Paul Lopez

Over the last several years, predictive processing approaches to computational neuropsychiatry have been gaining explanatory traction. According to these accounts, some of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia arise from aberrant precision-weighting during hierarchical Bayesian inference. In contrast to computational approaches, the phenomenological tradition in psychiatry holds that disruptions or alterations of the self (Ichstörungen) lie at the core of schizophrenia. In this article, we aim to integrate these approaches. We align ourselves with the phenomenological insight that self-disturbances lie at the core of schizophrenia and with the hierarchical conception of the self-model that emerges from the predictive processing architecture. We suggest that disruptions of the “hard core” of the narrative self-model might be partially involved in the generation of aberrant experiences and hyperreflexivity, and in some aspects of the sense of self-alienation and ambiguity that is characteristic of the phenomenology of schizophrenia.

With a higher prevalence in schizophrenia, delusions of thought insertion (TI) are regarded as one of the most severe symptoms of psychosis. Patients suffering from TI report that external agents are able to place thoughts into their minds or skulls. A version of the doxastic approach characterizes delusions as abnormal beliefs rooted in anomalous experiences. Nonetheless, the exact role of these experiences in determining the content and the way in which delusional beliefs are fixated is still under debate. While _endorsement_ models claim that the abnormal experience comprises the very content of the delusional beliefs, _explanationist_ approaches claim that delusional beliefs emerge as explanations for abnormal experiences with less specific content. This paper combines conceptual analysis with phenomenological data to examine the merits of both endorsement and explanationist approaches to TI. I propose that potential solutions to the dispute could lay in finding a middle ground between the two approaches, and non-exhaustive ways in which hybrid doxastic approaches to TI could be formulated.

Este artículo examina el debate acerca de si el delirio de inserción de pensamiento constituye un contraejemplo para el denominado principio de inmunidad al error a través de la mala identificación. Luego de distinguir diferentes formulaciones del principio en la literatura, concluimos que el fenómeno delirante en cuestión no constituye un contraejemplo para el principio examinado. En la parte final se clarifica el concepto de autoadscripción psicológica y su uso relativo a los pronombres de primera persona en el contexto del debate acerca de la relación entre inserción de pensamiento e inmunidad al error a través de la mala identificación.

The concept of mental privacy can be defined as the principle that subjects should have control over the access to their own neural data and to the information about the mental processes and states that can be obtained by analyzing it. Our aim is to contribute to the current debate on mental privacy by identifying the main positions, articulating key assumptions and addressing central arguments. First, we map the different positions found in current literature. We distinguish between those who dismiss concerns about mental privacy and those who endorse them. In this latter group, we establish a further disagreement between conservative and liberal strategies to protect mental privacy. Then, we address the first discussion by articulating and criticizing different skeptical views on mental privacy. Finally, we try to identify what are the unique features of neural data and examine how they may be connected to the ways in which neurotechnological mindreading could put mental privacy at risk. We suggest that even if neural data is unique, it may not require new strategies to protect people from its misuse. However, identifying the special features and risks of neurotechnological mind-reading is necessary for the second discussion on mental privacy to properly take off.

The Next Release Problem (NRP) is a combinatorial optimization problem that aims to find a subset of software requirements to be delivered in the next software release, which maximize the satisfaction of a list of clients and minimize the effort required by developers to implement them. Previous studies have applied various metaheuristics, mostly genetic algorithms. Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDA), based on probabilistic modelling, have been proved to obtain good results in problems where genetic algorithms struggle. In this paper we propose to adapt three EDAs to tackle the multi-objective NRP in a fast and effective way. Results show that EDAs can be applicable to solve the NRP with rather good quality of solutions. Furthermore, we prove that their execution time can be significantly reduced using a per-iteration solution subset selection method while maintaining the overall quality of the solutions obtained, and they perform the best when limiting the search time as in an interactive tool that requires fast responsiveness. The experimental framework, code and datasets have been made public in a code repository.

Patients suffering from delusions of thought insertion (TI) report that external agents of different nature have placed thoughts into their minds. The symptom involves distressing feelings of intromission and exposition, loss of mental privacy, diminished ego boundaries, and a – often neglected – peculiar “physicality”. A dominant approach within cognitive sciences characterizes TI as involving alterations in the experience of being the author of certain thoughts. For the advocates of this so-called Standard Approach to TI, the absence of a sense of agency for certain thoughts would lead to their externalization, this explaining the general structure of the clinical reports. In this paper, I problematize the phenomenological picture of everyday thoughts that the standard approach adopts when trying to make sense of TI. I claim that the standard approach neglects two more fundamental aspects of TI, namely the multimodal nature of thinking in psychosis and the deeply social dimension of the phenomenology of delusions in schizophrenia. After this, a broader descriptive phenomenological characterization of TI is provided. Finally, I establish some connections between the characterization of TI developed here and current research in social perception and clinical practice.

En filosofía de la mente se ha sugerido que, a diferencia de los estados puramente materiales, los estados conscientes serían aquellos de los cuales podemos decir que existe ‘un algo que es como estar en ellos’ para un sujeto, esto es, estados que poseen una fenomenología. Asumiendo una demarcación intuitiva entre estados sensoriales y estados cognitivos, durante los últimos años se ha establecido un debate en torno a la pregunta acerca del carácter fenoménico de nuestros estados cognitivos, especialmente, el de nuestros pensamientos. A este asunto se le ha denominado el debate acerca de la fenomenología cognitiva. El análisis del debate parece depender del examen crítico de las formas en las que establecemos conclusiones acerca de los componentes fenoménicos de nuestra propia vida mental. El presente artículo elabora diversos problemas que se derivan del uso de dos estrategias en este contexto: reportes introspectivos y los contrastes fenoménicos. Luego de analizar la forma en que tales estrategias podrían favorecer a cierta posición dentro del debate, el artículo concluye comentando cómo algunos asuntos asociados a la fenomenología de la actividad matemática podrían iluminar el debate.

An attribution of mental agency is defined as the act of assigning the initiation or authorship of a first personal phenomenal thought to a specific agent. This type of attribution is fundamental for the production of the belief that human beings are rational agents not only in behavioral terms, but also, in a cognitive manner. The top-down approach –one of the dominant theories in current literature– suggests that attributions of mental agency arise as retrospective rational explanations for the occurrence of phenomenal thoughts. Thus, the agency of a thought would not be contained in its most fundamental phenomenal structure, rather, it would be an imposed category. After introducing the most fundamental elements of the debate, this paper evaluates the top-down model in order to identify its argumentative strengths and weaknesses. It is concluded that, although this model possesses a number of merits, it cannot deal in a plausible way with some fundamental conceptual challenges.

Términos como «espiritualidad», «naturaleza», «naturalismo» y «religión» se han venido usando con frecuencia de modo engañoso desde el siglo decimoctavo, a partir del sector antirreligioso del Iluminismo británico y francés. De hecho, esos términos a veces significan lo contrario de lo que aparentemente expresan. Así pues, necesitamos explorar el significado real de dichos términos, en especial el de «naturalismo». También tenemos que analizar una serie de contradicciones acerca de la comprensión de nociones como «persona» y «religión». Nos proponemos argumentar una nueva fraternidad universal y personal basada en la real naturaleza humana, la real espiritualidad y la real religiosidad.

Despite the diagnostic relevance of thought insertion for disorders such as schizophrenia, the debates about its aetiology are far from resolved. This paper claims that in paying exclusive attention to the perceptual and cognitive impairments leading to delusional experiences in general, current deficit approaches overlook the role that affective disturbances might play in giving rise to cases of thought insertion. In the context of psychosis, affective impairments are often characterized as a consequence of the stress and anxiety caused by delusional episodes. However, here I explore some of the conceptual and empirical reasons to think that affective problems might in fact play a crucial doxastic role in the aetiology of thought insertion. Finally, I conclude by proposing a way of integrating the main insights of my analysis with the current ‘two-factor’ deficit approach to thought insertion and I explore the potential adaptive role that some delusions might have within this framework.