BORN OR MADE?
DEVELOPING HUMAN AND ARTIFICIAL SELVES
June/17/ 2022
Centre for Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon
Join us for an interdisciplinary hybrid workshop in the beautiful city of Lisbon and via Zoom to discuss key questions on self-consciousness and social interactions in humans and artificial agents!
The First Workshop of the interdisciplinary project ‘The Interacting Self: from Self-Consciousness to Social Interactions in Humans and Artificial Agents’ will take place on June 17th 2022 in Lisbon!
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:
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- What are the basic or minimal “ingredients” of a human and artificial self
- What are its conceptual, behavioral, neural and computational components and how these components sustain the foundation of a human and artificial self?
- What are the fundamental (dis)similarities between human and artificial selves and bodies?
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.
SPEAKERS
Anna Ciaunica (Centre for Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal / Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, The UK)
Andy Clark (University of Sussex, The UK)
Pablo Lanillos (Radboud University, The Netherlands)
Graziana Russo (Department of Cognitive Sciences, Psychology, Education, and Cultural Studies, University of Messina, Italy)
Katerina Stepanova (School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada)
Paula Wicher (Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, The UK)
PROGRAM
| Morning session | |
| 09:30 – 10:20 | Registration |
| 10:20 – 10:30 | Opening remarks: Anna Ciaunica |
| 10:30 – 11:30 | Andy Clark: Cyborg Minds: Humans as Bio-Technological Hybrids |
| 11:30 – 12:30 | Anna Ciaunica: From Cells to Selves: Developing self-awareness in Human and Artificial Agents |
| 12:30 – 15:00 | Lunch break |
| Afternoon session | |
| 15:00 – 15:30 | Graziana Russo: Participatory time-making: the co-embodied relational roots of time experience in humans |
| 15:30 – 16:00 | Paula Wicher: Following your Art: Why do we copy other people’s artistic choices? |
| 16:00 – 16:30 | Coffee Break |
| 16:30 – 17:30 | Pablo Lanillos: Robots do not have a self, yet |
| 17:30 – 18:00 | Katerina Stepanova: Transcending Fluid Boundaries of Virtual Bodies to Mediate Selves and Others through Abstract Body Ownership in Virtual Reality |
ABSTRACTS
Anna Ciaunica: From Cells to Selves: Developing self-awareness in Human and Artificial Agents.
In this talk I will defend the idea that one potentially fruitful way to address the perennial question ‘What self-consciousness is?’ is to first address the question ‘How self-consciousness emerges and develops from the outset?’ Namely: how cells transform into selves. I will highlight the deeply biological roots of bodily self-awareness in humans and discuss potential implications for the development and implementation of self-awareness in artificial agents.
Andy Clark: Cyborg Minds: Humans as Bio-Technological Hybrids.
In this talk, I defend the claim that human minds are already ‘cyborg minds’ – organs of thought and reason whose components include both natural and artificial parts and whose boundaries are not always those of skin and skull. This matters for the way we think about brain damage sufferers who may lean heavily on the use of assistive technologies such as smartphones. But it also matters for understanding ourselves – for we too are hybrid minds, built of both biological and non-biological parts. As we enter an age of increasingly widespread human enhancement, it is important to ask: where does the human mind, and the human being, stop and the rest of the world begin?
Pablo Lanillos: Robots do not have a self, yet.
While we are starting to be able to build coherent ‘unconscious’ sensorimotor computational models, we are still lost in translation when it comes to self-awareness and any type of reflective skill. In this talk, I will explain why robots, and artificial agents, do not have a self. Yet, I will detail how we can deploy predictive processing models into real robots and compare them with human experiments related to body perception and action, settling the basis for synthetic awareness. I will finalize by pinpointing some ideas that we are investigating to develop self-aware robots and machines with agency, and why this may be a gamechanger in embodied artificial intelligence.
Graziana Russo: Participatory time-making: the co-embodied relational roots of time experience in humans.
This talk considers the phenomenology of time-consciousness in relation to its embodied and biological nature. As living beings, our organic processes are initially tied to the rhythms of rotation and revolution of our planet. The body’s interoceptive, proprioceptive, and kinetic states reflect its homeostatic needs, which must always be attuned to the rhythmically changing environmental contingencies. Keeping track of the body’s inner clock – e.g., circadian rhythms, breathing, heartbeat, metabolic processes – is indeed crucial for survival and defines the way individuals perceive their bodies in time and space. Time-consciousness is a key component of all bodily experiences, which are always spatiotemporally situated and modulated by biologically salient rhythms. The sense of time emerges from the body’s homeostatic necessity to be an attunement seeker. Therefore, looking at the biological constraints of time-consciousness leads to understanding its relational nature, showing that its bedrock is the organism and environment interdependency. Here, we remark that our sense of time is structured not only by the homeostatic relationship between the individual body and the environment but also by how we relate to the bodies of others. We suggest that the first and most primitive sense of time in humans is already shared. It reflects visceral-affective attunement and co-rhythmicity between bodies situated in a shared and homeostatically meaningful environment. Consequently, we propose the notion of participatory time-making to outline the co-embodied relational basis of time-consciousness. This may help us go beyond the received dichotomy between subjective/private time and objective/public time.
Katerina Stepanova: Transcending Fluid Boundaries of Virtual Bodies to Mediate Selves and Others through Abstract Body Ownership in Virtual Reality.
Our social interactions are fundamentally embodied as we experience the world through our indispensable bodies and meet others as their bodies. Our sense of social connection is rooted in the relation between our bodies. Intriguingly, we can suppose that the same mechanisms involved in the formation of our sense of self as emerging from our body, such as multi-sensory integration and representation matching of body image, could also apply to other bodies, consequently blurring the self-other distinction. We feel more connected to others that look or move more like us. This hypothesis could be explored by meditating this relationship in virtual reality (VR) that could provide us with virtual bodies different from our own, yet possible for us to embody.
Body RemiXer is a VR art installation that explores how we can mediate our embodied social interactions and cultivate a sense of connection among strangers. In Body RemiXer immersants’ bodies are transformed into abstract virtual auras comprised of light particles. They see others surrounding them as these virtual auras obscuring identifiable features and highlighting our shared unity. When immersants reach over and touch others’ hands their bodies become connected, exchanging particles between them or overlaying on top of each others’ bodies. This interaction triggered through social touch perceptually blurs the self-other boundary. The soundscape encourages immersants to synchronize their movement by playing a drum sound when their postures are matched. A phenomenological study with Body RemiXer has begun to unveil the nuances and complexities of embodiment of virtual abstract bodies in a social setting, as well as the potential of such art installations to foster connection with others by mediating bodies.
Paula Wicher: Following your Art: Why do we copy other people’s artistic choices?
In this talk I will present recent results from an online and in-lab study on the social consequences of copying art choices vs hand movements with human confederates and I will discuss future project directions focused on the interactions between humans and artificial agents in the context of social mimicry.
ORGANISERS
Anna Ciaunica (Centre for Philosophy of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal / Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, The UK)
Graziana Russo (Department of Cognitive Sciences, Psychology, Education, and Cultural Studies, University of Messina, Italy)
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)