The reappearing tool: transparency, smart technology, and the extended mind

Embodiment in online psychotherapy: A qualitative study

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many therapists and patients have been required to switch to online sessions in order to continue their treatments. Online psychotherapy has become increasingly popular, and although its efficacy seems to be similar to face-to-face encounters, its capacity to support the implicit nonverbal and embodied aspects of the therapeutic relationship has been questioned and remains understudied.

OBJECTIVES

To study how embodied and intersubjective processes are modified in online psychotherapy sessions.

DESIGN

Taking the enactive concept of participatory sense-making as a guiding thread, we designed an interpretative phenomenological analysis to examine the experiences of embodiment in online therapy.

METHODS

We conducted phenomenological semi-structured interviews with patients and therapists who have recently switched from face-to-face encounters to online modality.

RESULTS

Adjustments in verbal and nonverbal behavior, gaze behavior, management of silences, and displacements of non-intentional and pre-reflective patterns onto reflective ones are reported as necessary to compensate for changes introduced in the online modality.

CONCLUSIONS

From an enactive perspective, such adaptations manifest regulatory processes aimed at sustaining interactive dynamics and coordinating the primordial tension between relational and individual norms in social encounters.

PRACTITIONER POINTS

We examine different aspects of embodiment that practitioners should take into account when switching from face-to-face to online encounters with their clients. Online communication systems can alter aspects of the therapeutic relationship, such as its structure, its fragility, and its significance. Video calls afford new forms of intervention such as integrating the experience of patients with their self-image, incorporating information about their habitual environment into the process, and adopting less confrontational therapeutic styles.

Varieties of transparency: exploring agency within AI systems

AI systems play an increasingly important role in shaping and regulating the lives of millions of human beings across the world. Calls for greater transparency from such systems have been widespread. However, there is considerable ambiguity concerning what "transparency" actually means, and therefore, what greater transparency might entail. While, according to some debates, transparency requires seeing through the artefact or device, widespread calls for transparency imply seeing into different aspects of AI systems. These two notions are in apparent tension with each other, and they are present in two lively but largely disconnected debates. In this paper, we aim to further analyse what these calls for transparency entail, and in so doing, clarify the sorts of transparency that we should want from AI systems. We do so by offering a taxonomy that classifies different notions of transparency. After a careful exploration of the different varieties of transparency, we show how this taxonomy can help us to navigate various domains of human-technology interactions, and more usefully discuss the relationship between technological transparency and human agency. We conclude by arguing that all of these different notions of transparency should be taken into account when designing more ethically adequate AI systems.

Varieties of Artifacts: Embodied, Perceptual, Cognitive, and Affective

The primary goal of this essay is to provide a comprehensive overview and analysis of the various relations between material artifacts and the embodied mind. A secondary goal of this essay is to identify some of the trends in the design and use of artifacts. First, based on their functional properties, I identify four categories of artifacts co-opted by the embodied mind, namely (a) embodied artifacts, (b) perceptual artifacts, (c) cognitive artifacts, and (d) affective artifacts. These categories can overlap and so some artifacts are members of more than one category. I also identify some of the techniques (or skills) we use when interacting with artifacts. Identifying these categories of artifacts and techniques allows us to map the landscape of relations between embodied minds and the artifactual world. Second, having identified categories of artifacts and techniques, this essay then outlines some of the trends in the design and use of artifacts, focusing on neuroprosthetics, brain-computer interfaces, and personalization algorithms nudging their users toward particular epistemic paths of information consumption.

Overcoming the Past-endorsement Criterion: Toward a Transparency-Based Mark of the Mental

Starting from the discussion on the original set of criteria advanced by Clark and Chalmers (1998) meant to avoid the overextension of the mind, or the so-called cognitive bloat, we will sketch our solution to the problem of criteria evaluation, by connecting it to the search for a mark of the mental. Our proposal is to argue for a “weak conscientialist” mark of the mental based on transparent access, which vindicates the role of consciousness in defining what is mental without, however, identifying the mental with the conscious. This renovated link between mind and consciousness, spelled out through the concept of transparency, further develops some of our previous work on the topic (Di Francesco, 2007; Di Francesco and Piredda, 2012) and is partially inspired by Horgan and Kriegel (2008).