Pablo Fernandez Velasco

One of the central questions in philosophy of mind concerns the intentionality of moods. While it is standard to take the intentional object of moods as either ‘everything’ or ‘nothing’, neither view seems to be explanatorily inadequate. Given this, this paper develops and motivates a positive account of the intentionality of moods, according to which moods are directed at atmospheres. We first analyze the elusiveness of mood experiences in terms of three aspects, intentional, phenomenological and normative, and also specify some core characteristics of atmospheres. We then motivate the atmosphere view of moods by arguing that the elusiveness of mood experiences can be well‐explained in terms of the atmospheres at which they are directed.

There is a growing interdisciplinary effort to understand the emotional dimensions of the climate crisis. A central focus in this line of research is ecological grief—the grief felt in relation to ecological losses. Ecological grief is frequently claimed to be a shared emotion. Here, we discuss whether, and in which way, ecological grief is a shared emotion. We argue that ecological grief is characteristically shared as a group-based emotion. The shared character of ecological grief comes down to the shared nature of place-based practices and place-based identity, and this is reflected in the intentional structure of ecological grief, which is about our possibilities that have been lost through the loss of place. Ecological grief is also, we argue, apt to take the form of a shared process due to the often ambiguous and ongoing nature of ecological losses.

Climate change leads to environmental transformations and destruction, which deeply affect individuals and communities living in vulnerable areas. There is a growing literature considering the ethical and political implications of climate change on people's identity and attachment to places. Separately, there is a body of research on the mental health impact of climate change, with many studies focusing on ecological grief—the grief felt in response to ecological losses. In this article, we will connect these two strands of inquiry. We will bring together insights from accounts of attachment to place and the experience of ecological grief, which will shed new light on the negative implications of climate change on places and people's connections to them. The study of ecological grief within climate research capitalizes on existing work in psychology on grief over non-death losses. There is growing evidence that people grieve not just bereavement but also losses arising from illness, incarceration, or infertility. A recent proposal is that what unites all these experiences is a sense of losing one's life possibilities. In the case of ecological grief, the heart of the experience is the loss of possibilities that were sustained by one's place. In this article, we will connect this insight with the emerging attention given by political theorists to the significance of occupying a specific place for people's life plans, and we will investigate how climate change threatens people's ability to sustain their traditional ways of life and their stability in life projects, constituting an incommensurable loss.

Collective memory is deeply connected to place. Places are powerful mnemonic cues, and many practices of collective remembering are tied to place. However, experimental psychology has largely overlooked this connection. Here, we leverage distributed cognition theory to develop a framework within which existing psychological research can explore the connection between place and collective memory. We do so by focusing on two areas of growing recent research attention: social wayfinding and atmospheres, two key examples of how collective memory and place are intertwined.

Nowadays, Wilderness Search and Rescue (WiSAR) (WiSAR) operations revolve around the creation of ProbabilityMaps using GIS planning tools (Doherty et al, Appl Geogr 47:99–110, 2014). Although this method has proven effective, there is Wilderness Search and Rescue (WiSAR) theory and advances in other fields related to Disorientation (e.g. Psychology and Neuroscience). A unified conceptualisation of disorientation is a crucial element for understanding the mind and Behaviour of disoriented subjects. The central aim of this chapter is to explore how a unified conceptualisation of disorientation can Wilderness Search and Rescue (WiSAR) theory. The paper will open with a review of the work on disorientation coming from different Fields, to then introduce the conceptual work that is needed for a unified account of Disorientation. We will discuss Wilderness Search and Rescue (WiSAR) theory: a ring model and a Bayesian model. We end on a discussion on how conceptual work on Wilderness Search and Rescue (WiSAR) theory can help each other advance.

This paper advances an analytic philosophical approach to atmospheres. We start by outlining three core characteristics of atmospheres: holism (an atmosphere is a holistic entity that emerges through the combinations of various aspects of the environment), affectivity (atmospheres are grasped corporeally and affectively), and quasi-objectivity (atmospheres cannot be captured in solely objective or solely subjective terms). We look at the most promising candidate theory of atmospheres, which defends that atmospheres supervene on affective affordances, and challenge it by casting doubt on how far the concept of affective affordance can stretch in order to accommodate the relevant phenomenology, and by highlighting current controversies in the ontology of affordances. We then outline a more promising theory based on recent developments in the metaphysics of potentiality. According to the proposed theory, atmospheres are high-level nested relations of agent-environment joint potentialities.

This paper advances an analytic philosophical approach to atmospheres. We start by outlining three core characteristics of atmospheres: holism (an atmosphere is a holistic entity that emerges through the combinations of various aspects of the environment), affectivity (atmospheres are grasped corporeally and affectively), and quasi-objectivity (atmospheres cannot be captured in solely objective or solely subjective terms). We look at the most promising candidate theory of atmospheres, which defends that atmospheres supervene on affective affordances, and challenge it by casting doubt on how far the concept of affective affordance can stretch in order to accommodate the relevant phenomenology, and by highlighting current controversies in the ontology of affordances. We then outline a more promising theory based on recent developments in the metaphysics of potentiality. According to the proposed theory, atmospheres are high-level nested relations of agent-environment joint potentialities.

Major proponents of both Distributed Cognition and Predictive Processing have argued that the two theoretical frameworks are strongly compatible. An important conjecture supporting the union of the two frameworks is that cultural practices tend to reduce entropy —that is, to increase predictability— at all scales in a cultural cognitive ecosystem. This conjecture connects Distributed Cognition with Predictive Processing because it shows how cultural practices facilitate prediction. The present contribution introduces the following challenge to the union of Distributed Cognition and Predictive Processing: the problem of entropic cultural practices. The problem lies in the existence of multiple cultural practices that tend to increase entropy instead of reducing it. This paper discusses these entropic cultural practices and the nature of the problem at hand. Finally, the paper advances an expanded conception of cultural practices that could unite the two frameworks and explores the difficulties of committing to such a conception.

There is a remarkable gap in the academic literature when it comes to group navigation, and procedural metacognition in group navigation is an important but virtually unexplored topic. The present paper aims to fill this gap by providing an account of how metacognitive feelings evaluate and regulate group navigational processes. The paper reviews animal studies and ethnographic work to elucidate three exiting processes in human group navigation: many-wrongs, leadership and emergent sensing. This is followed by an analysis of the role of procedural metacognition in the navigational processes involved in each of these three processes. This analysis shows that procedural metacognition serves to regulate and evaluate group navigation in a flexible, process-specific way. When performance issues arise during group navigation, the emergence of negative affective states makes the navigational process conspicuous, prompting a modulation of said process.

Studying disorientation is studying how, through our bodies, culture and technology, we humans are connected to our environment, and what happens when this connection is weakened or severed. What happens, of course, depends again on our environment, bodies, culture and technology: the world around us becomes at times uncanny, unfamiliar or dangerous when we get disoriented. Disorientation can be exciting and refreshing—an invitation to explore, to leave behind nagging desires for control and certainty, and to embrace instead a more spontaneous relationship with our surroundings. Getting lost shapes our consciousness, not only by transforming our perception of the world around us, but by transforming our sense of who we are in that world, and what possibilities are open to us within it.In this chapter, we analyse the phenomenology of disorientation to elucidate the role that emotions play in distributed cognitive processes that involve multiple agents and cognitive artefacts. The feeling of disorientation destabilises our horizon of experience and turns the world around us unfamiliar or alien. This feeling embodies our disconnection to the agents, the cognitive artefacts, and the environment around us. A proper analysis of the phenomenology of both orientation and disorientation uncovers the role feelings play in distributed cognitive processes: emotions serve as a form of evaluative regulation that contributes to, on the one hand, the syncing of the different elements of a distributed cognitive process, and on the other, to the eventual disengagement of the agent from an unreliable distributed cognitive process.