem in principle. (...) I call the first the “Somatic” hypothesis; the second, the “Memorial”; and the third, a “Rilkean” hypothesis of PTSD, which is inspired by the recent work of Rowlands (2015, 2017). The first two have been more-or-less articulated previously; the third is introduced here for the first time. The primary argument of this essay is abductive: I argue in favor of a Rilkean Memory hypothesis of PTSD by comparing it to the other two accounts and showing that it possesses greater theoretical virtue than they do. I then conclude the essay by noting certain limitations with the account here sketched, nonetheless suggesting that this hypothesis can open up new avenues of clinical research and treatment options for the disorder. (shrink)
Within the concept of the extended mind, the active modification of external objects, externalizations, is seen as an auxiliary means to adapt to the environment. Toolmaking and use are advanced stages of externalizations that evolve. All past or present tools can, theoretically, be precisely assigned a location in an evolutionary tree with predecessors and progeny. Tools are reliably replicated, modified, and selected by their ability to facilitate human needs. Tool evolution, therefore, fulfills Darwinian criteria where the material tool is the (...) phenotype and the instruction to build it is the code. The ostensive triangle consisting of a pointing individual, an observing individual, and a pointedat object or tool is the germ cell of social transmission of instructions. Tool-building instructions ultimately can be reduced to distinct sequences of motor acts that can be recombined and are socially transmitted. When executed, they replicate tools for the reward of convenience or improved fitness. Tools elicit affordances relating to their use that synchronize different individuals’ perceptions, result in psychological “understanding,” and thereby modify social networks. Massive tool fabrication as present today in the “tool-sphere” has, therefore, accelerated prosociality and over time led to the acquisition of an individual’s third person perspective. The entangled biological evolution accelerated the ongoing cumulative cultural evolution by selecting traits facilitating social transmission. In this context, tool evolution and the corresponding acquired individual instructional content is a precondition to the emergence of higher cognition and “consciousness.” A neuroscience investigating externalizations as the starting point of this process is urgently needed. (shrink)
This article reexamines genius and extraordinary talent within the framework of predictive processing. Drawing upon an interdisciplinary synthesis of neuroscience, philosophy, chaos theory, information theory, and critical epistemologies, it attempts to analyze the genius mind as a dynamic, self-regulating system capable of reducing local entropy. From the perspective of local learning-global optimization, the genius, through deep focus on a specific domain, reconstructs global structures. The genius mind functions as a generative model with extensive scope, capable of minimizing prediction errors and (...) utilizing them as raw material for creativity, constructive chaos, and semantic reconfiguration. (shrink)
Autobiographical interviews are a key tool in various social science disciplines. Autobiographical narratives, the product of these interviews, suggest that individuals use self-narration to construct their identity. In addition to remembering, interviewees often engage in parallel additional mental tasks (AMTs), such as action evaluation, counterfactual imagination, and value expression. Although research on autobiographical interviews has highlighted the occurrence of these AMTs, the cognitive processes behind them remain underexplored. In this article, I draw on the theoretical framework of Simulation Theory, which (...) is influential in the psychology and philosophy of memory, to examine the nature of AMTs and their role in identity construction. According to simulationist accounts, remembering personal past events relies on mental simulation as a general mechanism for episodic construction. I argue that this mechanism not only enables recalling information about the past but also supports AMTs that help achieve the agent’s current goals. In autobiographical interviews, the coordinated use of recalling information about the past and engaging in AMTs serves to construct identity through self-narration. AMTs play a key role in reinforcing or altering beliefs about the self by tapping into the malleability of memory and the need for coherence between memories and self-conceptions. (shrink)
There are certain changes in a person, often small at first, almost too subtle to notice, that begin to rearrange the familiar contours of their mind. A misplaced word, a forgotten task, a momentary confusion about time or place. We tend to react to these slips with concern because they seem to signal something drifting out of reach, but we rarely reflect on what exactly we believe is being lost. Forgetfulness appears frightening not only because a memory is gone but (...) because it disturbs our quiet assumption that memory is the substance of who we are. We live in a culture where the symbolic self, our stories, identities, names, and roles, carries the entire weight of our personhood. When cracks appear in that structure, it feels as though the person themself is leaking away. (shrink)
Computation has become the dominant substrate of the modern era, promising permanence through infinite storage, redundancy, and replication. Yet beneath the surface of this digital immortality lies a structural contradiction: adaptive systems do not persist by remembering everything but by forgetting selectively. Coherence is not the product of perfect recall; it is the result of recursive selection and the active pruning of low-yield states. The illusion of permanence that computation creates threatens to lock civilization into entropy retention, mistaking accumulation for (...) continuity. Drawing on coherence-based frameworks and first-principles system theory, this work argues that forgetting is not a failure mode but a necessary act of structural adaptation. Biological memory, cultural evolution, and intelligence itself all demonstrate that persistence emerges from dynamic impermanence. As our computational architectures extend beyond human cognition and become the nervous system of civilization, the absence of adaptive forgetting mechanisms risks systemic brittleness and collapse. To survive the age of computation, we must learn to erase with intention, embedding coherence-weighted forgetting at the core of technology, culture, and self. In forgetting lies the only path to remembering what matters. (shrink)
The central claim here is that the self is an emergent experiential, information processing and behavioral system that arises reflexively in the conscious subject and a body setting that is organized and primed with many of the required processes in place. These processes and their associated functions represent our world as coherent and temporally unified within the construct of a developing and roughly continuous experiencer-agent, or self. These representations are not, however, copies of the external world. In this way, selves (...) develop as temporal subjects; as active and complex informational, dispositional, belief-driven and memory-driven configurations of mental states with unique (personal) properties that interact. They are robust and pivotal subsystems of our global mental organization and are suffused with the phenomenality of perception. As constructs in internal and external time, selves have histories, memories, beliefs, skills, cognitive capacities, attitudes, standpoints, social and emotional equities, pre-dispositions and default responses. Yet they are neither causally nor ontologically reducible to their embodied physical states. They are, rather, implemented in them. The body, I maintain, is a necessary but insufficient condition for the occurrence of a self. (shrink)
The article presents the phenomenon of cyborgization as a complex inter weaving of technological and human practices. It is shown that the roots of cyborgization lie in ancient myths and prosthetic practices. Using examples from history and contemporary cases, the author argues that the expansion of capabilities through external devices alters ontological and epistemological frameworks: a synergistic effect arises, and subjective experience and cognition are transformed. Comprehending cyborgization within the framework of optimistic trans humanist discourse, technology critique, descriptions of hypothetical (...) models such as the agro-cyborg, and the concepts of the anti-cyborg and “reverse cyborg” makes it possible to identify both the risks and potential of cyborg technologies. The author develops an integrative approach, that is, cyborgian eclecticism based on the interweaving of various theories and methodologies and the reflexive revision of priorities as new data emerges. This approach enables the development of recommendations for the integration of technologies into social processes in a way that promotes the protection of human values and takes into account the variability of the socio-technical context. Cyborgization thus appears not simply as a modification of the body and/or consciousness, but as a transformation of modes of being that requires philosophical understanding and flexible ethical guidelines. // В данной работе феномен киборгизации представлен как сложное переплетение технологических и человеческих практик. Показано, что корни киборгизации уходят в древние мифы и практики протезирования. На примерах из истории и на современных кейсах автор доказывает, что расширение возможностей с помощью внешних устройств меняет онтологические и эпистемологические рамки: возникает синергетический эффект, трансформируются субъектный опыт и познание. Осмысление киборгизации в рамках оптимистического трансгуманистического дискурса, критики технологий, описания гипотетических моделей, таких как агрокиборг, и концептов антикиборга и «киборга наоборот» позволяет выявить как риски, так и потенциал киборгианских технологий. Автор развивает интегративный подход - киборгианский эклектизм, базирующийся на сплетении разных теорий и методик, рефлексивном пересмотре приоритетов по мере появления новых данных. Этот подход дает возможность разрабатывать рекомендации по внедрению технологий в общественные процессы таким образом, чтобы эта интеграция способствовала защите человеческих ценностей и учитывала изменчивость социально-технического контекста. Тем самым киборгизация предстает не просто как модификация тела и/или сознания, а как трансформация способов бытия, требующая философского осмысления и гибких этических ориентиров. (shrink)
Episodic memory gives us the ability to mentally travel back in time to revisit and relive past experiences. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the function of episodic memory. According to the orthodox view, episodic memory should be considered a part of a constructive system that simulates the future for sophisticated foresight and flexible planning. In this paper, I offer a novel alternative view. I argue that episodic memory provides invaluable information about the past behavior of (...) others, allowing us to identify reliable and trustworthy partners while avoiding dealing with cheaters. Theoretical models demonstrate that cooperation in groups can be maintained if potential partners use information about an individual’s past behavior to guide their behavior toward that individual. In these reputation-based models of human cooperation, individuals with a history of cheating are ostracized, whereas those with a history of cooperative behavior flourish. Against this theoretical background, it is possible to see a function of episodic memory in facilitating information exchange about others, helping group members make effective partner choices, and avoiding the risk of interacting with cheaters. If correct, episodic memory may have played a significant role in the evolution of human cooperation. (shrink)
Why is our knowledge of the past so much more ‘expansive’ (to pick a suitably vague term) than our knowledge of the future, and what is the best way to capture the difference(s) (i.e., in what sense is knowledge of the past more ‘expansive’)? One could reasonably approach these questions by giving necessary conditions for different kinds of knowledge, and showing how some were satisfied by certain propositions about the past, and not by corresponding propositions about the future. I take (...) it that such is the approach of Chapter 6 of Time and Chance (T&C). Here’s another such a proposal, similar to that of, but significantly different from T&C; my purpose in this section is to highlight the differences, by showing how this account fails. (shrink)
One can be reproached for not remembering. Remembering and forgetting shows who and what one values. Indeed, memory is constitutively normative. Theoretical approaches to memory should be sensitive to this normative character. We will argue that traditional views that consider memory as the storing and retrieval of mental content, fail to consider the practices we need for telling the truth about our past. We introduce the Radically Enactive view of Cognition, or REC, as well-placed to recognize the central role of (...) norms in remembering. Crucially, REC construes all remembering as “something we do”, and the most sophisticated forms of remembering as things we collectively do, answerable to socioculturally established practices. On this view our mnemonic performances cannot avoid re-shaping our collective ways of doing and seeing going forward. By REC’s lights therefore, the “is” of memory is “oughty” through and through. (shrink)
Memory perspectives on past events allegedly take one of two shapes. In field memories, we recall episodes from a first-person point of view, while in observer memories, we look at a past scene from a third-person perspective. But this mere visuospatial dichotomy faces several practical and conceptual challenges. First, this binary distinction is not exhaustive. Second, this characterization insufficiently accounts for the phenomenology of observer memories. Third, the focus on the visual aspect of memory perspective neglects emotional, agential, and self-related (...) social aspects. Fourth, the focus on the time of recall neglects the fact that visual, emotional, agential, and social aspects of perspective can also be dissociated in the original experience. In this chapter, we move away from the standard visual dichotomy. Instead, we propose that memory perspective is better understood along four lines: visual, agential, emotional, and social. Drawing on empirical research, we argue that these dimensions predict a disposition to recall a past event based on the present situation of the memorizer. This account supports seeing episodic memory as a natural kind, supported by scenario construction mechanisms and minimal memory traces. By remapping the classic distinction between field and observer perspectives along four dimensions, our proposal provides explanatory advantages and secures practical gains by enabling testable hypotheses. (shrink)
Human beings can be said to naturally seek familiarity in their environment for survival purposes, and this can explain why the mere-exposure effect, where being merely exposed to external factors in our environment, can increase preference for these factors. Familiarity in this sense can thus be framed as important for affect and preference formation and considered built upon both the subjective process of fluency and the objects of experience being processed. The feeling of uncanniness is often considered the opposite of (...) familiarity, yet within its semantic vicinity. By considering the term ‘uncanny’ as having a double meaning linked to both familiarity and unfamiliarity, however, this paper will show how this ambiguity allows for a semantic relatedness of this concept to process fluency rather than familiarity. This connection will in turn be shown to have ramifications for affect through the proposal of a fourth model of process fluency: The Embodied Fluency Model. Through consideration of Mori’s shinkawan, Freud’s notion of the uncanny, and Heidegger’s connection between uncanniness and Angst, an exploration into conceiving how fluency and uncanniness share attributes that allow for a different view on affect is propounded. (shrink)
Remembering and forgetting are the two poles of the memory system. Consequently, any approach to memory should be able to explain both remembering and forgetting in order to gain a comprehensive and insightful understanding of the memory system. Can an enactive approach to memory processes do so? In this article I propose a possible way to provide a positive answer to this question. In line with some current enactive approaches to memory, I suggest that forgetting –similarly to remembering– might be (...) constituted within an embodied and active process. Within this process, some simulation and re-enactment paths would acquire more relevance than others. This acquired relevance would make the activation of other paths of recall less likely, thus preventing the memory system from engaging in some episodic simulations. These changes in the likelihood of activation of some paths of recall –the forgotten ones– can be accounted for in an enactive fashion by studying both “internal” and “external” re-enactment and simulation paths. With regard to the latter, I propose to examine the process of forgetting by considering the engagement and affective relation of an embodied agent with her field of affordances. I suggest that, in the case of emotion-laden memories, the agent’s decoupling from some affordances of the environment might contribute to the process of forgetting, in that it would reduce the agent’s opportunities for situated episodic simulations. (shrink)
Is an appropriate causal connection to the past experience it represents a necessary condition for a mental state to qualify as an episodic memory? For some years this issue has been the subject of an intense debate between the causalist theory of episodic memory (CTM) and the simulationist theory of episodic memory (STM). This paper aims at exploring the prospects for an embodied approach to episodic memory and assessing the potential case for causalism that could be founded on it. In (...) a critical section, it argues that the empirical data to which STM appeals are both incomplete and inconclusive, and on closer examination even provide support for a proceduralist version of CTM. In a constructive section, it elaborates on the notion of a necessary causal connection in terms of particular procedural patterns acquired at encoding and operative at retrieval, grounding this move on recent empirical data about eye movements in mnemonic mental imagery. (shrink)
Despite the popularity that the embodied cognition thesis has gained in recent years, explicit memories of events personally experienced are still conceived as disembodied mental representations. It seems that we can consciously remember our personal past through sensory imagery, through concepts, propositions and language, but not through the body. In this article, I defend the idea that the body constitutes a genuine means of representing past personal experiences. For this purpose, I focus on the analysis of bodily movements associated with (...) the retrieval of a personal memory, which have certain features that make them different from procedural memories, pragmatic actions and common gestures, as well as other forms of embodied memories found in recent literature. I refer to these as “kinetic memories” and analyse their representative nature as well as their adaptive functions. Kinetic memories are bodily movements in which some event or action that took place in the past can be seen, because they are an externalisation of the subject’s inner intention of representing a past personal experience. Kinetic memories represent a past experience sometimes by imitation of a past movement, and other times through embodied symbols and metaphors. Furthermore, although sometimes they present direct pragmatic benefits, such as communicative benefits, they seem to enhance the whole reexperience of the past event and memory recall, which I argue is one important adaptive value. (shrink)
The horizon of clinical memory modification, long the domain of science fiction, is rapidly approaching; it is therefore imperative that we understand the ethical implications of such neuromodificatory technologies. We might begin such inquiry with the public’s worries about these technologies, namely that modifying memory will concomitantly modify the self. Yet, before discerning the reasonableness of this worry, we must understand the meaning of “the self” in relation to memory. Distilling this conception of the self is the principal aim of (...) this thesis. I argue that many popular self-conceptions cannot capture our worries about neuromodification. Hence, I distill a novel such conception, which I call the Proustian Self—marshaling, to that end, not only neuroscientific evidence and metaphysical arguments but also literary-phenomenological analysis. I ultimately argue that this conception should be the target of further neuroethical inquiry regarding the prospect memory modification and its effects on putative patients. (shrink)
This article provides an overview and analysis of recent work on the extended self, demonstrating that the boundaries of selves are fluid, shifting across biological, artifactual, and sociocultural structures. First, it distinguishes the notions of minimal self, person, and narrative self. Second, it surveys how philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists argue that embodiment, cognition, emotion, consciousness, and moral character traits can be extended and what that implies for the boundaries of selves. It also reviews and responds to various criticisms and (...) counterarguments against the extended self. The main focus is on the link between the extended mind and extended self, which has received the most attention in recent literature. But accounts of the extended self developed independently of the extended mind are also briefly discussed. This article ends by drawing out some of the conceptual, methodological, and normative implications of the extended self and suggesting some directions for future research. (shrink)
In the history of external information systems, the World Wide Web presents a significant change in terms of the accessibility and amount of available information. Constant access to various kinds of online information has consequences for the way we think, act and remember. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have recently started to examine the interactions between the human mind and the Web, mainly focussing on the way online information influences our biological memory systems. In this article, we use concepts from the (...) extended cognition and distributed cognition frameworks and from transactive memory theory to analyse the cognitive relations between humans and the Web. We first argue that while neither of these approaches neatly capture the nature of human-Web interactions, both offer useful concepts to describe aspects of such interactions. We then conceptualize relations between the Web and its users in terms of cognitive integration, arguing that most current Web applications are not deeply integrated and are better seen as a scaffold for memory and cognition. Some highly personalised applications accessed on wearable computing devices, however, may already have the capacity for deep integration. Finally, we draw out some of the epistemic implications of our cognitive analysis. (shrink)
The role of the body in cognition is acknowledged across a variety of disciplines, even if the precise nature and scope of that contribution remain contentious. As a result, most philosophers working on embodiment—e.g. those in embodied cognition, enactivism, and ‘4e’ cognition—interact with the life sciences as part of their interdisciplinary agenda. Despite this, a detailed engagement with emerging findings in epigenetics and post-genomic biology has been missing from proponents of this embodied turn. Surveying this research provides an opportunity to (...) rethink the relationship between embodiment and genetics, and we argue that the balance of current epigenetic research favours the extension of an enactivist approach to mind and life, rather than the extended functionalist view of embodied cognition associated with Andy Clark and Mike Wheeler, which is more substrate neutral. (shrink)
Merleau-Ponty’s attitude to psychoanalysis was ambiguous. On the one hand, he realized that the phenomena psychoanalysis deals with require to go beyond the area of act intentionality, and that, from a different angle, psychoanalysis addresses the same problem as Gestalt psychology, which played the central role in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical project. On the other hand, he explicitly rejected the terms used by Freud for conveying his discoveries. Merleau-Ponty replaced unconscious mental contents, which act on conscious behavior, by ambiguous consciousness. In the (...) Structure of Behavior and Phenomenology of Perception, he used the terms “habit,” “bad faith,” “bodily expression,” “affective intentionality,” and “body schema” to specify his notion of experiential “ambiguity.” This paper aims to present the key concepts of Merleau-Ponty’s early interpretation of the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious. A partial task is to show how Merleau-Ponty’s concept of bad faith differs from that of Sartre, and to distinguish existential ambiguity from the psychoanalytic concept of overdetermination. (shrink)
Memory is everywhere in Blade Runner 2049. From the dead tree that serves as a memorial and a site of remembrance (“Who keeps a dead tree?”), to the ‘flashbulb’ memories individuals hold about the moment of the ‘blackout’, when all the electronic stores of data were irretrievably erased (“everyone remembers where they were at the blackout”). Indeed, the data wiped out in the blackout itself involves a loss of memory (“all our memory bearings from the time, they were all damaged (...) in the blackout”). Memory, and lack of it, permeates place, where from the post-blackout Las Vegas Deckard remembers it as somewhere you could “forget your troubles.” Memory is a commodity, called upon and consumed by the Wallace Corporation, purchased from the memory-maker, Dr Ana Stelline, who constructs and implants “the best memories” in replicants so as to instil in them real human responses. Memory is ubiquitous in Blade Runner 2049, involving humans, replicants, objects, and machines. Even “God,” we are told, “remembered Rachael.” Nowhere, though, is the depiction of memory more important than in the attempt to solve a question of identity. Officer K has a memory of his past. Even though he knows it is an implant, it is a memory he is emotionally attached to, frequently narrating it to Joi, his digital girlfriend. But it is a memory that starts to puzzle and trouble him. When K discovers the remains of a dead replicant, a female NEXUS-7, he uncovers a secret—this replicant was pregnant and died during childbirth, a discovery that could “break the world.” K is charged with hunting down the child and making the problem disappear. Yet as K starts seeking answers to the question of the child’s identity he gets inextricably caught up in the mystery. Is he merely Officer K, or is he Joe, the miracle child of Rachael and Deckard? The answer to this question hinges on K’s memory. But is the memory genuine? Is the memory his? Blade Runner 2049 encourages us to think deeply about the nature of memory, identity, and the relation between them. Indeed, the film does not just serve as a starting point for thinking about philosophical issues related to memory and identity. Rather, as we show in this chapter, the film seems to offer a view on these philosophical issues. Blade Runner 2049 offers us a view of memory as spread out over people, objects, and the environment, and it shows us that memory’s role in questions of identity goes beyond merely accurately recalling one’s past. Identity depends not on memory per se, but partly on what we use memory for. (shrink)
In this paper, we evaluate the pragmatic turn towards embodied, enactive thinking in cognitive science, in the context of recent empirical research on the memory palace technique. The memory palace is a powerful method for remembering yet it faces two problems. First, cognitive scientists are currently unable to clarify its efficacy. Second, the technique faces significant practical challenges to its users. Virtual reality devices are sometimes presented as a way to solve these practical challenges, but currently fall short of delivering (...) on that promise. We address both issues in this paper. First, we argue that an embodied, enactive approach to memory can better help us understand the effectiveness of the memory palace. Second, we present design recommendations for a virtual memory palace. Our theoretical proposal and design recommendations contribute to solving both problems and provide reasons for preferring an embodied, enactive account over an information-processing treatment of the memory palace. (shrink)
This chapter proposes a radically enactive account of remembering that casts it as creative, dynamic, and wide-reaching. It paints a picture of remembering that no longer conceives of it as involving passive recollections – always occurring wholly and solely inside heads. Integrating empirical findings from various sources, the chapter puts pressure on familiar cognitivist visions of remembering. Pivotally, it is argued, that we achieve a stronger and more elegant account of remembering by abandoning the widely held assumption that it is (...) rooted in the retrieval of stored information or content in order to represent past events. We demonstrate how a radically enactive account of the roots of remembering can successfully handle classic cases discussed in the extended memory literature while, at same time, accommodating experientially rich forms of episodic memory. (shrink)
Western Philosophy’s modern period has been very much shaped by a representationalism according to which “concepts” (earlier: “ideas”) assembled into “propositions” constitute the fundamental unit of meaning, thought, belief— and even, in the hands of 20th century philosophers such as G.E.M. Anscombe and Jaegwon Kim— action, conceived as performed under a description. What exactly a proposition consists in ontologically is not easy to explain in a manner consonant with prevailing scientific naturalism. But it is clearly a disembodied entity, some kind (...) of abstract object. But in human behaviour, much depends on not just what is done but how it is done (and this ‘how’ will possess a beginning, middle, and end denied to abstract objects). The ‘how’ may be understood as gesture, and Maddalena’s book takes a first pass across how a philosophy that takes this, rather than disembodied meanings, as its foundation might organise itself. The result is a fascinating wealth of germinal ideas, not all of which I have space to discuss here. (shrink)
The shift from print to screen has bodily effects on how we read. We distinguish two dimensions of embodied reading: the spatio-temporal and the imaginary. The former relates to what the body does during the act of reading and the latter relates to the role of the body in the imagined scenarios we create from what we read. At the level of neurons, these two dimensions are related to how we make sense of the world. From this perspective, we explain (...) how the bodily activity of reading changes from print to screen. Our focus is on the decreased material anchoring of memories. (shrink)
Education has recently been shaped by the cognitive science of memory. In turn, the science of memory has been infused by revolutionary ideas found in Wittgenstein’s works. However, the memory science presently applied to education draws mainly on traditional models that are quickly becoming outmoded; Wittgenstein’s insights have yet to be fruitfully applied, though they have helped to develop the science of memory. In this chapter, I examine three Wittgensteinian reforms in memory science as they pertain to education . First, (...) Wittgenstein has inspired a particular strain of enactive models of memory and cognition, with important implications for theories of situated learning in education. Second, researchers have begun modeling memory as public practice , which deeply informs, inter alia, fraught theoretical discussions of assessment. Third, a number of memory researchers have rejected models based on a stored trace, a fundamental, Wittgensteinian revision with broad implications for characterizations of learning. (shrink)
In this chapter, we analyze the relationships between the Internet and its users in terms of situated cognition theory. We first argue that the Internet is a new kind of cognitive ecology, providing almost constant access to a vast amount of digital information that is increasingly more integrated into our cognitive routines. We then briefly introduce situated cognition theory and its species of embedded, embodied, extended, distributed and collective cognition. Having thus set the stage, we begin by taking an embedded (...) cognition view and analyze how the Internet aids certain cognitive tasks. After that, we conceptualize how the Internet enables new kinds of embodied interaction, extends certain aspects of our embodiment, and examine how wearable technologies that monitor physiological, behavioral and contextual states transform the embodied self. On the basis of the degree of cognitive integration between a user and Internet resource, we then look at how and when the Internet extends our cognitive processes. We end this chapter with a discussion of distributed and collective cognition as facilitated by the Internet. (shrink)
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