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729What is a subliminal technique? An ethical perspective on AI-driven influenceIeee Ethics-2023 Conference Proceedings. 2023.Concerns about threats to human autonomy feature prominently in the field of AI ethics. One aspect of this concern relates to the use of AI systems for problematically manipulative influence. In response to this, the European Union’s draft AI Act (AIA) includes a prohibition on AI systems deploying subliminal techniques that alter people’s behavior in ways that are reasonably likely to cause harm (Article 5(1)(a)). Critics have argued that the term ‘subliminal techniques’ is too narrow to captur…Read more
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399Temptation and ApathyOxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility. forthcoming.Self-control is deemed crucial for reasons-responsive agency and a key contributor to long-term wellbeing. But recent studies suggest that effortfully resisting one’s temptations does not contribute to long-term goal attainment, and can even be harmful. So how does self-control improve our lives? Finding an answer requires revising the role that overcoming temptation plays in self-control. This paper distinguishes two forms of self-control problems: temptation (the presence of a strong wayward m…Read more
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559What is the feeling of effort about?Australasian Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.For agents like us, the feeling of effort is a very useful thing. It helps us sense how hard an action is, control its level of intensity, and decide whether to continue or stop performing it. While there has been progress in understanding the feeling of mental effort and the feeling of bodily effort, this has not translated into a unified account of the general feeling of effort. To advance in this direction, I defend the single-feeling view, which states that the feeling of effort is one and t…Read more
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198Moralization and self-control strategy selectionPsychonomic Bulletin and Review 30 (4). 2023.To manage conflicts between temptation and commitment, people use self-control. The process model of self-control outlines different strategies for managing the onset and experience of temptation. However, little is known about the decision-making factors underlying strategy selection. Across three experiments (N = 317), we tested whether the moral valence of a commitment predicts how people advise attentional self-control strategies. In Experiments 1 and 2, people rated attentional focus strate…Read more
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498Efforts and their feelingsPhilosophy Compass 18 (1). 2022.Effort and the feeling of effort play important roles in many theoretical discussions, from perception to self-control and free will, from the nature of ownership to the nature of desert and achievement. A crucial, overlooked distinction within the philosophical and scientific literatures is the distinction between theories that seek to explain effort and theories that seek to explain the feeling of effort. Lacking a clear distinction between these two phenomena makes the literature hard to navi…Read more
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87Will-powered: Synchronic regulation is the difference maker for self-controlCognition 225 (C): 105154. 2022.Philosophers, psychologists, and economists have reached the consensus that one can use two different kinds of regulation to achieve self-control. Synchronic regulation uses willpower to resist current temptation. Diachronic regulation implements a plan to avoid future temptation. Yet this consensus may rest on contaminated intuitions. Specifically, agents typically use willpower (synchronic regulation) to achieve their plans to avoid temptation (diachronic regulation). So even if cases of diach…Read more
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556What’s inside is all that counts? The contours of everyday thinking about self-controlReview of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (1): 33-55. 2023.Does self-control require willpower? The question cuts to the heart of a debate about whether self-control is identical with some psychological process internal to the agents or not. Noticeably absent from these debates is systematic evidence about the folk-psychological category of self-control. Here, we present the results of two behavioral studies (N = 296) that indicate the structure of everyday use of the concept. In Study 1, participants rated the degree to which different strategies to re…Read more
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531Introduction: Habitual Action, Automaticity, and ControlTopoi 40 (3): 587-595. 2021.Habitual action would still be a tremendously pervasive feature of our agency. And yet, references to habitual action have been marginal at best in contemporary philosophy of action. This neglect is due, at least, to the combination of two ideas. The first is a widespread view of habit as entirely automatic, inflexible, and irresponsive to reasons. The second is philosophy of action’s tendency (dominant at least since Anscombe and Davidson) to focus on explaining action by reference to reasons. …Read more
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346Perceiving utilitarian gradients: Heart rate variability and self-regulatory effort in the moral dilemma taskSocial Neuroscience 16 (4). 2021.It is not yet clear which response behavior requires self-regulatory effort in the moral dilemma task. Previous research has proposed that utilitarian responses require cognitive control, but subsequent studies have found inconsistencies with the empirical predictions of that hypothesis. In this paper we treat participants’ sensitivity to utilitarian gradients as a measure of performance. We confronted participants (N = 82) with a set of five dilemmas evoking a gradient of mean utilitarian respo…Read more
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1010The skill of self-controlSynthese 199 (3-4): 6251-6273. 2021.Researchers often claim that self-control is a skill. It is also often stated that self-control exertions are intentional actions. However, no account has yet been proposed of the skillful agency that makes self-control exertion possible, so our understanding of self-control remains incomplete. Here I propose the skill model of self-control, which accounts for skillful agency by tackling the guidance problem: how can agents transform their abstract and coarse-grained intentions into the highly c…Read more
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655Willpower needs tactical skillBehavioral and Brain Sciences 44 (e32). 2021.In “Willpower with and without effort”, G. Ainslie advances our understanding of selfcontrol by theoretically unifying multiple forms of willpower. But one crucial question remains unanswered: How do agents pick the right forms of willpower in each situation? I argue that willpower requires tactical skill, which detects willpower-demanding contexts, selects context-appropriate tactics, and monitors their implementation. Research on tactical skill will significantly advance our understanding of w…Read more
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609Intentional mind-wandering as intentional omission: the surrealist methodSynthese 199 (3-4): 7727-7748. 2021.Mind-wandering seems to be paradigmatically unintentional. However, experimental findings have yielded the paradoxical result that mind-wandering can also be intentional. In this paper, we first present the paradox of intentional mind-wandering and then explain intentional mind-wandering as the intentional omission to control one’s own thoughts. Finally, we present the surrealist method for artistic production to illustrate how intentional omission of control over thoughts can be deployed toward…Read more
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49Decision conflict drives reaction times and utilitarian responses in sacrificial dilemmasJudgment and Decision Making 14 555-564. 2019.In the sacrificial moral dilemma task, participants have to morally judge an action that saves several lives at the cost of killing one person. According to the dual process corrective model of moral judgment suggested by Greene and collaborators (2001; 2004; 2008), cognitive control is necessary to override the intuitive, deontological force of the norm against killing and endorse the utilitarian perspective. However, a conflict model has been proposed more recently to account for part of the e…Read more
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35Sánchez, Liliana Carolina. Traditio animae: la recepción aristotélica de las teorías presocráticas del alma. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2016. 348 pp (review)Ideas Y Valores 65 (162): 391-395. 2016.El ser en su riqueza se expresa en el lenguaje que emana también del ser. El lenguaje emergió de su olvido en la filosofía griega, gracias a las ideas cristianas de encarnación y trinidad que le hicieron más justicia. El mayor milagro del lenguaje no estriba en que la palabra aparezca en su ser externo, sino en el hecho de que lo que emerge y se manifiesta sea siempre palabra. La vuelta de Gadamer al final de Verdad y método, en torno a la evidencia de que el ser de lo bello consiste en presenta…Read more
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1695Social media and self-control: The vices and virtues of attentionIn C. G. Prado Phd Frsc & Phd C. G. Prado (eds.), Social Media and Your Brain: Web-Based Communication Is Changing How We Think and Express Ourselves, Praeger. pp. 57-74. 2016.Self-control, the capacity to resist temptations and pursue longer-term goals over immediate gratifications, is crucial in determining the overall shape of our lives, and thereby in our ability to shape our identities. As it turns out, this capacity is intimately linked with our ability to control the direction of our attention. This raises the worry that perhaps social media are making us more easily distracted people, and therefore less able to exercise self-control. Is this so? And is it nece…Read more
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83Viewing Others as Equals: the Non-cognitive Roots of Shared IntentionalityReview of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (3): 485-502. 2018.We propose two adjustments to the classic view of shared intentionality as based on conceptual-level cognitive skills. The first one takes into account that infants and young children display this capacity, but lack conceptual-level cognitive skills. The second one seeks to integrate cognitive and non-cognitive skills into that capacity. This second adjustment is motivated by two facts. First, there is an enormous difference between human infants and our closest living primate relatives with res…Read more
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721Is a bad will a weak will? Cognitive dispositions modulate folk attributions of weakness of willPhilosophical Explorations 21 (3). 2018.In line with recent efforts to empirically study the folk concept of weakness of will, we examine two issues in this paper: (1) How is weakness of will attribution [WWA] influenced by an agent’s violations of best judgment and/or resolution, and by the moral valence of the agent’s action? (2) Do any of these influences depend on the cognitive dispositions of the judging individual? We implemented a factorial 2x2x2 between–subjects design with judgment violation, resolution violation, and action …Read more
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822Remembering as a mental actionIn Kourken Michaelian, Dorothea Debus & Denis Perrin (eds.), New Directions in the Philosophy of Memory, Routledge. pp. 75-96. 2018.Many philosophers consider that memory is just a passive information retention and retrieval capacity. Some information and experiences are encoded, stored, and subsequently retrieved in a passive way, without any control or intervention on the subject’s part. In this paper, we will defend an active account of memory according to which remembering is a mental action and not merely a passive mental event. According to the reconstructive account, memory is an imaginative reconstruction of past exp…Read more
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377Can reason establish the goals of action? Assessing interpretations of Aristotle’s theory of agencyDiscusiones Filosóficas 18 (30): 35-62. 2017.Scholarship on Aristotle’s theory of action has recently veered toward an intellectualist position, according to which reason is in charge of setting the goals of action. This position has recently been criticized by an anti-intellectualism revival, according to which character, and not reason, sets the goals of action. I argue that neither view can sufficiently account for the complexities of Aristotle’s theory, and suggest a middle way that combines the strengths of both while avoiding their p…Read more
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625Truth and falsehood for non-representationalists: Gorgias on the normativity of languageJournal of Ancient Philosophy 11 (2): 1-21. 2017.Sophists and rhetoricians like Gorgias are often accused of disregarding truth and rationality: their speeches seem to aim only at effective persuasion, and be constrained by nothing but persuasiveness itself. In his extant texts Gorgias claims that language does not represent external objects or communicate internal states, but merely generates behavioural responses in people. It has been argued that this perspective erodes the possibility of rationally assessing speeches by making persuasivene…Read more
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669Nature and the Good: An exploration of ancient ethical naturalism in Cicero’s De finibusPensamiento y Cultura 14 (2): 145-163. 2011.This paper investigates the differences between ancient Greek and modern ethical naturalism, through the account of the whole classical tradition provided by Cicero in De finibus bonorum et malorum. Ever since Hume’s remarks on the topic, it is usually held that derivations of normative claims from factual claims require some kind of proper justification. It ́s a the presence of such justifications in the Epicurean, Stoic, and Academic-Peripatetic ethical theories (as portrayed in De finibus), a…Read more
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109Practical reason, habit, and care in AristotlePraxis Filosófica 43. 2016.Interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of action in the last few decades has tended toward an intellectualist position, according to which reason is in charge of setting the goals of action. This position has recently been criticized by the revival of anti-intellectualism (particularly from J. Moss’ work), according to which character, and not reason, sets the goals of action. In this essay I argue that neither view can sufficiently account for the complexities of Aristotle’s theory, and propose a…Read more
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1402Do we reflect while performing skillful actions? Automaticity, control, and the perils of distractionPhilosophical Psychology 30 (7): 896-924. 2017.From our everyday commuting to the gold medalist’s world-class performance, skillful actions are characterized by fine-grained, online agentive control. What is the proper explanation of such control? There are two traditional candidates: intellectualism explains skillful agentive control by reference to the agent’s propositional mental states; anti-intellectualism holds that propositional mental states or reflective processes are unnecessary since skillful action is fully accounted for by autom…Read more
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501Interrupción de tendencias y criterio del gusto: La estética del criterio del gusto de David Hume y realización en la filosofía de la música de Leonard MeyerUniversitas Philosophica 40 29-63. 2003.Hume presenta su teoría estética en el ensayo Sobre el criterio del gusto [On the Standard of Taste], en el que propone la existencia de un criterio [standard] capaz de zanjar discusiones de gusto. Ese criterio se basa en la existencia de ciertas formas y cualidades que complacen naturalmente a todo ser humano. Hume asevera que tal criterio corresponde a la opinión del crítico: un hombre que ha desplegado particularmente sus facultades cognoscitivas, lo cual le permite percibir esas finas cualid…Read more
Juan Pablo Bermúdez
Universidad Externado De Colombia
Delft University of Technology
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Universidad Externado De ColombiaFacultad de Ciencias Sociales Y HumanasAssistant Professor
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Delft, Netherlands
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Philosophy of Action |
Ethics of Artificial Intelligence |
Areas of Interest
Evolution of Morality |
Moral Psychology |
Environmental Ethics |