La patología en la filosofía de la individuación de Gilbert Simondon

Enara García and Iñigo Arandia-Romero (UPV/EHU)

Tuesday 19 November 2019 at 11:30  (Centro Carlos Santamaria, B14)

Language: Spanish

Abstract

En este trabajo, proponemos mirar en la filosofía de la individuación de Gilbert Simondon para ofrecer un entendimiento de lo patológico desde una ontología procesual y relacional que diluye tanto la discontinuidad entre procesos vitales y psíquicos como la dicotomía entre individuo y sociedad. Simondon propone estudiar, no tanto los individuos ya constituidos, sino el proceso de ontogénesis del individuo que, en el caso del ser humano, está mediado por su participación en lo colectivo. En este proceso, la afectividad juega un papel central, ya que atraviesa tanto la individuación vital, como la psíquica y la colectiva, conectando el conjunto de tensiones y potencialidades existentes previas al proceso de individuación (lo pre-individual) con el individuo constituido. Este cambio de perspectiva permite entender la patología, no en términos normativos, sino como el estudio de la dinámica de la afección, con su historia previa y sus posibilidades de evolución, e influyendo también en nuestra comprensión de los procesos terapéuticos.

Autopoiesis in the Game of Life

Manuel Heras-Escribano and Miguel Aguilera (UPV/EHU)

Tuesday 3 December 2019 at 11:30  (Centro Carlos Santamaria, B14)

Abstract

Enactive and Simondonian reflections on placebo phenomena

Iñigo Arandia-Romero (UPV/EHU)

Tuesday 21 January 2019 at 11:30  (Centro Carlos Santamaria, B14)

Abstract

Placebo effects have played a key role in the history of medicine, and they are still nowadays extremely useful as the gold standard to test the efficacy of many treatments through Randomized Control Trials (RCT). Despite its importance, they did not receive much research attention until the last two decades or so, and we are still far from a complete understanding of the phenomena related to the umbrella-term placebo. We will show that part of the problems and limitations to understand the placebo effects is related to theoretical assumptions that are often implicit in the current biomedical paradigm: the mind-body dualism, the predominance of individualism, the reductionist tendency to study isolated factors, and neglecting the dynamic nature of human beings (i.e, their history and evolution process). By taking advantage of the distinction between pre-reflective and reflective consciousness employed in the phenomenological tradition, the theoretical framework of the enactive perspective, and the philosophy of individuation developed by Gilbert Simondon, we will propose a novel way to analyze placebo interventions that overcomes some of the limitations of current approaches, and is able to explain part of the huge variability of placebo responses, across subjects and across conditions. Instead of offering a full account of placebo phenomena, we will provide insights to better analyze different experimental paradigms employed in placebo research considering that each subject is an embodied agent situated in a social environment with concrete problems that can be interpreted as a sense-making challenge or a search for meaning. Then, the placebo intervention can be understood as just the last step that triggers a large response but that would be impossible without the history of the subject, all her previous attempts to cope with her condition in her social context, the patient-practitioner interaction and other features that are often neglected or labelled as non-specific in the placebo literature.

Revisiting the “organism/environment interaction” category

Arantza Etxeberria (UPV/EHU)

Tuesday 12 November 2019 at 11:30  (Centro Carlos Santamaria, B14)

Abstract

The “organism/environment interaction” has been an important category in biomedical sciences since the end of the 19th century. It brings forward the view of the organism as an autonomous biological entity, with an internally controlled and regulated physiology, interacting with an environment providing opportunities and viability constraints for its living activities. It is often remarked that organisms can transform or construct these environments according to their needs (dialectical views of development and evolution; niche construction; technologies), or that they need to accommodate their lives and norms to restricted environments in case of disease. This presentation will introduce work in progress intending to examine and discuss the current scientific role of this category in biomedicine. On the grounds of some conceptual and empirical challenges, proposals tending to privilege deeper interconnectivities will be considered. This research is integrated within the Inter-identity Project (Mineco FFI2014-52173-P Research Project on Identities in interaction).

Motility Control of Symbionts and Organelles by the Eukaryotic Cell

Guglielmo Militello

Tuesday 29 at 11:30 (Centro Carlos Santamaria B14)

Motility occupies a decisive role in an organism’s ability to autonomously interact with its environment. However, collective biological organizations exhibit individual parts, which have temporally or definitively lost their motor capacities, but still able to autonomously interact with their host. Indeed, although the flagella of bacterial symbionts of eukaryotic cells are usually inhibited or lost, they autonomously modify the environment provided by their host. Furthermore, the eukaryotic organelles of endosymbiotic origin (i.e., mitochondria and plastids) are no longer able to move autonomously; nonetheless, they make a cytoskeletal-driven motion that allows them to communicate with other eukaryotic cells and to perform a considerable number of physiological functions. The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to investigate how changes in the motile capacities of the parts of a nested biological organization affect their interactive autonomy; second, to examine how the modification of the interactive autonomy of the individual parts influences the constitutive autonomy of the collective association as a whole. The article argues that the emergence and maintenance of collective biological identities involves a strict control of the motile abilities of their constituting members. This entails a restriction, but not necessarily a complete loss, of the agential capacities of the individual parts.

Date and time: April 9th, Tuesday, 11:30 a.m.

Location: Carlos Santamaría Building, Room B14.

Speaker: Iñigo Arandia (UPV/EHU)

Title: “Epistemic entanglement in the macroscopic world”

Abstract

Scientific non-reductionism emphasizes that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Beyond metaphor, such holistic idea can be made concrete (namely, mathematically formulated and empirically testable) via the notion of entanglement, which is a foundational concept and an established phenomenon in quantum mechanics related to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (a fundamental limit to the precision of simultaneously measuring two complementary variables, like the position and momentum of an electron, which is not a consequence of experimental limitations). Here we present a classical analog of entanglement, where uncertainty relations arise from experimental commitments, like the selection of variables and/or subsystems, or ignorance about the context. Inspired by a theoretical work offering a definition of entanglement in a model of macroscopic brownian particles (Allahverdyan et al., 2005), we propose a general sufficient condition for epistemic entanglement that is valid for any underlying dynamics and any pair of macroscopic stochastic observables. Our bound reflects a trade-off between inter-vs-intra particle correlations, and only requires estimating dispersions. This makes it empirically accessible and also somewhat intuitive. We explored the origin of epistemic entanglement by taking advantage of analytical results available in brownian models and simulations of stochastic systems. Then, we applied our sufficient condition to behavioral data of fly courtship, and found entanglement between position and coarse-grained velocity. This result implies the existence of macroscopic correlations that cannot be effectively explained in causal terms, thus limiting the common cause principle. Our work also challenges the idea of pure objectivity, as our choice of measurement variables induced epistemic correlations that cannot be adjudicated to the observed system but that, through coarse-graining, belong to the observer.