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