Conference Agenda

The relationship between cognitive enhancement and the extended mind thesis (EM) has traditionally been viewed through an optimistic lens, particularly by thinkers who see technological integration as a path to expanded cognitive capabilities. This paper challenges that straightforward optimism by identifying a specific form of epistemic loss that can occur through excessive technological cognitive extension. While acknowledging EM’s compelling account of how cognitive processes and dispositional states can be constituted partly by environmental elements, including technological artefacts, I argue that an exacerbated reliance on such extension may lead to a particular type of ignorance that has been overlooked in current discussions.

The analysis begins by examining how EM, as conceived by Clark and Chalmers (1998), operates at both the cognitive process and dispositional state levels, establishing how technological artefacts can legitimately form part of our cognitive systems under specific conditions. I then engage with Pritchard’s (2022) critique of the technology-induced ignorance thesis, which argues that cognitive extension through technology does not necessarily lead to increased ignorance since knowledge and true beliefs can still be acquired through extended processes. However, I demonstrate that Pritchard’s analysis, while valuable, misses a crucial dimension of potential epistemic loss: cognitive phenomenology.

The paper’s central contribution is the identification and analysis of how technological cognitive extension, even while preserving or enhancing propositional knowledge, may lead to ignorance about the qualitative experience of performing cognitive tasks. Drawing on theories of cognitive phenomenology - the experiential qualities associated with thinking, reasoning, and understanding - I argue that when cognitive tasks are increasingly delegated to technological artefacts, we risk losing touch with the experiential qualia of performing these operations ourselves. This represents a distinct form of ignorance not about propositional content, but about what it feels like to engage in cognitive processes directly.

This argument advances beyond current discussions of extended cognition and technological enhancement by highlighting a previously unexamined trade-off in cognitive extension. While we may gain efficiency and expanded capabilities through technological integration, we simultaneously risk becoming ignorant of the phenomenological dimension of cognitive activity - the subjective experience of what it is like to calculate, deduce, or remember by our own means. This insight has significant implications for how we conceptualize cognitive enhancement and raises important questions about the value we place on preserving direct cognitive experiences in an increasingly technology-mediated world.

The paper concludes by considering the broader implications of this analysis for discussions of cognitive enhancement, suggesting that a more nuanced approach to technological integration might be needed - one that balances the benefits of extended cognition with the preservation of direct cognitive experiences and their associated phenomenology. This work contributes to ongoing debates in the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and philosophy of technology while opening new avenues for investigating the relationship between technological enhancement and human cognitive experience.

Once praised as a beacon for open exchange and the promise for a truly deliberative polity, the Internet, with its echo chambers, conspiracy theories, and uncivil communication practices, is now often considered a threat to the very foundations of liberal democracy. Online discourse seems helplessly polarized and abrasive—and political conflict in the digital world (subsequently ‘digital conflict’) insurmountable. Technology ‘pessimists’ in the phenomenological literature explain these shortfalls by the very nature of the virtual: disembodied digital spaces simply do not allow for meaningful encounters between persons (e.g., Dreyfus 2008; Fuchs 2014). If meaningful engagement is precluded, so is resolving our quarrels. Other scholars hold that the body and other-understanding still reach into the digital world (e.g., Ekdahl & Ravn 2022; Osler 2020, 2021), albeit potentially in a modified form. The work of such ‘optimists’ suggests that dysfunctional conflict is not inevitable. Yet, these authors focus on the harmonious aspects of online sociality or on ludic forms of competition (e.g., videogames). How does political conflict, i.e., strife where matters of existential concern are at stake, complicate the picture? This paper presents initial findings of the three-year research project ‘Virtual Battlefields: Political Conflict in Digital Spaces’ currently running at the University of Hamburg. Based on qualitative data from interviews with politicians, activists, and journalists, it relies on an existential-phenomenological account of political conflict construed as a co-occurrence of different types of normative claims. The political agent is always first and foremost a political patient, called to adjudicate between different reasons coming their way. How do digital places have to be structured, so that the different forms of normativity of the political world—i.e., me-reasons, thou-reasons, we-reasons, they-reasons—can come to the fore? Moreover, as an instance of critical phenomenology, the paper investigates how logics of power, so familiar to us from the analogue world, continue to affect interactions on Facebook, WhatsApp, or Zoom. How does the social location of the user with respect to their occupation, gender, or race impact their experience? Are these differences stable across digital platforms? If need be, can these platforms be changed to make digital conflict more constructive; or do we need to dismantle them altogether? This paper will give some first, tentative answers to these questions.

References

Dreyfus, Hubert L. 2008. On the Internet. 2nd ed. Thinking in Action. London: Routledge.

Ekdahl, David, and Susanne Ravn. 2022. “Social Bodies in Virtual Worlds: Intercorporeality in Esports.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 21 (2): 293–316. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09734-1.

Fuchs, Thomas. 2014. “The Virtual Other: Empathy in the Age of Virtuality.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 21 (5–6): 152–73.

Osler, Lucy. 2020. “Feeling Togetherness Online: A Phenomenological Sketch of Online Communal Experiences.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 19 (3): 569–88. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-019-09627-4.

———. 2021. “Taking Empathy Online.” Inquiry, 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2021.1899045.

criminal law has many goals. It is a branch of law that serves multiple and varied purposes such as preventing crime in general, avoiding punishing innocents, rehabilitating offenders, and bringing justice. From another perspective, its role could be described as necessary for achieving and maintaining social order (on the aims of criminal law, see e.g. Hart 1958). It is a specific kind of law that has a unique role in societies (on criminal law exceptionalism (cf. Burchard and Duff 2023)). Because of its unique role, according to Lima, criminal law may not be the appropriate legal branch to respond to the wrongdoings of AI agents if such agents cannot satisfy the requirements of criminal responsibility. He wondered whether administrative law or a "whole new subject of law in-between" should be adopted to deal with AI-related harm. (Lima 2017, 696) His concern was that employing criminal law to respond to events may have unintended consequences that undermine common understanding of what criminal law is and what it can do. I will defend the thesis that promotes a legal response to the crimes of robots by criminal law.

For that purpose, I will introduce and defend the phenomenological account of criminal law. This account has explanatory value, facilitating response to robot crime, and what is more it has the potential to advance the discussion on robots. It allows for a better understanding of criminal law such as its history, role of (social) media, and for a reasoned response to challenges such as the growing skepticism (in the literature) regarding the moral responsibility of humans (see e.g. G. Caruso 2021). Accordingly, what is counted as criminal law could change over time: some behaviors such as “wrongdoings” of animals, might be classified as criminal at some historical point (see e.g. Holsinger 2009), and then disappear from the radar. Furthermore, the account is flexible: it could also accommodate responses to the crimes of minors and to corporate crimes; it could accommodate the idea of introducing posthumous punishment (punishment after death) (Melissaris 2017); and it could react to new issues such as those related to the deployment of robots. The fluidity that is embedded in the account could help in responding to new changes in society, as well as forcing constant evaluation of reality in order to adjust criminal law to new challenges. This objective marks a shift in the current discussion in focusing not on the agent that might be held responsible, but rather on the aims of criminal law that might be realized if it is employed.

References:

Burchard, Christoph, and Antony Duff. 2023. “Criminal Law Exceptionalism: Introduction.” Criminal Law and Philosophy 17 (1): 3–4. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-021-09612-6.

Caruso, Gregg. 2021. “Skepticism About Moral Responsibility.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2021. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/skepticism-moral-responsibility/.

Hart, Henry M. Jr. 1958. “The Aims of the Criminal Law Sentencing.” Law and Contemporary Problems 23 (3): 401–41.

Holsinger, Bruce. 2009. “Of Pigs and Parchment: Medieval Studies and the Coming of the Animal.” PMLA 124 (2): 616–23. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2009.124.2.616.

Lima, Dafni. 2017. “Could AI Agents Be Held Criminally Liable: Artificial Intelligence and the Challenges for Criminal Law.” South Carolina Law Review 69 (3): 677–96.

Mamak, Kamil. 2023. Robotics, AI and Criminal Law: Crimes against Robots. Routledge.

Melissaris, Emmanuel. 2017. “Posthumous ‘Punishment’: What May Be Done About Criminal Wrongs After the Wrongdoer’s Death?” Criminal Law and Philosophy 11 (2): 313–29. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-015-9373-2.