Creative Language Technologies Roxana Girju

This is episode #31 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 27th of April, 2023.

My invited guest this month is Tony Chemero,  a Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Cincinnati (UC), and a primary member of both the Center for Cognition, Action, and Perception and the Strange Tools Research Lab. In his research, both philosophical and empirical, he addresses questions related to nonlinear dynamical modeling, ecological psychology, complex systems, phenomenology, and social cognition. He is the author of more than 100 articles and the books Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (2009, MIT Press) and, with Stephan Käufer, Phenomenology (2015, Polity Press; second edition, 2021).

In this episode, I asked Tony to introduce the field of econogical psychology and share his views on its potential importance to artificial intelligence (details are provided in the interview notes).

Here is the show.

Show Notes:
- Ecological psychology (definition and importance) vs. traditional cognitive science
- The replication crisis in psychology
- Is ecological psychology a science?
- The concept of affordances: definition matters
- Interpersonal synergies and alignment systems (especially online) and their implication for interface design and AI
- Can AI help us understand one another? Can ecological psychology help us design platforms that support social connections online?
- Ecological psychology and the Metaverse

Tony’s books:
Radical Embodied Cognitive Science:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516471/radical-embodied-cognitive-science/

Phenomenology: An Introduction, 2nd Edition:
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Phenomenology:+An+Introduction,+2nd+Edition-p-9781509540655

This is episode #30 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 23rd of March, 2023. 
A couple of month ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Stephen Fleming, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Royal Society at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, where he leads the Metacognition Group. He is also a Group Leader at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Principal Investigator at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging. The group’s research focuses on understanding the relationship between objective measures (behaviour and brain activity) and subjective experience and metacognition. Steve’s research on metacognition has been recognised by several early career awards including the British Academy Wiley Prize in Psychology (2016), a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Psychology (2018), and the British Psychological Society Spearman Medal (2019). He was a previous Executive Director of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (2014-2020), and is an editor at the journals PNAS Nexus and Mind and Language. He writes widely for a general audience, including articles for Aeon, New Scientist and Scientific American, and is the author of Know Thyself, a trade book on the science of metacognition.
In the interview, we touched on various aspects of metacognition as well as on its connection to artificial intelligence (details are provided in the notes from the interview).
Here is the show.

Show Notes:
- Metacognition (definition and objective measures)
- Metacognition vs. intelligence
- Strategies to improve our metacognitive awareness and abilities: self-assessment vs. external feedback
- Explainable AI (can metacognition help us design AI that can explain how it reached its decision?)
- Current large language models (GPT-3, chatGPT) and some of their problems
- Social media: how would knowledge of meta-cognition can help us design spaces that support social connections  (and how to reduce misinformation online)
- The promise of artificial therapy
- The objective and the subjective (How should / can objective science make room for the subjective in its own right?)

Steve’s books and lab:
Know Thyself https://www.amazon.com/Know-Thyself-Self-Awareness-Stephen-Fleming/dp/1541672844
The MetaLab http://metacoglab.org/

This is episode #29 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 16th of February, 2023.

A couple of month ago, I had the pleasure to interview Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, a scientist with a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence).  Bernardo is particularly known for his work at the forefront of the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental. Covered in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured on 'Scientific American,' the 'Institute of Art and Ideas,' the 'Blog of the American Philosophical Association' and 'Big Think,' among others. Bernardo is also the executive director of Essentia Foundation, an information hub that identifies and helps to promote scientific and philosophical work relevant to metaphysical idealism or nondualism. In the interview, we touched on various aspects of these topics as well as on their connection to artificial intelligence (details are provided in the notes from the interview).
Here is the show.

Show Notes:
- Theories of (perception of) reality: what is reality and how we make sense of it
- Content representations explained
- How to make room for the subjective (value, meaning, intention, purpose, etc.) in the physical world
- The false mind-matter dichotomy and its connection to language
- AI, its representation(s) of the world, and its illusions
- Augmented reality
- Approaches to AI
- The tension between science and experience
- How to best investigate experience and the first-person perspective
- How (and even should) we bring the subjective in science?
- The isolation of AI: Consequences of losing the ‘Renaissance Man’

Essentia Foundation: https://www.essentiafoundation.org
Media info here: https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/media.html

This is episode #28 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 26th of December, 2022.

My invited speaker is Dr. Erik Myin, professor of philosophy at the University of Antwerp. He has published extensively on philosophy of mind and cognition, sometimes alone, sometimes with scientists or other philosophers. With Dan Hutto he wrote "Radicalizing Enactivism" and "Evolving Enactivism", both published with MIT Press. In these books, they defend the point that cognition is embodied interaction rather than being necessarily computational or representational. Currently, Erik has just finished writing a co-authored book in Dutch on embodiment and technology, and has started a solo work titled "Of a Different Mind".

The focus of our discussion is REC, the Radical Enactive or Embodied view of Cognition, and the ways in which it departs from traditional intellectual positions. Specifically, Erik debates the idea of contextual mental representations and the fact that one can explain cognition in terms of mental representations inside the brain. Instead, all these ways of representing are embodied, the result of socio-cultural practices.

The second part of the interview covered the future of digital technologies (including immersive technologies like mixed reality and artificial intelligence) — and if/how they can be (re)shaped by embodied cognitive science.

Here is the show.

Show Notes:
- What is REC (the Radical Enactive or Embodied view of Cognition)
- Contentful mental representations and traditional views on cognition
- The normatively of memory and the Information Processing Theory
- The role of REC in the future of technology

Erik Myin’s website:
https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/staff/erik-myin/

This is episode #27 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 17th of November, 2022. 
My invited speaker today is Dr. Mark James, a philosopher and theoretical cognitive scientist who adopts an embodied approach to questions about the development of habits in both individuals and collectives. Specifically, he is interested in how the designed world shapes such habits, and how we can leverage this understanding to address questions of well-being. More recently, Mark has begun researching how psychological flexibility, our ability to switch between habits, is scaffolded by our bodies and environments. Mark hosts the Connectomics podcast, wherein he speaks with theorists and practitioners about the intersection of embodied cognitive science, culture, technology and design. Mark is also a meditator, musician and martial artist, and a lover of good stories.
We started the show talking about his journey in this field and then delved deeper into aspects of Embodied Cognitive Science and its methodologies. We also looked into ways of studying subjective experience scientifically, and debated if subjective experience can be intersubjectively verified. Mark also elaborated Tom Froese’s proposal for an Irruption Theory of Consciousness, a new theory of consciousness that integrates an embodied-enactive account of basic mind with radical formulations of the freedom and efficacy of intentional agency.
The second part of the interview covered the future of digital technologies (including immersive technologies like mixed reality and artificial intelligence) — and if/how they can be (re)shaped by embodied cognitive science. 
Here is the show.
Show Notes:
- Embodied Cognitive Science - definition and methodologies
- The scientific study of subjective experience
- Can subjective experience be intersubjectively verified?
- Tom Froese’s proposal for an Irruption Theory of Consciousness
- The future of digital technologies (including immersive technologies like MR and AI) 
The Connectomics podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/connectomics/id1606319926
www.markmjames.com

This is episode #26 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 29th of September, 2022. 
Today I sat down with Dr. Andrea Macrae, a researcher in the fields of cognitive narratology and stylistics at Oxford Brookes University, in Oxford, England.  She works on literature and on non-literary discourse - most recently the discourse of charity fundraising. In her research she studies the relationships between text, readers' interpretations, and broader socio-cultural narratives and ways of thinking.
Our discussion theme was the discourse of charity fundraising — a timely topic, as we live in a hyperconnected world where everybody fights for our attention. Specifically, we talked about the role of charity fundraising letters and touched on how research within the sector has only recently begun to connect with theories of narrative. This was important to address given some disconnect between the strategies employed by academic philanthropic researchers and charities   on how to measure the engagement with the beneficiary’s story that would eventually drive donation. 
The second part of the interview covered the the future of digital technologies as contributing to storytelling for non-profit fundraising. Although virtual reality (VR) has already started to play an important role in charity fundraising, Andrea believes that traditional fundraising letters are here to stay.
Here is the show.

Show Notes:
- the discourse of charity fundraising and fundraising letters
- some disconnect between the strategies employed by academic philanthropic researchers and charities on how to measure the engagement
- the role of empathy in the context of charity fundraising letters; the shift from individual to ‘universal compassion’
- the future of digital technologies as contributing to storytelling for non-profit fundraising (next 10-20 years)
- engagement with the donors in immersive environments (AR/VR)
- ethical implications of individual’s story as representative of others

Relevant papers:
Andrea Macrae; Small Stories in Charity Fundraising Letters and the Ethics of Interwoven Individualism. Poetics Today 1 June 2022; 43 (2): 219–241.

Link to Dr. Macrae’s professional webpage: https://www.brookes.ac.uk/profiles/staff/andrea-macrae