Cognitive Science

L’erranza di Rinaldo, il suo divergere rispetto alla traiettoria epica, e poi la redenzione e la riconquista del proprio ruolo, costituiscono una delle direttrici principali della Gerusalemme Liberata, determinandone la dinamica narrativa fatta di spinte centrifughe e tendenze ricompositive.
Il Bildungsroman di Rinaldo è stato variamente interpretato dalla critica, che ne ha messo in luce la densità metaforica, e la funzione di mise en abyme tanto della struttura del poema, quanto delle sue tensioni poetiche e ideologiche. Le letture psicoanalitiche, in particolare, hanno individuato nel risveglio di Rinaldo, soggiogato e infantilizzato dalla maga Armida e quindi messo da Carlo e Ubaldo di fronte all’immagine della propria degradazione, una rappresentazione della costruzione del sé, della fissazione del soggetto attraverso quella che Lacan definisce la “fase dello specchio”.
Scopo della mia proposta è approfondire e integrare questa interpretazione cercando di individuare nella rinascita di Rinaldo un evento analogo a ciò che il neurologo Antonio Damasio chiama “processo del sé”, attraverso il quale la mente diventa cosciente della propria presenza cognitivo-corporea nel mondo. La coscienza autoriflessiva emerge nel momento in cui il cervello riconosce le modificazioni emotive dell’organismo e le collega attribuendole a un unico “sé”. Il sé nasce quando i meccanismi cerebrali si specchiano nel proprio funzionamento, e poi nello stesso funzionamento riconosciuto all’esterno, nelle manifestazioni delle menti altrui.
La rinascita dell’eroe, dunque, la sua rigenerazione, è una messa in forma, una stilizzazione letteraria, dei processi di formazione della coscienza. Specchiandosi nello scudo Rinaldo non solo rinasce metaforicamente e spiritualmente, ma letteralmente rivive l’esperienza biologica e cognitiva del formarsi della coscienza.

Cognition, Communication and Interaction is an edited collection of articles that examine the theoretical and methodological
research issues that underlie the design and use of interactive technology. Present interactive designs are addressing the multi-modality of human interaction and the multi-sensory dimension of how we engage with each other. This book aims to provide
a trans-disciplinary research framework and methodology for interaction design. The analysis directs attention to three human capacities that our engagement with interactive technology has made salient and open to constant redefinition. These capacities are human cognition, communication and interaction.
In this book examination of these capacities is embedded in understanding the following foundations for design: concepts of “communication and interaction” and their application (Part 1); conceptions of “knowledge and cognition” (Part 2); the role of
aesthetics and ethics in design (Part 3).

There have been two basic assumptions long held in the traditional view of cognitive processing in the human brain: firstly, cognitive processes are exclusively functions of the cerebral cortex, and secondly, the cerebral cortex is divided into discrete areas or “centers” of cognitive functioning. This traditional orientation toward cognitive processing in the human brain has created a conceptual paradigm that has driven the direction of research and interpretation of the nature of cognition and neurophysiological mechanisms in the brain that has had a profound effect on contemporary ideas of the relationship between brain and behavior and the understanding and treatment of cognitive and behavioral disorders.

Two streams of research have contributed to the concept of localization of cognitive function in the cerebral cortex: 1) brain lesion studies, and 2) fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) of cognitive function localization in the brain. This paper is an analytical summary of brain lesion studies correlated with dissonances in the conceptual premises and technological limitations in both the design and interpretation of fMRI studies of cognitive function localization.

There is a perception that the substantial data from psi (a.k.a. ESP, anomalous cognition) research is indicative of support for a dualistic worldview. In this paper, we present an overview of this perspective as discussed in the works of John Beloff, Charles Tart, David Rousseau, Ed Kelly, and Larry Dossey. Following this, we discuss the refutation of the dualist view from the point of (1) the definition of non-material, and provide a possible definition of non-material, and (2) the role of consciousness in quantum mechanics. We conclude that these criteria are sufficient to reject a dualist perspec-tive in the analysis of psi data, until the validity of all possible physicalist-reductionist views have been exhausted. In our analysis, the next question guiding a psi research programme is how psi occurs and what its mechanics are.

Swarm intelligence is the production of generative social space, the agency to “create and open spaces into which existing knowledge can extend, interrelate, coexist, and where new ideas and relationships can emerge prosthetically.” Swarm intelligence is argued to be a liminal, proximal, and distal zone of collective human development wherein memories and experience are made “prosthetic” in both the verb and noun sense of the word—that is, as an adaptive and potentially pedagogical capacity enabling the assimilation of supplemental patterns of behavior and thought, as well as the accommodation of the extant social archaeologies and emerging architectures that might further constitute our identities.

TESIS DOCTORAL
Adolfo Vásquez Rocca
Dossier
PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATÓLICA DE VALPARAÍSO
FACULTAD DE FILOSOFÍA Y EDUCACIÓN
INSTITUTO DE FILOSOFIA PUCV
TESIS DOCTORAL
"EL GIRO ESTÉTICO DE LA EPISTEMOLOGÍA. NUEVAS RETÓRICAS DE LA POSMODERNIDAD".
Adolfo Vásquez Rocca.
Profesor Guía:
Hugo Renato Ochoa Disselkoen
2 0 0 4
Calificación SOBRESALIENTE
Summa cum laude
Convalidada
Proyecto Postdoctoral
Dr. Jacobo Muñoz Veiga
Facultad de Filosofía
Departamento de Filosofía IV
UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID

The task of engineering artificial moral agents (AMAs) has been quickly gaining in importance and urgency, given the steeply increasing demand for and proposals of autonomous services and agents interacting with people. Researchers in the field of machine ethics have begun to develop dedicated strategies for engineering AMAs in a broad variety of scenarios.

As Wendell Wallach [1] notes, this task requires understanding of human moral decision-making, since humans are the only reference in this domain. A significant challenge is constituted by the limited understanding of functions of cognitive mechanisms underlying moral decision-making. In fact, there is even no agreement over the most fundamental questions regarding: the defining criteria for moral decisions (What makes a decision a moral one?); the defining set of cognitive processes for making a moral decision (Which are necessary and sufficient?); and the problem of evaluating moral decisions (What performance measures for AMAs?).

Instead, much effort has been concerned with premature proposals for engineering AMAs grounded in deficient assumptions regarding the processes of moral decision-making, with many of the issues discussed in fact being due to fundamental flaws in the approaches. Still, next to these impasses and frequent focus on irrelevant or secondary issues there do exist serious attempts to identify principled minimal sets of core components that make up moral faculty [2], a key milestone to enable subsequent research on how to instantiate and integrate them within a working AMA architecture.

I argue that improved understanding of the functional role of morality at the computational theory level as proposed by DeScioli and Kurzban [3] is a priority for progress with building AMAs. A sound conception of the role of moral cognition and its components is required for engineers to be instructed with the specific purposes that their models of moral cognition are to serve and design systems fitting such purposes.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Paolo Petta for supervising this project.

References
[1] W. Wallach, "Robot minds and human ethics: The need for a comprehensive model of moral decision making", Ethics and Information Technology, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 243-250, Jul. 2010.
[2] B. Malle and M. Scheutz, "Moral competence in social robots", 2014 IEEE International Symposium on Ethics in Science, Technology and Engineering, Curran Associates, Inc., Red Hook, NY, USA. 2014.
[3] P. DeScioli and R. Kurzban, "Mysteries of morality", Cognition, vol. 112, no. 2, pp. 281-299, Aug. 2009.

The main purpose of this paper is show that an intensional object is cognitively equivalent to an extensional objet; that also mean that a particular kind of language or a fragment of it –a sentence- is able to be intertranslated from an informational-cognitive point of view to a particular kind of spatial structure. Both languages and spaces are interrelated in different planes of complexity-abstraction: in chapter 2 we will see how logics are close to topological realities as well as in chapter 3 how natural languages is related to manifold structures. All of this serve to the goal of create a theory of cognitive types that connect in several orders the space with the language, the extensional with the intensional.

The notion of representation is well-defined within the traditional computational theory of mind. However, in the relatively novel theory of situated cognition this is not the case. The focus of this thesis is on the nature of representation in situated systems, i.e., situated representation. In the first chapter, the problem concerning situated representation is outlined. The chapter indicates that the cognitive sciences are in need of an operationalisation of the notion of situated representation. To investigate a possible realisation of such an operationalisation the following problem statement is formulated: What is the nature of representation in situated systems? Subsequently, two research questions are formulated to investigate the problem statement: (i) to what extent can we identify where the knowledge resides that is used by a situated system to solve a certain task? and (ii) how is this knowledge accessed and used by a situated system when solving a certain task? Furthermore, in this chapter, the methodology of our investigation is described in terms of five conditions for models of cognition (situatedness, embodiment, cognition, parsimony, and transparency) and a short outline of the three models applied in the thesis (a robot model of active categorical perception, a robot model of the Tower of London task, and a robot model of foraging) is given. The second chapter provides background information. It elaborates on representation issues in situated systems and on the two types of representation that such systems use, internal representation and external representation. This elaboration guides the empirical study of situated representation in artificial systems in the third, fourth, and fifth chapter. In the third chapter, the behaviour of robots in a simple model of active categorical perception is examined. The effective sensorimotor mapping of optimised situated robots clarifies the notion of situated representation. The model provides a unique opportunity to study situated representations, because the perceptual ambiguity in the model forces successful situated robots to represent adequately the information they need to perform a given task. The findings obtained by employing the active categorical perception model and the subsequent analyses leads us to four conclusions: (i) reactive robots can cope with perceptual ambiguity in the context of active categorical perception, (ii) reactive robots can organise their behaviour according to sensory stimuli that are no longer present using the environment as an external memory, (iii) reactive robots incorporating a non-linear sensorimotor mapping are better capable of dealing with perceptual ambiguity in an active categorical perception task than those incorporating a linear mapping, and (iv) sensory state-transition diagrams provide insight into the behavioural strategies employed by reactive robots to deal with perceptual ambiguity and their use of the environment as an external memory. Moreover, the findings obtained by employing the active categorical perception model and the subsequent analysis demonstrate that representation in situated systems can be internal and / or external. This indicates that the operationalisation of the notion of situated representation should allow internal representation and external representation. The fourth chapter studies the nature of internal representation. Internal representation is often associated with planning in symbol manipulation tasks. In order to study the nature of internal representation, in this chapter we investigate representation in a situated robot model of a typical planning task that requires symbol manipulation, the Tower of London task. The results obtained with the situated Tower of London model and the subsequent analyses leads us to conclude that the ability to perform (situated) symbol manipulation by internal simulation of perception and behaviour allows the robot to plan ahead in time. Our second conclusion is that representation of both the current and future states of the environment occurs through the mapping of sensor-array activations to actions. For the current state the activation is received from the environment and for the future state the activation is received from the internally generated expected state. The two conclusions indicate that in order to operationalise situated internal representation, the operationalisation should allow internal simulation of perception and behaviour. The fifth chapter studies the nature of external representation of a situated robot performing a foraging task in a stochastic environment. In order to investigate how the externally represented knowledge is accessed and used by the situated robot, we analyse the robot-environment interaction in the situated model of foraging by two different types of analysis (microscopic and macroscopic). The analyses of the results obtained with the situated model of foraging lead us to three conclusions: (i) macroscopic analysis may predict a universal property that can be explained at the microscopic level by microscopic analysis, (ii) macroscopic analysis may complement microscopic analysis in the study of adaptive behaviour, and (iii) macroscopic analysis may be preferred over microscopic analysis, owing to its power to reveal universal properties. Moreover, the experiment with the situated model of foraging and both the analyses show that external representation may reside in the average properties of the interaction with the environment. Robots in the model of foraging do not represent individual food elements (or their physical locations) by element-speciffic interaction, but represent the uniform distribution of those food elements in their average interaction with the environment. These findings indicate that in order to incorporate external representation into the operationalisation of the notion of situated representation, the operationalisation should allow representation by the average interaction with the environment. The sixth chapter combines the results of the three investigations reported in the preceding chapters. On the basis of these investigations we formulate a new operationalisation of the notion of representation. The new operationalisation holds that for an entity to be adequately represented by a system, it is implied that the system is able to perform and / or simulate internally the entity-speciffic interaction with the environment. Four advantages of the new operationalisation over its non-situated counterpart are discussed, these advantages concern: (i) external representation and internal representation, (ii) the representation debate, (iii) situated accounts of cognition and awareness, and (iv) the symbol-grounding problem. Thereafter, the two operationalisations are compared to each other, from which we arrive at the conclusion that the operationalisation of non-situated representation should be replaced by the new operationalisation. Furthermore, in this chapter, a discussion on the possible implications of the new operationalisation indicates that the new operationalisation may have implications for the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. In the seventh chapter we answer the research questions formulated in the first chapter by stating that: (1) we can identify where the knowledge resides that is used by a situated system to solve a certain task to the extent that we can reveal the coordination between the sensory and motor system(s) of a system and relate it to the environmental dynamics, and (2) the knowledge which a situated system uses to solve a certain task is accessed and used by: (i) exploiting the attractors in the interaction with the environment (chapter 3), (ii) simulating interaction with the environment internally (chapter 4), and (iii) exploiting the average properties of the interaction with the environment (chap- ter 5). Furthermore, in the seventh chapter, we answer the problem statement formulated in the first chapter by stating that in emphasising the role of interaction for cognition in the theory of situated cognition the operationalisation of situated representation is essential. We conclude by stating that, in a situated system, representation is as strongly rooted in the environment as in the system itself. In other words, we conclude that representation is situated in nature.

RESUMEN
El presente artículo se propone dar cuenta del elusivo fenómeno de la conciencia desde la original perspectiva de la neurofenomenología de Francisco Varela, quien a partir de nociones tales como neuroplasticidad, enacción y emergencia, explica, cómo ocurren los procesos cerebrales que fundan la conciencia y la “unidad” de la vivencia. Describiendo como la conciencia aparece en el vivir encarnado: en la regulación con el cuerpo entero; en sus relaciones sensorio-motoras con el mundo y en una red ínter-subjetiva de acciones y de lenguaje.
Dr. Adolfo Vásquez Rocca
Keywords:  Neurociencias, ciencias cognitivas, ética, yo, cuerpo, neuroplasticidad, enacción, acciones corporeizadas,  biología cultural,  saber-cómo.
Neuroscience, cognitive science, ethics, self, body, neuroplasticity, enaction, actions embodied experiences, cultural biology,  know-how.
-Francisco Varela: neurophenomenology, enactive approach to cognition, minds without me and the elusive phenomenon of consciousness.
DR. ADOLFO VÁSQUEZ ROCCA

Pessoa’s (2013) arguments imply that various leading approaches in the social sciences have not adequately conceptualized how emotion and cognition influence human decision making and social behavior. This is particularly unfortunate, as these approaches have been central to the efforts to build bridges between neuroscience and the social sciences. We argue that it would be better to base these efforts on other social theories that appear more compatible with Pessoa’s analysis of the brain.