I consider applications of “AI extenders” (Vold & Hernández-Orallo 2021) to dementia care. AI extenders are AI-powered technologies that extend minds in ways interestingly different from old-school tech like notebooks, sketch pads, models, and microscopes. I focus on AI extenders as ambiance: so thoroughly embedded into things and spaces that they fade from view and become part of a subject’s taken-for-granted background. Using dementia care as a case study, I argue that ambient AI extenders are promising because they afford richer (...) and more durable forms of multidimensional integration than do old-school extenders like Otto’s notebook. They can be tailored, in fine-grained ways along multiple timescales, to a user’s particular needs, values, and preferences — and crucially, they can do much of this self-optimizing on their own. I discuss why this is so, why it matters, and its potential impact on affect and agency. I conclude with some worries in need of further discussion. (shrink)

In this article, we investigate how distressing background feelings can be subject to social injustice. We define background feelings as enduring feeling states that condition our perceptions of everyday situations, interpersonal dynamics, and the broader social milieu. While phenomenological psychopathology has long addressed such affective phenomena, including anxiety, guilt, and feelings of not belonging, the intersection with social injustice remains largely unexplored within the framework. To address this gap, we introduce the concept of existential injustice into phenomenological psychopathology. Existential injustice (...) pertains to the unjust formation, perpetuation, and treatment of background feelings. We contend that distressing alterations in these feeling states can stem from, or be perpetuated by, unjust social structures and practices. Existential injustice manifests as a felt inadequacy of one’s background feelings, reflecting broader societal disparities and inequities. Drawing on themes from social psychiatry, we illustrate the utility and explanatory power of the concept through two concrete examples. By shedding light on the ways in which societal dynamics shape distressing affective experiences our analysis underscores the importance of integrating aspects of social injustice into the study of affective phenomena in phenomenological psychopathology. (shrink)

Much of the work in the rapidly growing field of computer ethics relies on the concepts and theories of Western philosophy. With this article my aim is to help stimulate conversations that draw on a wider range of ethical perspectives. I build on recent work on the sense in which the regular operations of the attention economy might violate our right to attention, and I do so through looking to a range of Theravāda and Mahāyāna Buddhist texts. As I argue, (...) these texts should inspire us to realize that we have more than just the right to direct our attention as we will and the right to be free from distraction. This is because there is a third right to attention that the recent literature overlooks, namely the right to strengthen our ordinarily weak capacity to control our attention. (shrink)

The narratives we have about ourselves are important for our sense of who we are. However, our narratives are influenced, even manipulated, by the people and environments we interact with, impacting our self-understanding. This can lead to narratives that are limited, even harmful. In this paper, I explore how our narrative agency is constrained, to greater and lesser degrees, through a process I call ‘narrative railroading’. Bringing together work on narratives and 4E cognition, I specifically explore how using features of (...) our socio-material environments to support and construct our narratives does not simply offer up possibilities for creating more reliable and accurate self-narratives (Heersmink 2020) but can lead to increasingly tight narrative railroading. To illustrate this idea, I analyse how digital technologies do not neutrally distribute our narratives but dynamically shape and mould narrative agency in ways that can restrict our self-understanding with potentially harmful consequences. As such, I argue that we need to recognise that digital devices not only support narratives but work as powerful narrative devices, shaping and propagating the kinds of narratives that we self-ascribe and act in accordance with. (shrink)

Situated affectivity investigates how natural, material, and social environmental structures, so-called ‘scaffolds,’ influence our affective life. Initially, the debate focused on user-resource-interactions, i.e., on cases where individuals (‘users’) actively structure the environment (‘resource’) in beneficial ways, setting up scaffolds that allow them to solve routine problems, modify their means of coping with challenges, or avail themselves of new affective competences. More recently, cases of mind invasion have captured philosophers’ attention where the ways others structure the environment affect, or invade, people’s (...) minds, typically without their awareness and with harmful consequences. This paper contributes to recent discussions about the variety of phenomena that can count as ‘scaffolded affectivity’ in general and ‘scaffolded affective harm’ in particular. It also addresses the emerging question of how harmful affective scaffolds can come to have a grip on people’s minds, despite their detrimental consequences. We first disentangle some misconceptions and illustrate how diverse (harmful) affective scaffolds can be. In contrast to recent approaches that have characterized scaffolds in largely descriptive terms, we then identify factors that can help explain why a given scaffold is effective in modifying people’s minds. We also try to shed light on why some agents and some social structures are especially likely to experience or cause scaffolded affective harm, respectively, by arguing that user-resource-interactions and mind invasions are not independent, but intimately intertwined and mutually reinforcing, especially in the digital domain. We conclude with a speculative suggestion for further research. (shrink)

The influential social model understands disability in terms of oppression instantiated in a material environment that disables bodily impaired people. Many of the demands of disability activists for what we might call equal material access have since been satisfied. Yet oppression of subtler psychological and emotional forms persists for many disabled people. We will argue that the results of these psychosocial forms of oppression is that scaffolding which was set up to provide access to disabled people may become disabling. We (...) introduce the concept of “disabling scaffolding” to refer to environmental structures that inhibit the disabled person’s abilities because of social structures of intersubjective and material oppression. We borrow Iris Marion Young’s concept of “inhibited intentionality” to describe the effects of oppression, which come to operate “from within” the disabled person, deeply affecting the person’s experience of the body as an “I-can”. Disabling scaffolding is a consequence of material and intersubjective oppression that leads to inhibited intentionality, gradually leading to a pathologization of the disabled person’s embodiment. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to deepen into a theoretical account on the role of behavioral settings and relational affordative space and how this perspective can be used to reconceptualize various human cognitive developmental trajectories and conditions. In the course of this theoretical work, we want to contribute in rethinking developmental trajectories based on the role of behavioral settings and relational affordances from an embodied perspective. Behavioral settings emerge from joint actions in conjunction with the affordances available. These affordances (...) will have multiple levels and kinds of meanings for the organism which is why we need to distinguish between the general affordances for a form of life and the particular affordances for particular agents that are generated through sensorimotor interactions. We propose to apply this theoretical frame in different developmental conditions, taking as a leading example the Autistic Spectrum, extending it to other lived experiences of other groups marginalized by “normative behavioral settings” – and the ensuing ethical concerns. (shrink)