Joel Krueger

If loneliness is a psychological state experienced by subjects, what does it mean to speak of things and places as exuding lonely atmospheres? In previous work (Osler et al. 2026), we argued that spaces seem lonely when they present “obsolete affordances”: action possibilities that remain unrealised due to material decay or an absence of human uptake. Here, we extend this framework to the digital realm. We argue that lonely atmospheres generated by dead game worlds, abandoned discussion forums, and forgotten websites similarly arise via their obsolete affordances. We show that digital obsolescence presents a unique phenomenological profile: unlike material ruins, which can be physically repurposed or reclaimed by nature, abandoned digital environments cannot. Through a series of case studies, we unpack the character of digital affordances, their experienced obsolescence, and show how this analysis enriches broader discussions of affordances, affect, and atmospheres.

Despite the recent proliferation of scientific, clinical, and narrative accounts of auditory verbal hallucinations, the phenomenology of voice hearing remains opaque and undertheorized. In this article, we outline an interdisciplinary approach to understanding hallucinatory experiences which seeks to demonstrate the value of the humanities and social sciences to advancing knowledge in clinical research and practice. We argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH utilizes rigorous and context-appropriate methodologies to analyze a wider range of first-person accounts of AVH at 3 contextual levels: cultural, social, and historical; experiential; and biographical. We go on to show that there are significant potential benefits for voice hearers, clinicians, and researchers. These include informing the development and refinement of subtypes of hallucinations within and across diagnostic categories; “front-loading” research in cognitive neuroscience; and suggesting new possibilities for therapeutic intervention. In conclusion, we argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH can nourish the ethical core of scientific enquiry by challenging its interpretive paradigms, and offer voice hearers richer, potentially more empowering ways to make sense of their experiences.

I consider some ways autistic people use AI chatbots for companionship and connection, and some distinctive benefits and harms that may follow from this usage—particularly as it relates to the virtue of authenticity. Drawing on first-person reports, as well as debates about the extended mind and extended virtues, I argue that while AI systems lack authenticity, they may be brought into extended (human-AI) systems that help some users achieve authenticity. AI companions may prompt some autistic persons to realize authenticity-expressing traits and capacities that might not otherwise emerge. Along the way, I consider some important ethical concerns. I conclude that while we should remain critical in assessing the place of AI in our lives more generally—and the motives behind Big Tech’s relentless promotion of it—we also shouldn’t be overly hasty in dismissing these digital connections as necessarily inauthentic or lacking value.

Miranda Fricker’s concept of “epistemic injustice” has been crucial in revealing how identity prejudice can wrong individuals in their capacity as knowers. Yet this framework implicitly presupposes neurotypical norms of social communication and interaction as the baseline of epistemic exchange. In this paper, we argue that such presuppositions obscure how epistemic injustices against neurodivergent people often emerge not through identity prejudice but rather through socio-material environments that privilege certain neurotypes over others. Drawing on frameworks such as the neurodiversity paradigm and niche construction theory, we reframe the concept of epistemic injustice as a distributed phenomenon that is enacted through the interaction of cognitive agents, cultural practices, and material affordances to accommodate these more structural forms of epistemic injustice. In particular, we argue that José Medina’s concept of “meta-lucidity” can be used as a methodological resource for reconstructing epistemic niches such that neurodivergent perspectives are given a role in co-constituting the fabric of a “neurodiversified” social imagination.

Background: Autistic adults often report heightened bodily vulnerability in face-to-face interactions, shaped by factors such as social expectations and sensory demands. With the increasing centrality of online communication, it is important to understand how digital environments can shape embodied experiences and social participation for different autistic people. Methods: This qualitative study used phenomenological interviews with 11 autistic adults living in North America and Europe. We interviewed participants, all of whom were habituated users of online spaces, in their preferred modality (text, audio, or video). Thematic analysis, informed by phenomenological attention to embodiment, identified how participants described bodily attention, agency, and connection across online and offline settings. Results: Participants consistently reported offline interactions requiring extensive bodily monitoring, associated with feelings of scrutiny and exhaustion. Online environments, in contrast, often afforded greater bodily ease, enabling shifts in attention away from self-monitoring toward communication. Participants emphasized novel forms of agency afforded in certain online contexts, helpful in fostering a sense of control. They furthermore described online communication as variably limiting or enriching, but frequently as supporting authentic and comfortable forms of self-expression and connection. Discussion: The findings suggest that online spaces can provide distinctive forms of embodied relief and inclusion for some autistic adults, challenging assumptions that in-person interaction is inherently preferable or superior for everyone. Consideration of autistic embodiment can be crucial for understanding accessible, inclusive platforms and for rethinking normative expectations of communication in both online and offline settings

Generative AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini routinely make things up. They "hallucinate" historical events and figures, legal cases, academic papers, non-existent tech products and features, biographies, and news articles. Recently, some have argued that these hallucinations are better understood as bullshit. Chatbots produce rich streams of text that look truth-apt without any concern for the truthfulness of what this text says. But can they also gossip? We argue that they can. After some definitions and scene-setting, we focus on a recent example to clarify what AI gossip looks like before considering some distinct harms — what we call "technosocial harms" — that follow from it.

Generative AI chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini routinely make things up. They "hallucinate" historical events and figures, legal cases, academic papers, non-existent tech products and features, biographies, and news articles. Recently, some have argued that these hallucinations are better understood as bullshit. Chatbots produce streams of text that look truth-apt without concern for the truthfulness of what this text says. But can they also gossip? We argue that they can. After some definitions and scene-setting, we focus on a recent example to clarify what AI gossip looks like before considering some distinct harms — what we call "technosocial harms" — that follow from it.

Music therapy for autism has historically been guided by a “pathology paradigm” that aims to normalize autistic people in line with neuronormativity. The neurodiversity movement has initiated a paradigm shift towards more neuro-affirming practices. However, music therapy would benefit from a more robust theoretical grounding to guide this neuro-affirming transition. We address this gap by putting forward an enactive account of autistic musical engagement—grounded in the neurodiversity paradigm—that avoids pathological framing. Drawing on first-person reports from recent qualitative studies, we discuss how autistic people use music in everyday life for emotional regulation, identity construction, and social connection, while also noting how music can sometimes clash with autistic sensory sensitivities and agency. From this enactive perspective, autistic styles of musical engagement are revealed not as a set of symptoms to be managed but as vital dimensions of sense-making. We conclude by deriving some core principles to guide the development of neuro-affirming music therapies and inclusive live music events, creating spaces for autistic flourishing.

Investigations into antagonistic political emotions have typically included a concern with expressions and actions related to particular emotions, such as hatred, anger, fear, and ressentiment, or examining how seemingly positive or apolitical emotions can become antagonistic on the political stage. Yet one of the ways in which antagonistic politics plays out is through imposing controls and restrictions on the spaces containing the expressions and experiences of emotions. Focusing on online social spaces as such a container, we examine how antagonistic politics play out within and through such spaces. Using the case of the 2019 protests in Iran when access to the internet was blocked across the nation as a means of oppressing revolt, we examine dynamics of political antagonism online. We highlight the affordances of online communities as a “holding space” for various emotions and affects that arise in response to state violence and oppression, and we consider some ways in which online spaces foster new possibilities for political empowerment and collective action.

While loneliness is typically conceived of as a psychological state experienced by agents, people often describe objects and places as lonely. Through an analysis of examples ranging from Ray Bradbury's automated house to abandoned buildings to digital decay, we emphasise how objects can be perceived as reaching out into the world for interaction and engagement and these invitations being left unfulfilled, hanging in mid-air. We suggest that we can understand this as a perception of what we call obsolete affordances—where we experience objects and places as lonely when we experience them as offering up action possibilities that remain unrealized or unrealizable due to the absence of human uptake or material deterioration. This approach emphasises the relational character of affordances while highlighting how loneliness can be embodied in material things, not just people. In doing so, we foreground how objects themselves can appear estranged or cut off from us, even when they offer an abundance of interactive possibilities that have been rendered obsolete.

Kristiansen's "Feeling like a perpetual outsider: relationality in Social Anxiety Disorder" offers a valuable analysis of loneliness within social anxiety disorder (SAD). Although phenomenological psychopathology has given extensive attention to conditions like schizophrenia, depression, and disordered eating, a more nuanced phenomenological examination of SAD is needed (Bortolan, 2023; Tanaka, 2020; Trigg, 2016). Kristiansen's work addresses this deficit and contributes to broader philosophical and phenomenological discussions of loneliness, including recent work on loneliness within psychopathology (e.g., Krueger et al., 2023; Motta, 2021; Roberts & Krueger, 2021; Seemann, 2022). We propose that first-person narratives illuminate two additional, phenomenologically and clinically relevant aspects: bodily doubt and experiences of absence. Understanding these aspects enriches our descriptive understanding of SAD and potentially informs more effective treatment strategies.

The term empathy (Einfühlung) is rooted in philosophical aesthetics. It was used by German philosophers toward the end of the nineteenth century to describe our ability to imaginatively “feel into” works of art, which speak to us in a certain humanlike way insofar as they contain traces of what Mikel Dufrenne calls a “quasi-subjectivity” (1973, 393). In this chapter, rather than looking to art as an object of empathy, we instead consider art—and more specifically, music—as a resource that can facilitate empathy. More precisely, we turn to two cases in which music seems to establish spaces that enable and sustain empathic connectedness, as well as the ability to explore and experiment with different forms of social understanding and affective sharing. The first case comes from the music tradition of free improvisation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with the saxophone player, Torben Snekkestad, we become acquainted with an approach to performance that does not concern music primarily as an aesthetic product, but as a shared process of communicating and connecting nonverbally with others—a process that is essentially about exploring and experimenting with different forms of intersubjectivity and empathy. The second case comes from music therapy and autism, which can involve listening, singing, or joint music-making. We discuss studies indicating that musical interventions positively address core impair- ments in capacities required for empathy: for example, joint attention, social reciprocity, and verbal and nonverbal communication, as well as comorbidities of atypical perception, motor performance, and behavioral problems. Although these two cases are different, they share the trait of using music to establish spaces of nonverbal communication and empathic understanding. Drawing on these two cases, this chapter analyses how musical-empathic spaces emerge and how these spaces solicit the integration of both low-level affective and bodily resonance mechanisms as well as high-level acts of meta-reflection, imagination, and planning that contribute to different forms of empathic understanding

I consider applications of “AI extenders” to dementia care. AI extenders are AI-powered technologies that extend minds in ways interestingly different from old-school tech like notebooks, sketch pads, models, and microscopes. I focus on AI extenders as ambiance: so thoroughly embedded into things and spaces that they fade from view and become part of a subject’s taken-for-granted background. Using dementia care as a case study, I argue that ambient AI extenders are promising because they afford richer and more durable forms of multidimensional integration than do old-school extenders like Otto’s notebook. They can be tailored, in fine-grained ways along multiple timescales, to a user’s particular needs, values, and preferences—and crucially, they can do much of this self-optimizing on their own. I discuss why this is so, why it matters, and its potential impact on affect and agency. I conclude with some worries in need of further discussion.

A teoria da construção de nichos ressalta o papel ativo dos organismos na modificação do seu ambiente externo. O nicho de desenvolvimento é um subconjunto dessas modificações, e refere-se aos legados ecológicos, epistêmicos, sociais e simbólicos que facilitam processos de desenvolvimento. Considerando que o desenvolvimento cognitivo ocorre em um ambiente culturalmente estruturado, questiona-se aqui se vieses culturais implícitos podem resultar em nichos de desenvolvimento mal adaptativos. Este artigo defenderá uma resposta afirmativa a esta questão. Para atingir esse objetivo, iremos conceituar vieses implícitos como hábitos perceptuais corporificados e, em seguida, argumentar que esses hábitos são responsáveis por nichos de desenvolvimento mal adaptativos em crianças com síndrome de Down e autismo. Ao unir a teoria da construção de nichos e a psicologia dos vieses implícitos, este trabalho pode oferecer uma ferramenta teórica útil para diagnosticar características mal adaptativas dos nichos causadas por vieses socioculturais, contribuindo assim para ambas as áreas de pesquisa. Palavras-chave: Teoria da construção do nicho. Vieses implícitos. Nicho de desenvolvimento. Autismo. Síndrome de Down.

The problem of other minds has a distinguished philosophical history stretching back more than two hundred years. Taken at face value, it is an epistemological question: it concerns how we can have knowledge of, or at least justified belief in, the existence of minds other than our own. In recent decades, philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists and primatologists have debated a related question: how we actually go about attributing mental states to others (regardless of whether we ever achieve knowledge or rational justification in this domain). Until the mid-nineties, the latter debate – which sometimes goes under the name of the “mindreading” debate – was characterized by a fairly clear-cut opposition between two theoretical outlooks: “theory-theory” (TT) and “simulation theory” (ST). Theory-theorists typically argued that we attribute mental states to others on the basis of a “theory of mind” that is either constructed in early infancy and subsequently revised and modified (Gopnik 1996), or else is the result of maturation of innate mindreading “modules” (Baron-Cohen 1995).

I develop Tetsurō Watsuji’s relational model of the self as “betweenness”. I argue that Watsuji’s view receives support from two case studies: solitary confinement and dementia. Both clarify the constitutive interdependence between the self and the social and material contexts of “betweenness” that define its lifeworld. They do so by providing powerful examples of what happens when the support and regulative grounding of this lifeworld is restricted or taken away. I argue further that Watsuji’s view helps see the other side of this deprivation, how reconstructing aspects of betweenness is, at the same time, a reconstruction of the self. I conclude by briefly indicating further consequences of this view.

As technology improves, artificial systems are increasingly able to behave in human-like ways: holding a conversation; providing information, advice, and support; or taking on the role of therapist, teacher, or counsellor. This enhanced behavioural complexity, we argue, encourages deeper forms of affective engagement on the part of the human user, with the artificial agent helping to stabilise, subdue, prolong, or intensify a person’s emotional condition. Here, we defend a fictionalist account of human/AI interaction, according to which these encounters involve an elaborate practise of imaginative pretence: a make-believe in which the artificial agent is attributed a life of its own. We attend, specifically, to the temporal characteristics of these fictions, and to what we imagine artificial agents are doing when we are not looking at them.