PhD Studentship opportunity on Theory and Philosophy of Agency with us!

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If you want to do a PhD with us within the Outagencies project, we have just opened a PhD studentship grant application for a 4-year scholarship. Here is some relevant information:

SUMMARY: Opportunity to join us at the IAS-Research Center for Life, Mind, and Society [https://ias-research.net] at the University of the Basque Country (San Sebastián) for a PhD studentship within the “Outagencies: Varieties of autonomous agency across living, humanimal, and technical systems” project [https://outonomy.net/project-description/]: an interdisciplinary exploration of agency across philosophy, biology, AI, and social sciences. We welcome passionate candidates from any background aligned with our research themes, who bring strong motivation, English proficiency, and a robust academic profile.
Deadline: November 18th, 2024
Pre-submission here: https://forms.gle/AGAHu6osrSUJ4Bxd9
Official submission here: https://www.ehu.eus/es/web/ikerketaren-kudeaketa/-/fpi-2024_upv_ehu
Salary: €19,500-€25,000 annually during 4 years (salary increases every year)
Duration: 4 years starting early 2025
More updated information: https://outonomy.net/?p=335

IAS-research talk by Ben Shirt-Ediss: “Modelling the prebiotic origins of regulation & agency in evolving protocell ecologies”

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.

IAS-research talk by Laura Mojica: “The status of tools and artifacts in enaction: The concrete life of artifacts”

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.

IAS-research seminar by Jules Macome: “Does Origins of Life Research Define 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).

Two IAS-research talks, Filippo Batisti: “The Empirical Study of Linguistic Relativity on Post-Cognitivist Grounds” and Arantzazu Saratxaga “Epistemologies of complexity on the basis of a discourse analysis of the concept of entropy”

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.

Workshop: Varieties of norms

On the 13th of June in 2024, IAS-research is organizing the workshop Varieties of norms.
It lasts from 09.30 – 19.30 with dinner afterwards.
It takes place at the Sala de Juntas, Facultad de Educación, Filosofía y Antropología (HEFA-I), UPV/EHU.
If you plan to attend, please send a quick message to Mirko (mirkoalexander.prokop@ehu.eus) to confirm

Topic
For a long time, philosophers have regarded normative phenomena as belonging chiefly to the social and moral dimension of human thought and action. Today, however, different conceptions of norms and normativity play an increasingly important explanatory role in many disciplines, ranging from cognitive science and biology to comparative psychology and psychiatry. Against the background of recent developments in these fields, the aim of this workshop is to explore the variety in these different conceptions of norms as well as the continuity between them. In which sense are the relevant norms to be understood? Why is recognising their normativity important to explaining certain phenomena? What are the benefits and downsides of acknowledging a variety of different kinds of norms? Is there any fundamental principle underlying the diversity of norms?

Speakers
Miguel Segundo-Ortín, University of Murcia
Enara Garcia, University of Granada
Ezequiel Di Paolo, Ikerbasque / University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)
Laura Mojica, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU)
Tiago Rama, University of the Republic of Uruguay (Udelar)
Matthew Egbert, Te Ao Mārama – Centre for Fundamental Inquiry, University of Auckland

Schedule
09:30 – 10:00 Arrival and Welcome
10:00 – 11:00 Miguel Segundo-Ortín – Rethinking agency in ecological psychology: intentions and how they get shaped
11:00 – 12:00 Enara Garcia – Varieties of normativity and mental health. An enactive approach
12:00 – 12:30 Coffee Break
12:30 – 13:30 Ezequiel Di Paolo – F/acts: ways of enactive worldmaking
13:30 – 15:00 Lunch
15:00 – 16:00 Laura Mojica – Enactive normativity beyond the individual
16:00 – 17:00 Tiago Rama – The differences between physiological and ontogenetic norms and why this is important for evolutionary theory
17:00 – 17:30 Coffee Break
17:30 – 18:30 Matthew Egbert – Adapting to emergent and intrinsic viability limits
20:30 Dinner

IAS-seminar, talk by Charles Wolfe: “Taking the side of things, with a side order of agency: on some ontological aporias of New Materialism”

The Philosophy Master’s Programme: Ciencia, Sociedad, Tecnología is organizing the event ‘Inteligencia Artificial y Materialismos’. As part of this event, IAS is organizing the talk by Charles Wolfe. The event will take place at the Sala de Juntas on Thursday May 30th starting at 11.00

Program:
11:00 Jorge Linares (UNAM) Los desafios de la inteligencia artificial. (Seminario Abierto)
13:00 Cat Moir (University of Sydney) Freudo-Marxist materialism. (Seminario Abierto)
16:00 Charles Wolfe (University of Toulouse) Taking the side of things, with a side order of agency: on some ontological aporias of New Materialism. (IAS-Seminar)

Abstract from Charles Wolfe’s talk:
The theoretical movement known as New Materialism, which emerged in the early 2000s, saw not only the return of ontology, but also the affirmation of a materialism in which all oppositions and contradictions would dissolve. New Materialist trends take the agency of non-humans, as suggested by Haraway and Latour in particular, a step further, and come to regard all the material components of our societies as active agents endowed, to varying degrees, with a form of vitality. (Traditional terms like ‘animism’ and ‘vitalism’ are of limited use here as they seem to confuse the issue further without adding precision.) In this paper I return to what I call the ‘ontologism’ of New Materialism in relation to vital, mechanistic and dialectical forms of materialism, commenting on authors such as Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, and Elizabeth Grosz.

IAS-research talk by Xabier E. Barandiaran and Lola S. Almendros: “Transforming agency: on the mode of existence of Large Language Models”

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.

IAS-research talk by Guilherme Sanches de Oliveira: “William James was not a Jamesian: James’s legacy and the boundaries of mind”

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.

IAS-Research talk by Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo: “Protocell modelling as a way to investigate minimal autonomy”

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.