Papers by Melina Gastelum
Frontiers in psychology, Feb 9, 2024
The conventional dichotomy between human health and disease has historically been approached thro... more The conventional dichotomy between human health and disease has historically been approached through reductionist models that emphasize the exclusive causal relevance of physiological and pathological processes. Consequently, self-awareness and affective dimensions, integral to a phenomenological perspective, are often relegated to secondary traits, affording little consideration for the causal role of embodied living organization. Our interest lies in exploring the potential relevance of the phenomenology of embodied self-awareness in relation to interoceptive processes within therapeutic settings. As we illustrate, when the unfolding processes of interoceptive awareness and its affective capacity take precedence, the agent assumes an active, rather than passive, role in their own experience of health or illness. Departing from an enactive, phenomenological, and ecological standpoint, we propose a distinctive perspective on interoceptive processes, relying on an affective conceptualization of a spectrum of experiences of bodily being-in-the-world. Our primary argument posits that considering interoceptive processes from an embodied and ecological viewpoint of the self, interacting with the material and social environment, enables an approach to the gradient of affective experiences of embodied self-awareness-where pleasure or suffering is perceived and felt-in a naturalized, non-reductive, and relational manner. We discern two ways in which interoceptive processes interrelate with the experience of embodied selfawareness: sensitivity (self-affective) and affective-laden perception. Drawing on this distinction, we provide a nuanced description of these experiences within communities of cis-women, exemplified through the contexts of menstruation and endometriosis. This exploration seeks to enhance our understanding of the phenomenology of embodied, ecological, and affective self-experience from within diverse and situated bodies. The goal is to contribute to their autonomy and ability to adapt and self-regulate within therapeutic contexts.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2024
In this article, we explore behaviour settings that enable reasoning and the diversity of constra... more In this article, we explore behaviour settings that enable reasoning and the diversity of constraints that not only limit but also make these behaviour settings possible. We focus specifically on reasoning and surveying how behaviour settings allow for the generation of norms of action that are nevertheless differentiated by geographies and sociocultural systems. These geographies and sociocultural systems involve diverse trajectories for reasoning even within similar behaviour settings. We will touch on places for reasoning like Twitter, social movements, traditional knowledge and laboratories set up for experimentation on our reasoning abilities. We will show how these places and the behaviour settings that emerge in them can be studied in terms of the complexity of the interactions between their participants and in terms of enabling constraints. This article is part of the theme issue 'People, places, things, and communities: expanding behaviour settings theory in the twenty-first century'.
Andamios, 2024
En este artículo queremos enriquecer una mirada de la educación intercultural que pueda utilizar ... more En este artículo queremos enriquecer una mirada de la educación intercultural que pueda utilizar las conceptualizaciones de la cognición 4E (enactiva, embebida, corporizada y extendida). Seguimos la idea de que la educación se puede entender como co- munidad de prácticas situadas. Argüimos que la perspectiva de las prácticas adquiere un sentido desde la cognición 4E que ayudará a promover una epistemología educativa que no se cierne solamente sobre los procesos gnoseológicos, sino que pone en juego otras cate- gorías del entorno sociocultural que ayudan a otro tipo de reflexio- nes que lleven hacia una interculturalidad crítica, política y ética.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2024
The conventional dichotomy between human health and disease has historically been approached thro... more The conventional dichotomy between human health and disease has historically been approached through reductionist models that emphasize the exclusive causal relevance of physiological and pathological processes. Consequently, self-awareness and affective dimensions, integral to a phenomenological perspective, are often relegated to secondary traits, affording little consideration for the causal role of embodied living organization. Our interest lies in exploring the potential relevance of the phenomenology of embodied self-awareness in relation to interoceptive processes within therapeutic settings. As we illustrate, when the unfolding processes of interoceptive awareness and its affective capacity take precedence, the agent assumes an active, rather than passive, role in their own experience of health or illness. Departing from an enactive, phenomenological, and ecological standpoint, we propose a distinctive perspective on interoceptive processes, relying on an affective conceptualization of a spectrum of experiences of bodily being-in-the-world. Our primary argument posits that considering interoceptive processes from an embodied and ecological viewpoint of the self, interacting with the material and social environment, enables an approach to the gradient of affective experiences of embodied self-awareness—where pleasure or suffering is perceived and felt—in a naturalized, non-reductive, and relational manner. We discern two ways in which interoceptive processes interrelate with the experience of embodied self- awareness: sensitivity (self-affective) and affective-laden perception. Drawing on this distinction, we provide a nuanced description of these experiences within communities of cis-women, exemplified through the contexts of menstruation and endometriosis. This exploration seeks to enhance our understanding of the phenomenology of embodied, ecological, and affective self-experience from within diverse and situated bodies. The goal is to contribute to their autonomy and ability to adapt and self-regulate within therapeutic contexts.
Adaptive Behavior, Sep 25, 2018
Time perception has been typically investigated from cognitivism and internalist approaches. In t... more Time perception has been typically investigated from cognitivism and internalist approaches. In this opinion, I sketch an outline to suggest how time experience is constituted on the subjective interactions with the sociomaterial environment. For this purpose, I suggest that a 4E approach can answer better such issues.
arXiv (Cornell University), Feb 16, 2022
The violation of Bell inequalities is often interpreted as showing that, if hidden variables exis... more The violation of Bell inequalities is often interpreted as showing that, if hidden variables exist, they must be contextual and non local. But they can also be explained questioning the probability space employed, or the validity of the Kolmogorov axioms. In this article we explore the additional constrains which can be deduced from two widely used objetive probability theories: frequentism and propensities. One of the strongest objections in the deduction of one version of Bell inequalities goes about the probability space, which assumes the existence of values for the output of the experiment in each run, while only two of the four values can be measured each time, making them counterfactual. It is shown that frequentism rejects the possibility of using counterfactual situations, while long-run propensities allow their use. In this case the introduction of locality and contextuality does not help to explain the violation, and an alternative explanation could point to a failure of the probability. Single case propensities were designed to associate probabilities to single events, but they need to be conditional to the whole universe, and do not have a clear link with the observed relative frequencies. It heavily limits their use.
Contributions to hermeneutics, 2017
We argue that the understanding of space, as an extended, simultaneous totality, although useful ... more We argue that the understanding of space, as an extended, simultaneous totality, although useful in some scientific contexts, is not true to our embodied experiences of space. It is an abstraction, involving a de-temporalization of space that falsifies our experience. From the phenomenological-enactivist perspective, space is not already there, neutrally constituted in its objective extension; rather, it is enacted, put in place relative to action affordances that are both corporeal and intercorporeal. Moreover, these action affordances are permeated by an intrinsic temporality, so that the experience of space is fully temporal because it is fully embodied. Space, as the experienced phenomenon of a delimited embodied enactment, is also hermeneutically situated so that meaning emerges for the embodied agent just because of its dynamical relations to a set of physical and social affordances.
Frontiers in Psychology, Jun 16, 2020
In this paper I seek to unify enactive and ecological approaches to cognitive science by emphasiz... more In this paper I seek to unify enactive and ecological approaches to cognitive science by emphasizing the fact that both approaches view cognitive processes as being inherently temporally extended. My hypothesis is that characterizing the temporal scales in which perception of affordances occur, they can serve different purposes of explanation within the theories. Specifically, the paper brings together, on the one hand, Chemero's (2009) dynamicist understanding of affordances, which he called affordances 2.0, with, on the other hand, a distinction originally made by Varela (1999), and later taken up by Shaun Gallagher (2011, 2017b), between three different timescales for understanding cognition: the elementary, the integrative, and the narrative. Varela's threefold distinction was originally intended as a way of identifying phenomenological events as being causally coupled to specific cellular events happening within the nervous system. The central claim of the present paper is that affordances, likewise, should be understood in terms of these three different timescales. I show that these temporal scales can be a useful toolkit for explaining the perception and learning of affordances and at the same time unifying enactivism and ecological psychology claiming that affordances serve a different explanatory role depending on which time scale you consider them at. If you are interested in explaining the embodied assemblies that form the always changing sensorimotor contingencies, then you see the elementary scale. If you're interested in explaining perception at the integrative scale, then affordances are solicitations that get actualized and bear an umwelt at that same scale. The perception of affordances as such is constituted by the integration of these first two scales, and the experience of it can be characterized by the husserlian structure of experience with its intrinsic temporality. Finally, if you are interested in explaining change in the animal-environment system over developmental time, that is, learning, then affordances are roughly what Chemero proposed and they operate at the narrative scale. But it is important to say that the three scales are always intertwined because learning and perception are ongoing processes that in many senses are impossible to separate. Finally, I discuss the importance of scales from the macro to micro levels for understanding behavior through affordances, considering them as synergies, where abilities and aspects of the environment are understood as constraints on the potential trajectories of such systems.
ArtefaCToS. Revista de estudios sobre la ciencia y la tecnología
Comprender que los organismos multicelulares no son entes pasivos es esencial, por una parte, par... more Comprender que los organismos multicelulares no son entes pasivos es esencial, por una parte, para ampliar nuestro entendimiento sobre la evolución de las especies y, por otra, para esclarecer cómo percibimos e interactuamos en el mundo. Lo anterior se debe a que, a través de múltiples procesos y mecanismos ontogenéticos y filogenéticos, los organismos navegan activamente el ambiente en el que están inmersos. Sin embargo, a pesar del énfasis que actualmente se ha puesto en esta visión académica, una conducta que ha recibido poca atención en este debate, en el caso de los homínidos y particularmente en Homo sapiens, es el juego. En este trabajo contribuimos a dilucidar la importancia del juego en el proceso de construcción de nicho y la emergencia de la cognición, dos áreas fundamentales para la discusión contemporánea del pensamiento evolucionista y de las ciencias cognitivas corporizadas. Sostenemos que esta tarea es relevante debido a que el juego es un camino a través del cual di...
ArtefaCToS. Revista de estudios de la ciencia y la tecnología, 2023
Multicellular organisms are not passive entities. Understanding this is important to increase our... more Multicellular organisms are not passive entities. Understanding this is important to increase our knowledge about the evolution of species, and to clarify how we perceive and interact in the world. Through multiple mechanisms and processes involving developmental as well as phylogenetic dimensions, these organisms actively navigate their environments. Despite current academic interest in these viewpoints, though, play has not been a central topic in this discussion, particularly in hominids and specifically in Homo sapiens. In this work, we contribute to elucidate the importance of play for niche construction processes and for the emergence of cognition, two fundamental fields within contemporary debates in evolutionary thinking and embodied cognitive science. We claim this is relevant because play is a path through which a very large number of multicellular species inquire, know, build, and transform the world. In the first section, we situate the discussion, and we describe the structure of our arguments. Then, we present the importance of niche construction theory, and the definitions of cultural and developmental niches, to highlight the active role of organisms in modifying (selective and ontogenetic) environments. Later we explain the enactivist perspective and its implications concerning the dynamics, and the embodied and situated properties of organisms for the study of cognition. Afterward we highlight the value of play in this wideview of evolutionary and enactivist frameworks. Finally, we offer conclusions on the implications that this kind of research could have for diverse disciplines —e. g., biological anthropology, cognitive science, philosophy of biology or pedagogy.
RESISTANCES. Journal of the Philosophy of History, Dec 8, 2022
Conflict of interest No potential conflict of interest is reported by the authors. Funding Proyec... more Conflict of interest No potential conflict of interest is reported by the authors. Funding Proyecto PAPIIT IA400522 Cognición y teoría del conocimiento en el marco de la diversidad cultural: estudio sobre prácticas científicas y tecnológicas, funded by UNAM, Mexico Acknowledgments We aknowledge Cristina Horcasitas and Ximena Gonzalez for their reading and comments. Notes This article is product of a larger project project (PAPIIT IA400522 Cognición y teoría del conocimiento en el marco de la diversidad cultural: estudio sobre prácticas científicas y tecnológicas) and also part of the ongoing research of both the authors. A radical embodied perspective of autism: towards ethical, and inclusive views for cognitive diversities Una perspectiva radical encarnada del autismo: hacia puntos de vista éticos e inclusivos para las diversidades cognitivas
Ludus Vitalis Revista De Filosofia De Las Ciencias De La Vida Journal of Philosophy of Life Sciences Revue De Philosophie Des Sciences De La Vie, 2010
A radical embodied perspective of autism: towards ethical, and inclusive views for cognitive diversities, 2022
Conflict of interest No potential conflict of interest is reported by the authors. Funding Proyec... more Conflict of interest No potential conflict of interest is reported by the authors. Funding Proyecto PAPIIT IA400522 Cognición y teoría del conocimiento en el marco de la diversidad cultural: estudio sobre prácticas científicas y tecnológicas, funded by UNAM, Mexico Acknowledgments We aknowledge Cristina Horcasitas and Ximena Gonzalez for their reading and comments. Notes This article is product of a larger project project (PAPIIT IA400522 Cognición y teoría del conocimiento en el marco de la diversidad cultural: estudio sobre prácticas científicas y tecnológicas) and also part of the ongoing research of both the authors. A radical embodied perspective of autism: towards ethical, and inclusive views for cognitive diversities Una perspectiva radical encarnada del autismo: hacia puntos de vista éticos e inclusivos para las diversidades cognitivas
The violation of Bell inequalities is often interpreted as showing that, if hidden variables exis... more The violation of Bell inequalities is often interpreted as showing that, if hidden variables exist, they must be contextual and non local. But they can also be explained questioning the probability space employed, or the validity of the Kolmogorov axioms. In this article we explore the additional constrains which can be deduced from two widely used objetive probability theories: frequentism and propensities. One of the strongest objections in the deduction of one version of Bell inequalities goes about the probability space, which assumes the existence of values for the output of the experiment in each run, while only two of the four values can be measured each time, making them counterfactual. It is shown that frequentism rejects the possibility of using counterfactual situations, while long-run propensities allow their use. In this case the introduction of locality and contextuality does not help to explain the violation, and an alternative explanation could point to a failure of ...
La afordancia como herramienta epistémica y ontológica en la demarcación de los sistemas cognitiv... more La afordancia como herramienta epistémica y ontológica en la demarcación de los sistemas cognitivos desde las posturas situadas Resumen En la primera parte de este trabajo se da cuenta de ciertas demarcaciones que surgen cuando entendemos la cognición de una manera situada, sobre todo en una postura ecológica. Para ello, pretendo explicar brevemente las implicaciones de hablar de cognición situada, además de comprender la separación entre las visiones extendida y enculturada de la cognición, explicando en términos ontológicos y epistémicos las consecuencias que conlleva el hablar de los sistemas cognitivos en uno u otro sentido. En la segunda parte se propondrá como herramienta epistémica y ontológica a la afordancia para explicar fenómenos que se dan precisamente en estas fronteras difusas entre los sistemas cognitivos y el ambiente, explicando algunas posturas respecto a ella y decantándonos por una postura relacional por su aplicación para fenómenos cognitivos, particularmente ...
Adaptive Behavior, 2018
Time perception has been typically investigated from cognitivism and internalist approaches. In t... more Time perception has been typically investigated from cognitivism and internalist approaches. In this opinion, I sketch an outline to suggest how time experience is constituted on the subjective interactions with the sociomaterial environment. For this purpose, I suggest that a 4E approach can answer better such issues.
International Journal of Psychological Research, 2018
While popular within some cognitive science approaches, the embodiment approach has still found r... more While popular within some cognitive science approaches, the embodiment approach has still found resistance, particularly in light of evidence arguing against strong forms of embodiment. Among other things, the embodiment approach breaks away from the Cartesian ontology of the modulatory system. We claim that the advantages of the embodiment approach are: a) it grounds cognition into modal experience, b) it is harmonious with a materialist philosophy of mind (emergent materialism), and c) it is supported by experimental research in various fields. However, embodiment must still address abstractions, theoretical misunderstandings (representations vs non-representations) and neuroscientific findings that challenge the extension and relevance of sensorimotor properties into cognitive processes. While the strong version of embodiment is seriously challenged by conceptual and physiological setbacks, its weak version is supported by compelling evidence. We suggest future research focus on ...
Entropy, 2021
Since the experimental observation of the violation of the Bell-CHSH inequalities, much has been ... more Since the experimental observation of the violation of the Bell-CHSH inequalities, much has been said about the non-local and contextual character of the underlying system. However, the hypothesis from which Bell’s inequalities are derived differ according to the probability space used to write them. The violation of Bell’s inequalities can, alternatively, be explained by assuming that the hidden variables do not exist at all, that they exist but their values cannot be simultaneously assigned, that the values can be assigned but joint probabilities cannot be properly defined, or that averages taken in different contexts cannot be combined. All of the above are valid options, selected by different communities to provide support to their particular research program.
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Papers by Melina Gastelum