Miguel Segundo-Ortín & Vicente Raja (Murcia): The ecological self-organization of agency

Tuesday December 10 2024 @11:30 (CET)
Sala B, Edificio de Humanidades, UNED & online

Abstract
The role of soft-assembly, criticality, and interaction-dominance at different spatial-temporal scales of cognitive systems has the potential of shedding light into philosophical debates regarding agency. From a radical embodied point of view, agency will not depend on computational capacities or the mental representation of reasons and goals. On the contrary, agency will be understood as a fundamental feature of the self-organization of cognitive systems in their environments. Gathering tools from ecological psychology and the sciences of complexity, we explore (i) the multiscale character of the dynamical self-organization of cognitive systems, (ii) the formation and development of intentions, and (iii) the role of environmental constraints in agential processes.

Bio
Miguel Segundo-Ortín is a Ramón y Cajal Research Fellow at Universidad de Murcia (Spain) and the Minimal Intelligence Lab (MINT Lab). He specializes in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences, with a special emphasis on ecological (neo-Gibsonian) psychology and other embodied theories of cognition. His current research focuses on developing an embodied approach to comparative cognition and studying how socio-cultural norms shape and mold human minds.

Vicente Raja is a research fellow at University of Murcia, Spain, and an external associate faculty member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy (Western University, Canada). His main field of research is the history and philosophy of cognitive science and neuroscience. An important part of his theoretical and experimental work revolves around different ideas on how to apply the insights of radical embodiment to the sciences of the brain. He is also interested in the history of psychology and in plant behavior.