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Papers by Andreu Ballús

Proceedings of the 13th International Conference for Music Perception and Cognition, 2014

Research in the field of music cognition typically focuses either on low-level, technically orien... more Research in the field of music cognition typically focuses either on low-level, technically oriented approaches or on highly abstract ontological discussions that lack direct grounding in evidence. To bridge this gap, we propose a revision of the ontology underlying such research, from a perspective restricted to the acoustic and individual aspects of music to an embodied, extended, and anti-individualist approach. We explore the application of these ideas to empirical research in a twofold way: by discussing two experiments conducted by our group and by proposing two ideas for further experimentation. One of the conducted experiments tests whether the ability to play an instrument in any of its dimensions has an influence on how a subject listens to music; the other one explores the impact of visual information on the perception of sound as music. We comment on the results obtained and their theoretical significance. Our work shows that it is possible for abstract theorizing and concrete experimentation to go hand in hand in the field of music studies.

Revista Iberoamericana de Argumentación, 7., Dec 28, 2013

Much attention has been drawn to the cognitive basis of innovation. While interesting in many way... more Much attention has been drawn to the cognitive basis of innovation. While interesting in many ways, this poses the threat of falling back to traditional internalist assumptions with regard to cognition. We oppose the ensuing contrast between internal cognitive processing and external public practices and technologies that such internal cognitive systems might produce and utilize. We argue that innovation is best understood from the gibsonian notion of affordance, and that many innovative practices emerge from the external scaffolding of cognitive processes. The
public engageability that allows the disclosure of hidden affordances is not only –not even primarily– a property of cognitive products, but of cognitive processes. We elaborate on this claims by drawing on Dutilh Novaes’ account of formal languages as cognitive technologies and Hutto’s Narrative Practice Hypothesis. This paves the way to sketch some general principles on how to strategically seek for innovation by targeting hidden affordances.

Mechademia: Origins (Ed. Minnosota Press), Sep 2014

We analyze the similarities between some elements of the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion and some o... more We analyze the similarities between some elements of the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion and some of the key ideas in poststructuralist philosophy. The general structure and content of the series and a number of specific scenes are read through the lens offered by Jacques Derrida’s ideas of differance and dissemination, and Gilles Deleuze’s notions of difference and rhizome. An global interpretation of the meaning of the series focused in the open and interpellative character of the series finales is also sketched.

Revista Astrolabio - Sección Debates Intelectuales, Jul 2013

Pese a pertenecer a tradiciones distintas y haberse originado en momentos diferentes, la filosofí... more Pese a pertenecer a tradiciones distintas y haberse originado en momentos diferentes, la filosofía de la individuación de Gilbert Simondon y la corriente conocida en la filosofía de las ciencias cognitivas con el nombre de enactivismo comparten algunas características e intereses comunes. Ambas coinciden en su voluntad de integrar diferentes dominios del conocimiento, así como en algunos elementos de su aproximaciones a nociones como las de de emergencia y autonomía, y en su tratamiento general de las relaciones entre cognición, percepción y acción. Mediante una comparación entre las ideas fundamentales los dos enfoques, trato de mostrar que el enactivismo podría beneficiarse de un acercamiento a las ideas expuestas por Simondon en sus obras fundamentales a diferentes niveles: por un lado, en la medida en la que la filosofía de la individuación ofrece una ontología fundamental más adecuada a los planteamientos enactivistas que la ontología individualista implícita en mucha de la filosofía de la mente contemporánea; pero también a un nivel más específico y concreto, ya que Simondon plantea con cierto detalle en sus obras algunas cuestiones importantes que el enactivismo ha empezado a abordar en los últimos años.

Conference Presentations by Andreu Ballús

Excess conference UCLA, 2015

The politics and metaphysics of love have traditionally been conceived under a scarcity paradigm:... more The politics and metaphysics of love have traditionally been conceived under a scarcity paradigm: through the ages, romantic love has tended to be portrayed as something that has to do with finding “the Only True One” amongst false candidates, with seizing a Fleeting Opportunity in the Right Moment. The dominance of this social imagery on love has its long term biological and economic causes in the material conditions of existence of historical societies. However, even as the basic “objective” constraints on love and its conceptions have evolved almost to the point of disappearing (at least in some societies), the paradigm itself seems to have remained untouched, maintaining a strong continued influence in the way social relations are defined and in the kind of narratives that support the functioning of basic social institutions such as the family.
We argue that this traditional conception of love as scarce and requiring a difficult selective effort has actually been strengthened as a result of the deep influence, in recent philosophical and literary discourses, of a certain group of ontologies focused in concepts such as Negativity, Lack, and (Logical and/or Empirical) Reducibility. In fact, despite its revolutionary impact in some other regards, these ontologies may have entered in a relationship of mutual reinforcement with this Myth of Scarce Love. On the other hand, there exists an alternative ontological tradition that focuses on the ideas of difference and novelty, and in the basic notion that reality is always in excess. This tradition, which includes classical authors such as Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, and one of whose most accomplished recent advocates is Gilles Deleuze, enjoys a very good health today, but its practical and political implications have not been exhaustively developed. We believe that, while not being explicitly focused on the matter of romantic love itself, this thriving line of thinking provides an ontological basis through which both the metaphysics of romantic love and its ethics and politics can be rethought in terms of freedom and excess, and ultimately freed from the sway of the scarcity mentality.

On the basis of the existence of a long tradition of philosophical conceptions of space and loca... more On the basis of the existence of a long tradition of philosophical conceptions of space and location which render them not applicable to cognition -from Berkeley to Bergson and beyond-, but also for more practical reasons, I want to argue that this apparently obvious claim cannot be accepted without discussion, the proponents of both the ExMT (Extended Mind Thesis) and its direct opposite bearing the burden of proof with regards to it. Furthermore, I contend that while the “folk” attribution of spatial location to minds and cognitive processes should not be considered wrong or meaningless (being indicative of a valid knowledge about which physical objects take part in certain processes), its philosophical counterpart should be avoided for the sake of conceptual clarity, or at the very least made a lot more explicit with regards to its assumptions. It should be clearly stated, for example, if the “space” coextensive to mind is to be identified as the allocentric space of physics, the egocentric phenomenological space or any kind of socially constructed space. However, I think that in spite of any further specification of these details of the ExM proposal, some of its central features are intrinsically problematic Insofar as the ontological claim of the locatedness of mind leads to the emergence of otherwise non existent problems (such as deciding on the existence of definite spatial boundaries for cognitive processes) and promotes counterintuitive descriptions of common situations (such as
the successive displacement of the borders of a cognitive system when processes implying a discontinuous use of
tools occur), it is a bad heuristic for increasing our knowledge about cognition. I also contend, against ExMT supporters and some of their opponents, that the temporal and causal structure of cognitive processes (and not their location) stands out as a the most reasonable criterion for the individuation of cognitive systems. Finally, I want to show that there are some philosophically scientifically reasonable descriptions of the world which are in direct conflict with crude spatialized cognition, i. e. those in which some features of physical space itself are dependant on cognitive processes.

Las corrientes más influyentes en la filosofía de la mente y las ciencias cognitivas del siglo pa... more Las corrientes más influyentes en la filosofía de la mente y las ciencias cognitivas del siglo pasado comparten, pese a su diversidad, ciertas rasgos paradigmáticos. El más importante de ellos es quizás la persistencia de una heurística negativa en la selección de temas y fuentes de datos: las corrientes más prestigiosas en el estudio de la cognición, con el cognitivismo como máximo exponente, tendieron a dejar de lado aquellos fenómenos o temas cuya modelización en términos de lógica
simbólica presentaba problemas graves, como el propio carácter fenomenológico de la conciencia. Desde las últimas décadas del siglo XX esta expulsión de los elementos subsimbólicos y extrasimbólicos del discurso sobre la cognición ha sido duramente criticada desde diferentes corrientes, comúnmente reunidas bajo el nombre de poscognitivismo. Desde propuestas como la tesis del embodied cognition y el
enactivismo se destaca hoy la necesidad de expandir el estudio de la cognición más allá del modelo simbólico/representacionalista, y se reivindica la herencia de tradiciones como el budismo y la fenomenología husserliana. Sin embargo, el autor que mejor anticipa los límites del modelo cognitivista es probablemente Henri Bergson (1859-1941). Su filosofía de la mente, enmarcada por un estudio del fenómeno de la evolución y del carácter de la temporalidad, incorpora muchos de los elementos del poscognitivismo actual (como la combinación de “acceso directo” y datos científicos, y las críticas al representacionalismo y al dualismo), y su ataque al intelectualismo admite ser interpretado como una “respuesta anticipada” al cognitivismo y otras corrientes afines.

One of the greatest challenges for the theories of scientific rationality is to provide an accoun... more One of the greatest challenges for the theories of scientific rationality is to provide an account of the continuities underlying scientific change. Innovation, as opposed to gradual improvement, can be particularly difficult to tackle in this regard. A typical solution to this problem is to look for a set of rational criteria that would regulate any successful scientific advance, including “ground-breaking” innovation. As an alternative, I propose to understand scientific innovation as the discovery of hidden affordances in the cognitive technologies that support scientific production, and scientific rationality as a series of rational strategies oriented towards that goal.

International Conference on Philosophy and Film, 2014

Japanese animation stands in a particularly complex relationship with technology: being a technol... more Japanese animation stands in a particularly complex relationship with technology: being a technological medium itself, its thematic content tends also to concern technological issues, such as the artificial extension of human capacities and the effects of technology on individual and collective identity. Authors such as Thomas Lamarre and Vanina Papalini have stressed the complementarity between these two dimensions, noting that anime involves not only thinking in technology, but also thinking through technology. Following this line of thought, we believe that Japanese animation forms (and many other forms of cinematography) should be considered as thinking devices in a strong sense, as they extend the cognitive capacities of viewers, affording them new kinds of collective reflection.
We focus specifically on one of this ‘ways of thinking’ made possible by technologically themed anime: a particular style of reflection on the nature of time. We contend that the close relationship between technical form and technological content in anime -exemplified, for instance in the dialogue between the techniques of limited animation and full animation in the history of science fiction anime- has contributed to the emergence of a sui generis style of depictions of temporality in technological anime. Amongst other characteristical features, these depictions tend to highlight the difference between two fundamental aspects of temporality: the time of production or process-time, and the time-as-result or product-time. We illustrate this with a brief analysis of the treatments of temporality in Neon Genesis Evangelion, Akira and Ghost in the Shell, where we try to show, one the one hand, how these treatments are connected to technical aspects of animation, and on the other, how the depictions of temporality presented relate to philosophical distinctions such as that between duration and spatialised time in the philosophy of Henri Bergson and that between process and chronology in Gilbert Simondon’s works.

"In the last decades, a group of theoretical proposals has emerged in the philosophy of cognitive... more "In the last decades, a group of theoretical proposals has emerged in the philosophy of cognitive science which defies some of the fundamental assumptions traditionally taken as granted in the study of mind and cognition. Developments like the extended mind thesis, the embodied/embedded approach to cognition and enactivism have contributed to call into question many traditional assumptions on the relations between mind, materiality and agency, while prompting a renewed interest in the cognitive value of bodily affects. These approaches also shed new light on the analysis of shortcomings of the classical essentialist conception of identity, providing a valuable scientific, materialist complement to poststructuralist criticisms of it.
The fictional worlds of Japanese animation, in turn, provide a surprisingly clear and suggestive entry point to the core ideas of these theories, with works like Neon Genesis Evangelion, Ghost in The Shell and Serial Experiments Lain exploring the limits of the technological imaginary and giving profound insights on the relations between of body, technology, identity and genre."

A lo largo de las últimas décadas ha aparecido, dentro del campo de las ciencias cognitivas, un c... more A lo largo de las últimas décadas ha aparecido, dentro del campo de las ciencias cognitivas, un conjunto de propuestas que ponen a prueba algunas de las concepciones más arraigadas sobre la naturaleza de la mente. Este diverso grupo, que incluye tesis como la de la mente corpórea, la cognición situada, la mente extendida y el enactivismo, contrasta especialmente con la tradición del cognitivismo y con sus supuestos básicos, en buena medida relacionados con el desarrollo de la computación y con el triunfo de lo que podemos llamar la metàfora de la mente como ordenador.
A su vez, el análisis de estas propuestas, comúnmente reunidas bajo la etiquetas de ‘tercera generación de las ciencias cognitivas’ o ‘postcognitivismo’, muestra similitudes y afinidades de fondo con varias líneas de desarrollo filosófico paralelas a la tradición lógico-analítica. Así, por ejemplo, son claras sus deudas con la fenomenología de Husserl y Merleau-Ponty, y con el análisis existencial de Heidegger. Sin embargo, más allá de estas herencias reconocidas, las propuestas de la tercera generación comparten con otras propuestas filosóficas del siglo XX un conjunto de características fundamentales, como el rechazo del dualismo cartesiano en el planteamiento de la relación mente-cuerpo, la puesta en duda de las categorías de sujeto / objeto, y, en especial, el replanteamiento de la relación entre agente cognitivo, recursos y entorno, que conllevan, en última instancia, una revisión de la noción clásica de identidad.
Exploraremos brevemente la relación de las ideas postcognitivistas con dos tradiciones que replantean el concepto de identidad. Por un lado, la línea que denominamos ‘textualista’, que sigue la tradición del análisis heideggeriano y la desarrolla en relación con el tema del lenguaje y el texto; en ella podemos situar autores como Jacques Lacan y Jacques Derrida. Por otro lado, defenderemos la existencia de una línea paralela de desarrollo, que, incluyendo el trabajo de autores como Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon y Gilles Deleuze, elabora su revisión del concepto de identidad partiendo de una observación atenta de los desarrollos científicos y técnicos, y tomando distancia de las concepciones ‘intelectualistas’ de la percepción y la cognición.
Esta comparación nos servirá, finalmente, para plantear una propuesta de replanteamiento de algunas de las cuestiones ontológicas puestas en juego en los desarrollos postcognitivistas, en especial en lo relativo a la relación del hombre con la tecnología y con el medio transformado tecnológicamente, llevándonos a abordar la pregunta ¿qué papel tiene la tecnología en la definición de los límites de lo humano?

Posters by Andreu Ballús

Talks by Andreu Ballús

Teaching Documents by Andreu Ballús

Mètode, 2018