Friday, May 16 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

In this talk, I examine the various ways in which researchers have thought about the continuity of life and non-life in the context of the origin of life. Specifically, we look at the role that continuity thinking has played in shaping and legitimizing origins of life research as a scientific field during the 20th century. We show there was a shift in continuity thinking in the middle of the 20th century. While the purpose of the principle of continuity during the first half was to oppose vitalism, its purpose in the second half was to oppose miraculism – the idea that the origin of life was so improbable that it was akin to a miracle. This shift is reflected in the views which challenged scientific research into the origins of life in each respective period. Despite this change, the notion of continuity continued to serve a legitimizing role in origins of life research: it turned the origin of life from an inscrutable mystery to a scientifically legitimate problem. We argue that the shift had two sources, the perceived obsoletism of vitalism and the introduction of the stepwise, chemical, and experimental approach that came to dominate origins of life research.

Friday, May 9 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

Legal philosophers have historically debated whether the interpretation of written statutes should pay closer attention to a law’s literal meaning or to the purpose that gave rise to its enactment. In this talk, I review various strands of empirical evidence that offer an emerging picture of the cognitive science of legal interpretation. These studies demonstrate that, across cultures, people vary widely in their tendency to favor a rule’s letter over its spirit when asked to apply written rules, and experience cognitive conflict when textualist and purposivist interpretations are incongruent. Evidence from speeded response paradigms and incentivized economic games suggests that the prevailing tendency toward textualism arises as judges resolve this cognitive conflict: specifically, by overriding the intuitive tendency to consult their personal moral values in order to arrive at a coordinated interpretation that matches that of other legal officials and society at large.

Friday, March 14 at 13:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 3. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact m.aste.tb2@gmail.com

Over the decades, organismalism has received little historical consideration. Recently, this trend has been inverted, sparking an explosion of organismal studies. However, the latter have been prone to a central limitation: their exclusive and all-engulfing emphasis on synthesizing and analyzing the particularities of specific biological principles. Admittedly, several valuable historical studies have amended this bias, revealing that organismalism was a bio-theoretical and not exclusively biological movement. In this talk, I will elaborate on these ideas by shedding light on the connections between organismalism and pragmatism. I will argue that there is a common thread linking them that revolves around the idea of “experience”. This concept allowed the latter to articulate their respective biological and philosophical intuitions, positioning themselves as “third ways” to mechanicism/vitalism and realism/idealism, respectively. I will illustrate how this concept was gradually shaped through cross-pollination between particular proto-organismal (E. D. Montgomery and J. S. Haldane) and pragmatist authors (J. Dewey).

Friday, February 28 at 13:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 3. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact m.aste.tb2@gmail.com

The research programme ‘basal cognition’ adopts an evolutionary perspective for studying biological cognition. This entails investigating possible cognitive processes in ‘simple’–often non-neuronal–organisms as a means to discover conserved mechanisms and adaptive capacities underwriting cognition in more complex (neuronal) organisms. However, by pulling in the opposite direction of a tradition that views cognition as something that is unique to neuronal organisms, basal cognition has been met with a fair amount of scepticism by philosophers and scientists. The very idea of approaching cognition by way of investigating the behaviour and underlying mechanisms in, say, bacteria, has been seen as preposterous and harmful to both cognitive science and biology. This paper aims to temper such scepticism to a certain degree by drawing parallels with how the evolution of ‘development,’ another loaded concept that refers to a not-so-easily definable, contested bundle of phenomena, has been fruitfully approached in Evolutionary Developmental Biology (Evo-Devo). Through this comparison, we identify four promising features of the basal cognition approach. These features suggest that sweeping scepticism may be unwarranted. However, each of them comes with important epistemic cautionary notes that should not be disregarded. By presenting these twofold considerations as potential ways to integrate a fully evolutionary perspective into basal cognition, this paper seeks to provide clarity and direction for the advancement of this research programme.

Friday, February 14 at 13:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 3 (mind the change in the habitual room). The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact m.aste.tb2@gmail.com

The aim of this work is to re-examine the organisational conception of teleology, in light of what I call the biological organisation’s plasticity, i.e., its capacity to change its conditions of existence as a teleological self-determining entity. The work is structured in two parts. I start by detecting a tension between two co-existing tendencies within the organisational approach (OA). One sees organisms as having one goal, or telos, namely existence, often cast as self-maintenance or maintenance of viability. The other sees organisms as having no telos, but multiple internally defined goals, i.e., their actual conditions of existence, whereby ‘conditions’ are both descriptive and normative. I take these two tendencies to be respectively the OA ‘metaphysical’ stance on living beings (in a ‘Kantian’ sense), and the model-theoretic operationalisation of such stance. While connected, the two tendencies bear implications for how we understand the organisation’s plasticity. In the first case, regulation changes the means to achieve the same telos, thus change is goal-directed (the end counterfactually determines its means). In the second, goals themselves change, but this change is not goal-directed (there is no ‘higher’ telos beyond present conditions). Afterwards, I propose to consider more closely the relationship between teleology and plasticity, to possibly conciliate these two perspectives. Here I take plasticity as the organisation’s capacity to accommodate external or internal inputs by exploring new configurations. On the one hand, “when the end modifies its means” (Moczeck 2022), plasticity keeps the organisation viable. However, ends, seen as a ‘benchmark’ for regulated change (Nicoglou 2024), also underdetermine their means. I suggest that when viability is multiply realisable, the determination of its realisability need not be goal-oriented, introducing a non-teleological dimension to self-determination beyond simply self-maintenance.

Friday, January 31 at 14:00 (mind the change in the habitual meeting time) in Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 4. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact m.aste.tb2@gmail.com

Abstract: References to what is good for the planet or harmful for the planet are ubiquitous in current discourse. However, it is generally unclear whether this attribution of normativity to our planet should be understood metaphorically, metonymically, or literally. Based on an understanding of the Earth as an interconnected, self-sustaining system, we claim that, indeed, different states of the Earth system can be considered “better” or “worse” relative to the organisation of the system as a whole.
To show this, first we identify the recent Quaternary period as a good state of the Earth system, based on three interrelated dimensions: (1) a cooler climate with enhanced thermodynamic capacity, which enables the Earth system to perform more work; (2) a slower, endogenous pacing of climate variation and (3) an increased biological complexity which culminates in the emergence of unprecedented capacities, such as symbolic reasoning and technological agency – which we take as a sign of the maturity of the system but whose role in planetary wellbeing is today an open, practical question.
Based on these three dimensions, we work towards a definition of Earthly well-being, which refers to the degree of autonomy of the planetary system, understood as its ability to perform work, self-regulate, and do things.
The current climatic crisis and the destabilization of planetary tipping points risk moving the system out of the boundaries of the Quaternary period. An organisational account of planetary (mal)function needs to refer both to the integrity of this particular climatic-geological regime and to the increased planetary autonomy that it sustains.

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.