Thursday January 11 starting at 11:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria room 5. The workshop will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact amontf94@gmail.com

The Free Energy Principle (FEP) and associated approaches such as predictive coding/processing and active inference have grown immensely in popularity in the last decade or so. With a grand unifying ambition, the FEP is said to underlie quantum and classical mechanics, biology, cognitive science, and sociology. But its statistical method and dense mathematics make the philosophical implications often difficult to follow for outsiders. To bring people up to speed on the basics, Thomas van Es and Miguel Aguilera will be presenting introductory materials.

11.00 – 13.00 Philosophical introduction to the FEP by Thomas van Es

13.00 – 15.00 lunch break

15.00 – 17.00 Critical examination of the mathematics of the FEP by Miguel Aguilera

Thursday 14 December at 17:30 in Centro Carlos Santamaría, room 3. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact amontf94@gmail.com

ABSTRACT:

Este seminario se adentra en la filosofía de la biología reproductiva, presentando un marco organísmico y relacional. Específicamente, se trata el concepto de rasgo reproductivo, discutiendo su relevancia para las ciencias biológicas, los criterios empleados para su individuación y las posibilidades epistémicas que permite. Se expone la conceptualización adaptacionista y funcional de los rasgos reproductivos, entendidas como estrategias reproductivas para incrementar el fitness, señalando algunas de sus problemas y limitaciones a la hora de clasificar y explicar la diversidad en la reproducción. Proponemos, después, el concepto de carácter reproductivo organísmico y relacional, que pone el foco en las relaciones y da cuenta de la dimensión material y de desarrollo al tiempo que integra una visión funcional y reconoce rasgos no meramente morfológicos. Se explora cómo estos caracteres están integrados y su interacción, no solo dentro de un organismo, sino entre organismos, brindando una comprensión más profunda de los procesos reproductivos y sus conexiones en la naturaleza. Finalmente se esbozan los aspectos operacionales de esta propuesta para clasificar y explicar la evolución de los rasgos reproductivos y se discute por qué esta aproximación no es reducible a las anteriormente presentadas.

Thursday 23 November at 17.30 in Room 1 of the Centro Carlos Santamaría The talk will be hybrid, to participate remotely please contact andrea.gambarotto@uclouvain.be

ABSTRACT:

En el campo de la psiquiatría parece haber un amplio acuerdo en defender la tesis según la cual, entre los años 1952 y 1954, con el descubrimiento del primer neuroléptico, la Clorpromazina, se iniciaría un proceso de radical transformación del saber psiquiátrico. En el año 1954, el laboratorio norte americano Smith, Kline & French (SK&F), hoy Glaxo Smith, compró la patente para comercializar esa droga en los Estados Unidos. Analizo la campaña publicitaria dirigida a las mujeres. La publicidad de esta potente droga psiquiátrica, a lo largo de las décadas de 1950 y 1960, permite entender la perspectiva de género existente en la industria farmacéutica y el papel de los neurolépticos en la gestión de la feminidad.

Thursday November 2nd, at 14:30 in Room 4 of the Centro Carlos Santamaría

The talk will be hybrid, to participate remotely please contact andrea.gambarotto@uclouvain.be

ABSTRACT: Cognition stands as one of the most formidable challenges in scientific inquiry. Living organisms exhibit behaviour teetering on the precipice of chaos. The Free Energy Principle (FEP) has been proposed as a pertinent approach to apprehending cognition. Conventional discourse on the FEP characterises the brain as a predictive apparatus. Instead, I posit that while predictive coding is a valuable tool for deciphering the conduct of complex systems, living systems do not function as detached computational prognosticators. Given their dual status as operationally closed and open systems, they exist in a state of delicacy, fostering an unbroken and pivotal interplay with their surroundings. This state of affairs, amenable to scientific explication through the FEP, provides a nuanced understanding of cognition within living systems.

On May 4th, 2023 4pm. Centro Carlos Santamaria, Room 1. The talk will be hybrid, to participate remotely contact andrea.gambarotto@uclouvain.be

Abstract: Since its inception in the 1990s, the enactive approach has grown into a vibrant framework for understanding the mind and its entanglement in biological processes, embodiment, agency, sensorimotor interactions, sociality and language, based on an organizational, dynamical, and non-representational approach centred around the concept of autonomy. Yet, despite significant progress, the characteristically human capacity to reason about what do to – a capacity hailed especially by classical approaches to which enaction was proposed as an alternative – remains to be explained in enactive terms. This explanatory lack is pressing not only in view of vindicating enaction as a new paradigm in the cognitive sciences. It is also important because dominant views both in philosophy and cognitive science continue to affirm a conception of practical reasoning which is individualistic and modelled on theoretical reasoning. However, research from various disciplines suggests that both these tendencies stand in the way of an accurate conception of practical reasoning, one that instead begins with a conception of the practical (action) and firmly places this conception in relation to the social nature of reasoning practices. I will argue that the enactive approach is in a promising position to develop a scientifically informed and philosophically illuminating account of practical reasoning which recognizes its essentially practical and social dimension. In particular, the recent enactive proposals of sensorimotor autonomy and agency, on the one hand, and of participatory sense-making and linguistic bodies, on the other, scaffold a rich conceptual space in which to develop an enactive account of practical reasoning. However, many steps towards this lofty goal remain to be taken. In particular, I will point out that what is missing from the enactive toolkit is a conception of practical inference and action explanation and justification. Expanding on enactive and related proposals, I try to sketch how an embodied account of these notions might be developed by attending to how the explanatory structure of action is laid bare and shaped through the dynamics of social interaction. My main aim, however, is not to articulate, but to motivate an enactive approach to practical reasoning, and to bring out some of its challenges and implications, to be addressed in future research.

Abstract. Transness has become a hot topic. The political work of the trans depathologization movement and allies, and trans* activists in other fields, has been accompanied by a growing, yet insufficient legal recognition of trans* people’s rights, and by a proliferation of neuroscientific and neurobiological studies on trans* identities. Following the historical trend of the scientific hunt for brain differences related to sex-gender, sexual orientation, and race, in the last three decades, particular emphasis has been placed on the search for brain differences between trans* and cis people. The idea of the existence of distinctive neurobiological traits of trans* people has social, political, legal, and medical implications. This makes the analysis of neurobiological accounts on trans* identities a relevant and timely task, even more, in this context of the rise of essentialisms, where different conceptions on sex-gender identities are in contention.   

In this talk I rise two claims: 1) The idea of two brain types, the trans brain and the cis brain, is highly problematic. 2) The question regarding embodied trans* identities is a complex one, which cannot be reduced to neurobiological factors, nor to neurobiological causes. In doing so, I critically analyze three main neurobiological theories on trans* identities to date: the neurobiological theory about the origin of gender dysphoria, the neurodevelopmental cortical hypothesis, and the alternative hypothesis of self-referential thinking and body perception. This critical review is carried out considering feminist and trans* neuroscientific, biological, philosophical, and political developments, focusing its attention on three main elements: the issue of (de)pathologization, the idea of the trans brain, and the etiology of trans* identities. Highlighting the differences and convergences among the three hypotheses examined regarding the three main issues at stake, I problematize the depictions of the trans brain departing from the findings and conceptualizations of the paradigm shifting brain mosaicism. I also challenge the biological deterministic framework in which the etiology of trans* identities is inscribed from a dynamic processual entanglement perspective. Finally, I question the complete departure of the neurobiological discourse from a pathologizing framework.     

Abstract: Change is the fundamental idea of evolution. Explaining the extraordinary biological change we see written in the history of genomes and fossil beds is the primary occupation of the evolutionary biologist. Yet it is a surprising fact that for the majority of evolutionary research, we have rarely studied how evolution typically unfolds in nature, in changing ecological environments, over space and time. While ecology played a major role in the eventual acceptance of the population genetic viewpoint of evolution in the synthetic era (circa 1918-1956), it held a lesser role in the development of evolutionary theory until the 1980s, when we began to systematically study the evolutionary dynamics of natural populations in space and time. As a result, early evolutionary theory was initially constructed in an abstract vacuum that was unrepresentative of evolution in nature. The subtle synthesis between ecology with evolutionary biology (eco-evo synthesis) over the past 40 years has progressed our knowledge of natural selection dynamics as they are found in nature, thus revealing how natural selection varies in strength, direction, form, and, more surprisingly, level of biological organization. Natural selection can no longer be reduced to lower levels of biological organization (i.e., individuals, selfish genes) over shorter timescales but should be expanded to include adaptation at higher levels and over longer timescales. Long-term and/or emergent evolutionary phenomena, such as multilevel selection or evolvability, have thus become tenable concepts within an evolutionary biology that embraces ecological and spatiotemporal change. As a result, evolutionary biology is currently suspended at an intermediate stage of scientific progress that calls for the organization of all the recent knowledge revealed by the eco-evo synthesis into a coherent and unified theoretical framework. This is where recent advancements in the philosophy of biology can be of particular use, acting as a bridge between the subdisciplines of biology and inventing new theoretical strategies to organize and accommodate the recent knowledge. Philosophers have recommended transitioning away from outdated philosophies that were originally derived from physics within the philosophical zeitgeist of logical positivism (i.e., monism, reductionism, and monocausation) and toward a distinct philosophy of biology that can capture the natural complexity of multifaceted biological systems within diverse ecosystems—one that embraces the emerging philosophies of pluralism, emergence, and multicausality. Therefore, I see recent advances in ecology, evolutionary biology, and the philosophy of biology as laying the groundwork for another major biological synthesis, what I refer to as the Second Synthesis because, in many respects, it is analogous to the aims and outcomes of the first major biological synthesis (but is notably distinct from the inorganic movement known as the extended evolutionary synthesis). With the general development of a distinctive philosophy of science, biology has rightfully emerged as an autonomous science. Thus, while the first synthesis legitimized biology, the Second Synthesis autonomized biology and afforded biology its own philosophy.

Event is hybrid. To receive event link contact: andrea.gambarotto@gmail.com