•  2478
    The concept of agency is of crucial importance in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, and it is often used as an intuitive and rather uncontroversial term, in contrast to more abstract and theoretically heavy-weighted terms like “intentionality”, “rationality” or “mind”. However, most of the available definitions of agency are either too loose or unspecific to allow for a progressive scientific program. They implicitly and unproblematically assume the features that characterize agents…Read more
  •  1094
    Dynamicism has provided cognitive science with important tools to understand some aspects of “how cognitive agents work” but the issue of “what makes something cognitive” has not been sufficiently addressed yet, and, we argue, the former will never be complete without the later. Behavioristic characterizations of cognitive properties are criticized in favor of an organizational approach focused on the internal dynamic relationships that constitute cognitive systems. A definition of cognition as …Read more
  •  472
    Norm-Establishing and Norm-Following in Autonomous Agency
    with Matthew Egbert
    Artificial Life 91 (2): 1-24. 2013.
    Living agency is subject to a normative dimension (good-bad, adaptive-maladaptive) that is absent from other types of interaction. We review current and historical attempts to naturalize normativity from an organism-centered perspective, identifying two central problems and their solution: (1) How to define the topology of the viability space so as to include a sense of gradation that permits reversible failure, and (2) how to relate both the processes that establish norms and those that result …Read more
  •  333
    Animats in the modeling ecosystem
    Adaptive Behavior 17 (4): 287-292. 2009.
    There are many different kinds of model and scientists do all kind of things with them. This diversity of model type and model use is a good thing for science. Indeed, it is crucial especially for the biological and cognitive sciences, which have to solve many different problems at many different scales, ranging from the most concrete of the structural details of a DNA molecule to the most abstract and generic principles of self-organization in networks. Getting a grip (or more likely many separ…Read more
  •  260
    Mental Life: Conceptual models and synthetic methodologies for a post-cognitivist psychology
    In B. Wallace, A. Ross, J. Davies & T. Anderson (eds.), The World, the Mind and the Body: Psychology after cognitivism, Imprint Academic. pp. 49-90. 2007.
  •  229
    A Naturalized Account of the Inside-Outside Dichotomy
    Philosophica 73 (1): 11-26. 2004.
    The first form of the inside-outside dichotomy appears as a self-encapsulated system with an active border. These systems are based on two complementary but asymmetric processes: constructive and interactive. The former physically constitute the system as a recursive network of component production, defining an inside. The maintenance of the constructive processes implies that the internal organization also constrains certain flows of matter and energy across the border of the system, generating…Read more
  •  211
    Alife models as epistemic artefacts
    with Alvaro Moreno
    In Luis Rocha, Larry Yaeger & Mark Bedau (eds.), Artificial Life X : Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems, Mit Press. pp. 513-519. 2006.
    Both the irreducible complexity of biological phenomena and the aim of a universalized biology (life-as-it-could-be) have lead to a deep methodological shift in the study of life; represented by the appearance of ALife, with its claim that computational modelling is the main tool for studying the general principles of biological phenomenology. However this methodological shift implies important questions concerning the aesthetic, engineering and specially the epistemological status of computatio…Read more
  •  121
    The concept of “autonomy”, once at the core of the original enactivist proposal in The Embodied Mind, is nowadays ignored or neglected by some of the most prominent contemporary enactivists approaches. Theories of autonomy, however, come to fill a theoretical gap that sensorimotor accounts of cognition cannot ignore: they provide a naturalized account of normativity and the resources to ground the identity of a cognitive subject in its specific mode of organization. There are, however, good reas…Read more
  •  55
    A Naturalizd Account of the Inside-Outside Dichotomy
    with Alvaro Moreno
    Philosophica 73 (1). 2004.
  •  22
  •  21
    Modeling habits as self-sustaining patterns of sensorimotor behavior
    with Matthew D. Egbert
    Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8. 2014.
  •  15
    Sensorimotor Life: An enactive proposal
    with Ezequiel Di Paolo and Thomas Bhurman
    Oxford University Press. 2017.
    How accurate is the picture of the human mind that has emerged from studies in neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science? Anybody with an interest in how minds work - how we learn about the world and how we remember people and events - may feel dissatisfied with the answers contemporary science has to offer. Sensorimotor Life draws on current theoretical developments in the enactive approach to life and mind. It examines and expands the premises of the sciences of the human mind, while dev…Read more
  •  14
    Decidim: redes políticas y tecnopolíticas para la democracia participativa
    with Antonio Calleja, Arnau Monterde, Pablo Aragón, Juan Linares, Carol Romero, and Andrés Pereira
    Recerca.Revista de Pensament I Anàlisi 21 137-150. 2017.
    Decidim es una plataforma digital de democracia participativa desarrollada por el Ajuntament de Barcelona. Decidim es, además, un proyecto tecnopolítico que implica multitud de códigos más allá del informático. Distinguimos tres planos analíticos que sirven para conceptualizar de forma holística y sistemática el proyecto Decidim: un plano político, uno tecnopolítico, y un plano técnico. Decidim emerge como ejemplo de lo que denominamos “redes políticas” caracterizadas, frente a las “redes social…Read more
  •  14
    Defining Collective Identities in Technopolitical Interaction Networks
    with Antonio Calleja-López and Emanuele Cozzo
    Frontiers in Psychology 11. 2020.
    We are currently witnessing the emergence of new forms of collective identities and a redefinition of the old ones through networked digital interactions, and these can be explicitly measured and analyzed. We distinguish between three major trends on the development of the concept of identity in the social realm: (1) an essentialist sense (based on conditions and properties shared by members of a group), (2) a representational or ideational sense (based on the application of categories by onesel…Read more
  •  11
    Decidim: redes políticas y tecnopolíticas para la democracia participativa
    with Antonio Calleja, Arnau Monterde, Pablo Aragón, Juan Linares, Carol Romero, and Andrés Pereira
    Recerca.Revista de Pensament I Anàlisi 21 137-150. 2017.
    Decidim es una plataforma digital de democracia participativa desarrollada por el Ajuntament de Barcelona. Decidim es, además, un proyecto tecnopolítico que implica multitud de códigos más allá del informático. Distinguimos tres planos analíticos que sirven para conceptualizar de forma holística y sistemática el proyecto Decidim: un plano político, uno tecnopolítico, y un plano técnico. Decidim emerge como ejemplo de lo que denominamos “redes políticas” caracterizadas, frente a las “redes social…Read more
  •  10
  •  3
    Personal Autonomy and (Digital) Technology: An Enactive Sensorimotor Framework
    with Marta Pérez-Verdugo
    Philosophy and Technology 36 (4): 1-28. 2023.
    Many digital technologies, designed and controlled by intensive data-driven corporate platforms, have become ubiquitous for many of our daily activities. This has raised political and ethical concerns over how they might be threatening our personal autonomy. However, not much philosophical attention has been paid to the specific role that their hyper-designed (sensorimotor) interfaces play in this regard. In this paper, we aim to offer a novel framework that can ground personal autonomy on senso…Read more