​Abstract
There are two fundamental models to understanding the phenomenon of natural life. One is the computational model, which is based on the symbolic thinking paradigm. The other is the biological organism model. The common difficulty attributed to these paradigms is that their reductive tools allow the phenomenological aspects of experience to remain hidden behind yes/no responses (behavioral tests), or brain ‘pictures’ (neuroimaging). Hence, one of the problems regards how to overcome methodological difficulties towards a non-reductive investigation of conscious experience. It is our aim in this paper to show how cooperation between Eastern and Western traditions may shed light for a non-reductive study of mind and life. This study focuses on the first-person experience associated with cognitive and mental events. We studied phenomenal data as a crucial fact for the domain of living beings, which, we expect, can provide the ground for a subsequent third-person study. The intervention with Jhana meditation, and its qualitative assessment, provided us with experiential profiles based upon subjects' evaluations of their own conscious experiences. The overall results should move towards an integrated or global perspective on mind where neither experience nor external mechanisms have the final word.

The Mind-Technology Problem - Investigating Minds, Selves and 21st Century Artifacts
 
We invite chapter contributions for the volume “The Mind-Technology Problem – Investigating Minds, Selves and 21st Century Artifacts” forthcoming in the book series Studies in Brain and Mind (Springer). This book explores the relation between philosophy of mind and emerging technologies. Technologies that only recently seemed to be science fiction are becoming part of everyday life. Our life is increasingly saturated with 'smart' artifacts. The ubiquitous and mobile Internet amounts to a radically new epistemic and cognitive environment which we already inhabit. This smart environment is saturated with artificial intelligence systems that not only guide us to information on the Internet, but are transforming the way we inhabit the non-virtual realm: the home, the urban environment and beyond. 

In the process, these technologies may be viewed as a form of rapidly evolving cognitive enhancement (Schneider, 2016, Heersmink, 2015). They may also be radically changing the human cognitive profile (Schneider and Mandik, 2016, Clowes, 2015; Clark, 2007) including the possibility of mind uploading (Corabi and Schneider, 2012). Some see these trends as deeply worrying, undermining a raft of our cognitive and social capacities (Carr, 2010; Turkle, 2011). Others see the relationship as a more of a continuum with the long history of artifactually led, cognitive evolution of human beings (Malafouris, 2013; Clark, 2003). 

These technologies appear to have important implications for the human mind, sense of identity and even perhaps what we think human beings are. Other technological tendencies may stretch our ideas further toward super-intelligence, (within the skin) cognitive enhancements, and more distantly perhaps, machine consciousness. Yet while ideas of artificial general intelligence, cognitive enhancements and a smart environment are widely commented on, a serious analysis of their philosophical implications is only now getting started. 

In this edited volume, we seek the best philosophical analysis of what current and near future 21st technology means for the metaphysics of mind. Some of the questions still open include: Should the adoption or incorporation of current technologies, such as smart phones or wearable gadgets be viewed as enhancements or diminishments of the human mind? Or is such a framework too restricted? Might they transform the sorts of self-knowledge available to us, or what self-knowledge is? Might the use of such gadgetry force us to rethink the boundary between human beings and technology, or indeed enduring philosophical questions such as personal identity or what the self is? According to various theories of personal identity, are radical cognitive enhancements even compatible with personal survival? 

In thinking about minds, there is a common tendency to define the ontological status of the mind in terms of whatever is the latest technology. The computational model of mind has certainly been one of the most influential and is currently undergoing important challenges and challenging reinventions (Schneider and Mandik, 2016). Is the notion that the mind or self as a program, which often guides public and philosophical discussions, metaphysically well founded? Whether or not our minds are actually computational, our ability to interface with machines, from virtual reality technologies such as Oculus Rift to our smart-phones and wearable gadgetry, are undergoing a profound shift and are rapidly reshaping the metaphors and concepts philosophers use to think about minds and the conclusion they draw (Metzinger, 2009; Chalmers, 2007). 

As a follow up of our “Minds, Selves and 21st Century Technology” meeting in Lisbon (http://mindandcognition.weebly.com/mind-selves-and-technology.html), we seek high quality submissions that investigate the philosophical implications of the engagement between 21st century technology, metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. We are especially interested in submissions that do not indulge in extensive futuristic speculation but focus on current or near-ready technologies which are already changing the shape of the human (and machine) cognitive landscape and our philosophical understanding of mind. Research question include the following: 
 
Extended Mind, Extended Cognition, Distributed self: 
· How should we think of distributed and extended memory in the context of 21st century technology? 
· Can artifacts make possible new forms of extended self-knowledge? What are the consequences of artifacts—for instance, the ubiquitous smart-phone—for notions such as the minimal self, the narrative self, or the distributed self? 
· What is the role of cognitive artifacts in the cognitive enhancement debate? 
 
 
Metaphysics of the mind: 
· Does the current state of the art of machine consciousness, brain enhancement or smart ambient technology warrant predictions and extrapolations on questions like personal identity, privacy, super intelligence, etc. many want to make? 
· Does current work in this realm tell us anything about phenomenal consciousness? The organization of mind? The possibility of artificial minds? 
· Do hierarchical predictive processing systems support the theoretical literature on the metaphysics of mind (mind, big data, minds online, deep minds)? 
 
 
Radical Brain Enhancement and Uploading: 
· Would an uploaded mind be me? Is mind uploading a myth? 
· Does radical brain enhancement challenge our sense of self, personal identity and / or humanity? 
 
 
Confirmed authors 
Susan Schneider (University of Connecticut) 
Gualtiero Piccinini (University of Missouri – St. Louis) 
Mark Bickhard (Lehigh University) 
Paul Smart (University of Southampton) 
Richard Heersmink (Macquarie University) 
Ron Chrisley (University of Sussex) 
Georg Theiner (Vilanova University) 
Keith Frankish (University of Crete) 
Gerald Vision (Temple University) 
 
Papers should not exceed 8,000 words. 
 
We especially encourage researchers who are women and/or underrepresented minorities to submit
 
For further questions please contact the editors: Robert W. Clowes (robert.clowes@gmail.com), Klaus Gärtner (klga@gmx.de), or Inês Hipólito (hipolito.ines@gmail.com) 
 
Please send your contributions to hipolito.ines@gmail.com. 
 
Deadline: 31st of January, 2018 
 
References 
Carr, N. (2010). The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember. London: Atlantic Books. 
Chalmers, D. (2007). Forward to Supersizing the Mind Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
Clark, A. (2003). Natural Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence. New York: Oxford University Press. 
Clark, A. (2007). Re-inventing ourselves: The plasticity of embodiment, sensing, and mind. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 32(3), 263-282. 
Clowes, R. W. (2015). Thinking in the cloud: The Cognitive Incorporation of Cloud-Based Technology. Philosophy and Technology, 28, Issue 2,(2), 261-296. 
Corabi, J., & Schneider, S. (2012). Metaphysics of Uploading. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 19 (7):26. 
Heersmink, R. (2015). Extended mind and cognitive enhancement: moral aspects of cognitive artifacts. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1-16. 
Malafouris, L. (2013). How Things Shape the Mind: MIT Press. 
Metzinger, T. (2009). The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self: Basic Books. 
Schneider, S. (Ed.). (2016). Science fiction and philosophy: from time travel to superintelligence. John Wiley & Sons. 
Schneider, S., & Mandik, P. (2016). How philosophy of mind can shape the future. Philosophy of Mind in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. London: Routledge. 
Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books. 

Empedocles is the first to bring forth a theory of color. In color vision, he says, the eye somehow takes in, or physically ‘ingests’ material effluences emitted by the distal object. Demokritos further attempted to explain the characteristics of particular colors by reference to the characteristics of the atoms constituting them. Like Demokritos, Plato also reckoned with self-radiating objects; but Plato thought that their rays meet and mingle with the pure fire (rays) placed in all human eyes by the gods. In the Timaeus, Plato states that particles coming from other bodies fall upon the sight. Thus seeing (or not seeing) depends on the size, strength and speed of the rays emanating from the objects, while perception of the various colors depends also on that process (see Benson, 2000).
​
Aristotle rejected the notion that a fiery ray emanated from the eye and reflected back from the objects to create sight—on the grounds that if this were so, night vision would be normal. By the same token he objected to the theory of emanations from objects, since the eye does not perceive them when the objects are pressed against the closed eye. He postulated the necessity of a medium between the eye and its percept, and reached back to the Presocratic translucence (diaphanes), which exists in water, air and translucent objects. Light is the agent (energeia) that reveals translucence as an incorporeal state ranging from bright to dark. Insofar as this flows into objects it ceases being mere light and reveals color as well as their substantiality. The color of the object in turn puts the medium itself in motion and this is transmitted to the eye. Obviously, the role of light is to make this process possible, but Aristotle attributes no movement to it, whereas the resulting color is an activator (kinetikon) of the medium (Benson, 2000). Aristotle’s theory of color contrasts thus with Empedocles[1] and Plato, in the sense that “the assimilation of the sensible form without the matter of the perceived object” is how Aristotle defines perception: “color is a power to move, or alter, what is transparent”. He draws a clear distinction between the physiological activity in the eye and the sensory presentation of color to the perceptive part of the soul. Aristotle conceives of light as incorporeal activity. It is a state of a potentially transparent medium, a state akin to, or equivalent to, a state of illumination.

For Aristotle, a substance together with its accidents forms a certain whole. The whole would seem to be such that substance is the first part, after which come quality, quantity, and the other accidents (Metaph. XII, in init.) (Brentano, 1981, p. 82). Aristotle is convinced that whole and part can never be actual simultaneously. At the root of his theory of categories is a theory of the relation of whole and part. If the whole is actual, then the part is merely potential. How does this applies to a thing extended in space? Conceptually, the accident always contains the substance, hence the real unity of the accident. Concept red contains, in Aristotle’s view, the concept colored, and the concept colored contains the concept sensibly qualitative. What is in question in Aristotle’s theory of categories is thus that it is not the plurality of individual parts; rather all attributes entering into the definition determine one and the same individual. Like any other scientific terms, “category” as undergone several changes of meaning in the course of history, Brentano himself disagreed in several arguments with Aristotle (see Brentano, 1981, part II pp. 81-89). Nevertheless, “this much is certain: he [Aristotle] thought that there was a sense of the term being for each category; and in making the classification, he wanted to distinguish as many different senses of being” (Brentano, 1981, p. 90). Thus, to arrive at the true understanding of perception, we must see the distinction between a subject and that which the subject underlies, such as sensible, quality, place, real time, extension, shape, – in fact, substantial determinations.


[1] For a detailed analysis, see Kalderon, M. E. (2015). Form without matter: Empedocles and Aristotle on color perception. OUP Oxford.

References
Aristotle, (1998). Metaphysics translated with an introduction by H. Lawson-Tancred. Penguin.
Benson, J. L. (2000). Greek color theory. Greek Color Theory and the Four Elements, 6. Art, Architecture & Art History at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst.
Brentano, F. (1981). The Theory of Categories. Melbourne International Philosophy Series, Vol. 8. London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.


 

I am delighted to share with you what Valeria and I have been up to. Our paper, Predictive engagement and motor intentionality, will be shortly published in the philosophical Esercizi Filosofici. We are happy how the MS turned out after the insightful comments of the anonymous reviewers, and we are also very thankful to the Lisbon Mind and Cognition Group.
We aimed to show that motor intentionality, as the underlying ground for social cognition, can be explained through the predictive engagement model. Sensorimotor processes seem to play central roles in social interaction, cognition and language, or at least this is the hypothesis that we trace here. We start by questioning the phenomenological role of the body in social cognition, to further investigate a causal neural explanation. In order to do so, we link the role of the body and intercorporeality with recent findings in philosophy of neuroscience under the predictive brain hypothesis. The living body seems to entertain a dialogical and enactive relationship with the surrounding context, as well as with neural circuits actively responding to external stimuli, which is why, in our perspective,  the body,  configured as a living organism, and not as mere biological substratum, offers to phenomenology and empirical sciences further confirmations of the possibility and need for a cooperation.

Have a look on the paper here, comments more than welcome. ​