INTERACTING AGENTS IN NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL ENVIRONMENTS
JOINT WORKSHOP INTERSELF / MAGIC SHOES / PERMANENT SEMINAR OF PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCES
Image by Chris Johanson
Untitled (Figure with black presence), 2002
© Chris Johanson
Adapted by Hugo Simão
October/13-14/2022
Centre for Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (CFCUL) and via Zoom
Join us for an interdisciplinary workshop in the beautiful city of Lisbon and via Zoom to discuss key questions on self-consciousness and social interactions in natural and artificial environments!
This event is a joint endeavor connecting two interdisciplinary projects and the Permanent Seminar on Philosophy of Sciences (PSPC) of the Centre for Philosophy of Sciences, University of Lisbon (CFCUL).
The joint workshop will take place on October 13th-14th 2022 in hybrid format, i.e. in person in Lisbon and via Zoom.
The workshop brings together world-leading scholars and junior researchers from philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, robotics and computational neuroscience, to address the following (non-exhaustive) key questions:
i) what is an interacting agent in natural and artificial environments?
ii) what is the relationship between self-consciousness and social interactions in natural and artificial environments?
iii) what are the mechanisms underpinning multisensory integration of self and world-related information in biological versus artificial agents?
iv) what is the relationship between artificial intelligence and artificial embodiment?
Funding info:
The Interself project (‘The interacting Self: from Self-Consciousness to Social Interactions in Humans and Artificial Agents’) is funded by Fundaçao para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT PTDC/FER-FIL/4802/2020) to Dr Anna Ciaunica and Prof. Antonia Hamilton.
The project It’s a Kind of Magic’: Exploring Multisensory Modulation of the Sense of Self Through Bodily Movements and Action Observation in Depersonalisation and Psychedelic Experiences) funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation and SSNAP Duke University award n° TWCF0384 to Dr Anna Ciaunica (PI), Dr Adam Safron (co-PI), Prof Ana Tajadura Jimenz, Prof Alex Galvez Pol, and Prof Anil Seth.
SPEAKERS
Anna Ciaunica (Centre for Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Antonia Hamilton (Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, The UK)
Angelia Caparco (Centre for Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal)
James Ladyman (Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, The UK)
Malika Auvray (Institute for Intelligent Systems and Robotics, Sorbonne-University, France)
Pedro Neves (Faculty of Science, University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Joe Barnby (Royal Holloway, University of London, The UK)
PROGRAM
October 13th-14th 2022
VENUE
Amphitheatre of FCiências.ID & Online live streamed
Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon
Building C1, Floor 3
Campo Grande, Lisbon
Thursday, October 13th 2022
| Afternoon session | |
| 13:00 – 13:30 | Registration and Opening remarks: Anna Ciaunica |
| 13:30 – 14:30 | Antonia Hamilton: Understanding face2face human social interaction |
| 14:30 – 15:00 | Angelia Caparco: It’s a kind of Magic: Exploring Multisensory Modulation of the Sense of Self through Bodily Movements and Action Observation in Depersonalisation |
| 15:00 – 15:30 | Coffe break |
| 15:30 – 16:00 | Pedro Neves: Modelling cognitive offload and its different purposes |
| 16:00 – 17:00 | Joe Barnby: Formalising social representation to explain psychiatric symptoms |
| 17:00 – 18:00 | Malika Auvray: Taking my perspective or yours? The influence of sensory, interoceptive, and social factors |
Friday, October 14th 2022
| Morning session | Permanent Seminar on Philosophy of Sciences (PSPC) |
| 11:00 – 13:00 | James Ladyman: On the attribution and misattribution of affective and cognitive capacities, and agency to artificial systems |
ABSTRACTS
Antonia Hamilton: Understanding face2face human social interaction
Our most important social interactions are face to face with another person, from a mother playing with her infant to critical political negotiations, we interact better in live face-to-face contexts. This talk will explore the mechanisms of nonverbal behaviour in face-to-face interaction, including head nodding, eye contact and facial gestures. I will describe how researchers can track and quantify these behaviours, and what kinds of experiments are needed to understand the dynamics of social interaction within a cognitive framework.
Angelia Caparco: It’s a kind of Magic: Exploring Multisensory Modulation of the Sense of Self through Bodily Movements and Action Observation in Depersonalisation
In ordinary daily life, subjective experience is characterised by a cohesive sense of self, i.e. the subjective first-personal ‘I’ or ‘self’, bound to the body and distinct from the world and others, and a sense of presence, i.e. the feeling of being immersed in a real-world here and now. In this talk, I will highlight how these fundamental aspects of conscious experience emerge and develop, and how they can be altered in depersonalisation (DP) episodes. DP is characterized by a disturbing change in the quality of subjective conscious experience, which induces alienating feelings of detachment from one’s self, body and the world. These profound alterations of self-awareness impair people’s ability to feel fully present in their lives and to relate to others, causing significant distress and social isolation. Feeling in touch with one’s self and the world may crucially depend on dynamic engagement and reciprocal interactions with our physical and social surroundings. I will conclude by illustrating our interdisciplinary project which will use the ‘Magic Shoes’ device to explore the multisensory modulation of the sense of self and presence through bodily movements and action observation. Making people more aware of their own and others’ bodily movements may counterbalance their feeling of being ‘trapped’ in their heads and increase the feelings of connection with one’s body, the world, and others.
Pedro Neves: Modelling cognitive offload and its different purposes
Living organisms evolved to cope with uncertainty about their environment and the impact of their actions. From this selective pressure resulted complex cognitive processes, such as memory, that would allow living beings to tell apart otherwise undistinguishable stimuli. This would be possible through the integration of sensorimotor information over time, forming internal representations. Nonetheless, both the environment and the agent’s body provide an exploitable structure and context to act appropriately, and some tasks can be solved through solely reactive means. Furthermore, through cognitive offload, an agent may externally encode the necessary information to regulate its behavior, making the environment an even more informative scenario. However, research suggests that when agents with cognitive capabilities, such as humans, employ cognitive offload, internal representations seem to not be formed. It would then appear that cognitive strategies that rely on internal processing and fully embodied reactive strategies represent two alternative solutions. Yet, some results remain unexplained and it has been suggested that encoding the very same information both internally and externally might yield benefit. In this work, by evolving in simulation different types of agents differing in their capacity both to maintain internal representations and deploy cognitive offload, we have set out to understand the relationship these two strategies pose toward one another. Although inconclusive, our results support the idea that internal and external representation interact synergically, leading to increased functionality that could not be achieved with only one type of representation.
Joe Barnby: Formalising social representation to explain psychiatric symptoms
Recent work in social cognition has moved beyond a focus on how people process social reward to examine how healthy people represent other agents and how this is altered in psychiatric disorders. However, formal modelling of social representation has not kept pace with these changes, impeding our understanding of how core aspects of social cognition function, and fail, in psychopathology. In this talk, I argue that belief-based computational models provide a basis for an integrated sociocognitive approach to psychiatry. I review current formal computational theories of social interaction and outline ways in which they have the potential to address important but unexamined pathologies of social representation such as maladaptive schemas and illusory social agents.
Malika Auvray: Taking my perspective or yours? The influence of sensory, interoceptive, and social factors
Information can be perceived from a multiplicity of spatial perspectives, which answer different requirements. On the one hand, adopting a first-person (or egocentred) perspective is crucial to integrating different stimuli across sensory modalities and central for the unity of the self. On the other hand, adopting a third-person (or decentred) perspective is necessary for understanding external space and communicating spatial knowledge with others. How do we juggle these two requirements? The graphesthesia task we developed allows investigating people’s ability to flexibly change spatial perspectives. I will describe the sensory, interoceptive, and social factors that were found to influence spatial perspective taking.
James Ladyman: On the attribution and misattribution of affective and cognitive capacities, and agency to artificial systems
The attribution of affective and cognitive states, and various kinds of agency, to nonhumans is liable to both false positives and false negatives. There are systematic reasons to expect errors of certain kinds. Some of these have to do with our nature or the nature of the technology, and some arise because the technology is developing in the context of massive inequalities of knowledge, power and wealth. Background factors make matters worse, but there are solutions to all these problems. It is possible to imagine very different kinds of AI and ways of implementing it in robots.
ORGANIZERS
Anna Ciaunica (Centre for Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Graziana Russo (Department of Cognitive Sciences, Psychology, Education, and Cultural Studies, University of Messina, Italy)
Angelia Caparco (Centre for Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Silvia Di Marco (Centre for Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Ana Vilar Bravo (Centre for Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal)
João Luís Cordovil (Centre for Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Pedro Neves (Faculty of Science, University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Alberto Colombo (Faculty of Science, University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Giulia Chiosini Hambsch (University of Osnabrueck, Germany)
Madalena Girão (Faculty of Science, University of Lisbon)