Friday November 22 at 13:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 4. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact m.aste.tb2@gmail.com

Abstract: At the origins of life, how did infra-biological systems develop the first mechanisms of regulation and what for? How could they turn into adaptive agents in a minimal (though deeply meaningful) biological sense? A novel simulation platform, ‘Araudia’, has been implemented to address these questions, which are deeply interrelated, in a prebiotic scenario where metabolically diverse protocells are allowed to modify their short-term dynamic behaviour in response to changes in their boundary conditions (e.g., nutrient concentrations in the medium) and/or in the activity of other protocells, including cross-feeding relationships. We extend ‘consumer-resource models’ (CRMs) to a stochastic evolutionary framework in which novelty appears bottom-up (i.e., from small changes at the individual protocell level), and a short-term memory may also develop in the population, to demonstrate that simple adaptive/learning processes can have relevant effects at somatic times (i.e., within the lifetime of single protocells). Our interest in exploring the interplay between metabolic-physiological aspects and ecological-evolutionary ones stems from the fact that it provides a complex causal domain, where various spatial and temporal scales intermingle, and where both the actual and the potential (pathways/behaviours) must be considered. It is in such a complex domain where the appearance of regulation acquires full significance, as an effective means to navigate phenotypic spaces that become too big for unguided exploration, given the large number of possible functionalities (or functional states) accessible to each proto-cellular agent.

Friday October 23 at 13:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 5. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact m.aste.tb2@gmail.com

Abstract: Human sensorimotor agency heavily depends on the use of tools and artifacts. Enactive approaches to cognition have primarily addressed this dependency within the timescale of perception and action, where an agent masters a tool to act. They have characterized tool mastery as the enactment of sensorimotor agency, in which the agent coordinates with, and sometimes assimilates and accommodates the material structures that support such agency. However, enactivists have given less attention to the human-artifact relation on longer timescales: after the action has concluded, both agent and tools persist independently, and any ongoing mutual dependency cannot be understood as skillful tool use by an individual agent. This paper argues that tools and artifacts’ existence depends on collective systems that surpass instances of individual use, and that sustain tools’ functionality and material existence through three processes. First, the processes of teaching, reproducing, refining, and transforming skills necessary for tool mastery in social practices which, I argue, constitute a tool’s functionality. Second, the processes of design and fabrication of tools and artifacts in increasingly specialized ways –a process that Gilbert Simondon identified and labeled as concretization. Third, the processes of entanglement of artifact design and fabrication with broader processes of object production and human life, that create increasingly complex networks of interdependence that are hard to disentangle. These three processes not only sustain the collective systems on which artifacts’ existence depends but also impose material and normative constraints on the sensorimotor agency of individuals participating in a given form of life.

Friday October 11 at 13:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 4. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact m.aste.tb2@gmail.com

Abstract: In origins of life research, there is an ongoing debate about whether it is necessary, possible, or useful, to define life in order to study its emergence. These disagreements often rest on varying views about what a definition amounts to. The various definitions of life depend on the field of study, the specific research programs being pursued, the type of definition (e.g., functional definitions are different from mechanical definitions), and the proponents relationship with the definition (e.g., conclusive definitions versus provisional or heuristic definitions). Getting bogged down on typological details about definitions distracts from the fact that, in any scientific field, robust conceptual assumptions about the object of study are made. In this talk, I argue that scientists cannot carry out research on the emergence of life without making significant assumptions about what life is. Thus, engaging with such an implicit understanding is necessary for a philosophically self-aware practice. I show that origins of life research works under two virtually unanimous assumptions about life. These are: (i) evolution by selection (chemical or natural) is the central driver of the origin of living systems (continuity thesis); (ii) explaining the emergence of a self-regulating system capable of undergoing evolution by natural selection would suffice to explain the origin of life. Taken together, these may be seen as a heuristic definition of life. By way of outlook, I question these assumptions and consider what research programs in origins of life research might be currently barred due to the entrenchment of (i) and (ii).

On the 6th of June IAS-research is organizing two talks at the Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 4. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact
amontf94@gmail.com

15:00 – 17:00 Filipo Bastiti “Epistemologies of complexity on the basis of a discourse analysis of the concept of entropy”

ABSTRACT: Linguistic relativity has known several interpretations over the last century or so, both theoretical and empirical. In its recent history, in fact, it was a particular experimental operationalization – namely, the Neo-Whorfian Renaissance of the 1990s – that rehabilitated its intellectual merits, after decades of academic oblivion. However, the Neo-Whorfian empirical re-reading of linguistic relativity was grounded in cognitivist models of how the mind works and how language relates to mind and behavior.
In the meantime, very different models of the mind were developed, as the post-cognitivist views grew stronger. It seems, though, that they are still far from providing full-fledged all-encompassing accounts of the role of language in human life, let alone the empirical/experimental side of it. An obliteration of linguistic relativity as a research rubric tout court is a possible, albeit undesirable, outcome of this impasse.
This talk reviews the difficulties of translating post-cognitivist tenets into empirical research
programs directed at the study of how languages influence human cognition and agency.

17:00 – 19:00 Arantzazu Saratxaga “Epistemologies of complexity on the basis of a discourse analysis of the concept of entropy”

ABSTRACT: Complexity research is an interdisciplinary study of how order can be generated from multiple interactions between different components, where the number of unpredictable elements is enormous. An epistemology of complexity should then require that the question of cognition be transformed from one of the description of reality and the analysis of the epistemic ordering parameters of this observation.
In this context, the epistemology of complexity aims at a critical analysis of the conditions of observed order/ordering structures of complex processes. This critical question – critical insofar as one deals with the conditions of possibility of the cognition of order structures – is dealt with by means of a discourse analysis of order/disorder and on the basis of the concept of entropy.

Thursday May 23 at 16:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 4.

ABSTRACT: This paper explores the different characterizations and understanding that have been given to ChatGPT and similar generative forms of AI technologies based on transformer architectures for Large Language Models (LLMs). We pay special attention to their characterization as agents. We next explain in detail the architecture, processing and training procedures of GPT to provide a proper understanding of its working. A critical evaluation of LLMs agentive capacities is provided in the light of phenomenological and enactive theories of life and mind. According to this view, ChatGPT fails to meet the individuality criteria (it is not the product of its own activity, it is not even directly affected by it), the normativity criteria (it does not generate its own norms or goals), and, partially the interactional asymmetry criteria (it is not the origin and sustained source of its interaction with the environment), all three required for autonomous agency. We finally discuss the mode of existence of ChatGPT under the light of enactive and embodied  approaches to cognition. We suggest that ChatGPT should be thought of as an interlocutor or linguistic automaton, a library-that-talks, devoid of (autonomous) agency, but capable to engage performatively in non-purposeful yet purpose-structured and purpose-bounded tasks on our digital linguistic environments. Finally, we explore how LLMs hold the expanding potential to deeply transform human agency and digital environments.
KEYWORDS: Transformers, enactivism, agency, LLMs, ChatGPT, philosophy of mind, philosophy of technology, autonomy, automatism.

Thursday May 16 at 16:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 5. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact
amontf94@gmail.com

ABSTRACT: William James (1842-1910) is widely acknowledged for his pioneering role in modern psychology and philosophy. His great influence and popularity have, however, resulted in a complicated legacy, with critics and supporters alike sometimes applying the label “Jamesian” to views that are in tension with the spirit of James’s ideas in their original context. In this talk I examine these tensions and James’s complicated legacy by discussing two cases, one concerning the boundaries of emotion, cognition and perception, and the other concerning the boundaries of habit and mind in intellectual, scientific expertise. Besides motivating a more nuanced appreciation of James’s place in the history of psychology and philosophy, this exercise also reveals the contributions that James’s thought can still make as a source of inspiration and new insights for understanding mind, life, and knowledge.

Thursday May 2 at 18:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria (room to be
announced). The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please
contact amontf94@gmail.com

ABSTRACT: In this seminar I will introduce my conception of ‘minimal autonomous system‘ — which is significantly different from ‘minimal living being‘ — and explain how we have approached its natural emergence, during the last 20 years or so, through the elaboration of both ‘in vitro’ and ‘in silico’ protocell models. I will conclude with a few remarks on the limitations of our approach and the — huge — gap still remaining between those elementary versions of autonomy and full-fledged biological autonomy. 

Thursday April 18 at 16:00 in the Sala de Juntas. The talk will be
hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact amontf94@gmail.com

ABSTRACT: The nutrition sciences aim to identify factors that make a difference for health outcomes and thereby explain how foods impact our health. Some critics have condemned a supposedly excessive reliance on “reductive” explanations and interpretations, and have raised the issue of discordant evidence. This talk builds on two projects. First, distinguishing critiques of “reductionism” enables a constructive defense of those reductions to food components, e.g., macronutrient ratios, which generate integrative explanations. What we call ‘synthetic reductionism’ can help identify the limits of useful reductionism. Second, we consider a broader issue of how the framework researchers use plays an important, and often unacknowledged, role in identifying the causal factor(s) of interest. Focusing on debates around nutritional causes of obesity (e.g., nutrient-based vs. food-based frameworks), we analyze how competing frameworks use distinct principles to select causal factors based on their explanatory and operational relevance, and we show how these selection principles diverge, especially concerning the role of mechanistic evidence. To move forward, we propose a scheme to evaluate the explanatory and practical utility of nutrition frameworks.

Thursday March 14 at 16:00 in the Sala de Juntas. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact amontf94@gmail.com

ABSTRACT

Philosophers of science have grown increasingly worried about the field’s lost opportunities to make an impact in science and society. Many believe that the field’s institutionalization in the mid-twentieth century sidelined social concerns as irrelevant to philosophical theorization about science. This led to a focus on internal debates over philosophical notions within science. To address this, many have advocated for a philosophy of science that is engaged and relevant to both science and society. This is a pressing issue, as the field’s funding from public governments may depend on its ability to make an impact. However, developing an engaged and relevant philosophy of science should force philosophers to ask two interrelated questions. Firstly, what is the methodology of those philosophical projects? In other words, how should they be done? Lastly, what differentiates engaged and relevant philosophy of science projects from other approaches to philosophy of science?

In this seminar, I will address the relationship between both questions. I will first focus on providing an answer to the second question by analyzing engaged and relevant philosophy of science projects and theories via the notion of normativity. The notion of normativity is present in philosophy of science theories when gathering evidence, analyzing/interpreting, and making evaluations/prescriptions about elements of science. Marie Kaiser has recently argued that ‘philosophy of science in practice’ approaches, which rely on scientific evidence for philosophical theorizing, differ from ‘ex-cathedra’ philosophy of science, which proceeds without considering scientific evidence. The differences are made clear by shifts in their normativity about gathering evidence and making evaluative/prescriptive statements about science. I will show that engaged and relevant projects in philosophy of science also present changes in their normativity regarding similar topics. Those changes in normativity help to conform a general methodology for those kinds of projects. Furthermore, I will consider how these normative shifts, which shape the overall methodology of philosophy of science, are influenced by meta-normative considerations regarding the role of philosophy and of the philosophers.

Thursday February 29 at 18:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria (room to be announced). The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact amontf94@gmail.com

ABSTRACT Free-living microorganisms typically display a wide range of physiological and behavioral features, inhabiting very diverse environments where spontaneous mutations and strong selective pressure make rapid adaptation possible. The coexistence of different species and their interactions provide microbial populations with a great variety of properties and functions, broadening the space of possible phenotypes. Nevertheless, biological diversity can also be observed in less open conditions, where populations of genetically similar individuals thrive in much more homogeneous microenvironments, and still demonstrate a surprisingly high phenotypic variability. This phenomenon reflects the importance of individuality within a collective/multicellular context and has been extensively observed in different species and organizational contexts — not only in artificially cultured bacteria but also in more complex cases, like cancer cells grown in tissue. Microbial phenotypic heterogeneity manifests in different ways, including morphological changes, macromolecular composition, different growth rates, reproductive strategies, motility mechanisms or specific metabolic signatures. So far, analyses performed to study this variability have mostly focused on cell growth rates, which are not sufficient to develop a satisfactory (minimally comprehensive) interpretation of phenotypic heterogeneity.
My PhD project, which I will briefly introduce in this session, focuses on the theoretical modelling of microbial metabolisms, with the aim to compensate for this deficit: i.e., expanding the study of phenotypic diversity beyond growth rates, to include the choice of specific metabolic regimes (derived from fluxomics data analysis), which is at the basis of most additional biological processes. On these lines, a preliminary ‘conceptual map’ will be presented, where we distinguish between metabolic plasticity and metabolic heterogeneity, as properties to be ascribed, respectively, to an individual organism and to the population, which may include cross-feeding (ecological) as well as kinship (phylogenetic) relationships. In this context, the distinction between potential and actual (ontogenic, or developmental) plasticity/heterogeneity will be made, as a bridge to connect the issue with the problem of evolvability. It is important to emphasize here that phenotypic heterogeneity is an evolutionary trait and can, in turn, shape the phylogenetic trajectories within a population. Therefore, one of the main aims of my work would be to correlate phenotypic diversity (understood specifically in terms of metabolic plasticity/heterogeneity) with ecological and evolutionary aspects. Through this “eco-evo-meta” perspective, we will try to contribute to a better understanding of the role of individual organisms in the emergence of population phenotypes and its evolutionary implications at the most fundamental biological level: the microbial world.