One routinely undergoes a noetic feeling (also called “metacognitive feeling” or “epistemic feeling”), the so-called “feeling of knowing”, whenever trying to recall a person’s name. One feels the name is known despite being unable to recall it. Other experiences also fall under this category, e.g., the tip-of-the-tongue experience, the feeling of confidence. A distinguishing characteristic of noetic feelings is how they are crucially related to the facts we know, so much so that the activation of semantic memory can easily result (...) in the production of noetic feelings – a regularity that memory research has often exploited. And yet little is known about the mechanism that produces noetic feelings. Is it solely brain-based or does it depend upon the extracerebral body for its production of feelings? To arrive at an answer, various studies in metamemory research will be analyzed to determine what ought to be made of the mechanism responsible for noetic feelings. I argue that evidence suggests that it relies upon extracerebral processes, in particular cardiovascular processes, the result being support for an embodied view of metacognition. (shrink)

The aim of this project to expose the reasons behind the pandemic of misinformation (henceforth, PofM) by examining the enabling conditions of epistemic agency and the emerging technologies that threaten it. I plan to research the emotional origin of epistemic agency, i.e. on the origin of our capacity to acquire justification for belief, as well as on the significance this emotional origin has for our lives as epistemic agents in our so-called Misinformation Age. This project has three objectives. First, I (...) plan to expose the degree to which epistemic agency is made possible by an under-researched species of emotion called epistemic feelings. Perhaps, the most epistemically significant is the feeling of confidence. In particular, epistemic feelings make epistemic agency possible by making errors in reasoning salient or the potential lack thereof. -/- Second, in order to diagnose the reasons for PofM, I will analyze the emotional basis of epistemic agency in the context of emerging technologies. Epistemic feelings ought to be construed as motivators of epistemic acts, specifically acts following exposure to misinformation spread by social media. For example, a recent study found that subjects on YouTube have a 6.3% probability in five clicks to go from watching innocuous videos to misogynistic videos. Accordingly, one prominent view holds that social media algorithms lead subjects down the proverbial rabbit hole, producing content that elicits strong emotional reactions. -/- But under-researched is the degree to which these emotions are intertwined with epistemic feelings, so that subjects are likely to misjudge the information as correct due to being primed to do so by processing the AI's suggested media. Thus, when this technology is used in epistemic practices, the result is invariably epistemically bad behavior because of how this manner of producing content motivates epistemic acts through the production of erroneous feelings of confidence, which result from the perceived ease of cognitive processing: the content is easy to process and so, the subject confidently misjudges, it is true. As of yet, an account of this cognitive and emotional decision-making process has not been used to analyze how emerging technologies are threatening epistemic agency, and thus our wellbeing as knowers. -/- Finally, I plan to develop therapeutics for PofM by outlining how to reform our collective epistemic practices. Thus, this project complements existing research in virtue epistemology, specifically by articulating the challenges to cultivating epistemic virtues and warding off the vices of the mind. In summation, the project aims to account for how emerging technologies are committing a form of epistemic injustice through the exploitation of cognitive biases and the production of erroneous epistemic feelings, with the overarching goal being a framework for convalescing from the pandemic of misinformation plaguing our age. (shrink)

This paper is going to explore the adverse effects of exposure to combat death on medics’ holistic well-being, which, if ignored could decrease individual readiness and negatively impact the mission. We rely on the experience of United States Air Force Special Operation Surgical Teams (AF SOST) whose exposure to mass casualty scenarios in austere environments could serve as approximations of conditions of future battlefields. Over the past two decades, the ability to deliver advanced medical care on and off the battlefield (...) along with a rapid casualty evacuation platform has allowed for unprecedented survival rates exceeding 90%. While laudable, these medical achievements have also set up a casualty management paradigm in which medical decision-making singularly focuses on life-saving care. Confronting peer-peer adversaries in large scale combat operations (LSCO) on a multi-domain battlefield will make casualty management frighteningly more complex by introducing major infrastructural, personnel, and resource constraints. When considering the high number of casualties expected in LSCO alongside enormous limitations in medical resource and resupply capability, the current casualty management paradigm will not be sustainable. The resource constrained environment in LSCO will shift medical decision-making away from a singular focus on life-saving care to triage, which hinges on the ability to determine futile medical interventions—a skill that has been lost in the past two generation of combat medics. As such, a broad ethical challenge that arises in preparation for LSCO is the need to set new expectations concerning dying and death. However, medical decision-making focused on death and dying has not been explicitly addressed in military medical training, research, or policy. Relying on a body of literature known as terror management theory (TMT) and ethnographic data from our study with AF SOST medics, we are going to argue that it is important to expose medics to death in mass casualty and triage training. (shrink)

On the basis of Descartes’s account of the passions of the soul, we argue that current interoception-based theories of emotions cannot account for the hallmark of a passion of the soul, i.e., that its effects are felt as being in the soul itself. We also pay attention to the epistemic functions of the passions and to Descartes’s category of emotions that are caused and occur in the soul alone. Certain passions of the soul and certain internal emotions are similar to (...) what are today called ‘epistemic feelings’ and ‘epistemic emotions.’ Descartes’s work reflects another challenge for contemporary embodied cognition: how might epistemic affect be embodied? Since the signature of embodiment is increasingly understood as interoceptive, the challenge to interoceptive research is demonstrating the degree to which affect results from interoception. This challenge also implies that the locus of emotional experience is taken into account. (shrink)

The aim of the present work is to make a plausible case for the phylogenetic origin of self-knowledge, one which is compatible with a prevalent view about its ontogenetic origin, the social-scaffolding view. Essentially, the phylogenetic origin is generally argued to be evaluative metacognition, i.e. a system of cognitive control mechanisms, while the ontogenetic origin is generally argued to be mindreading, i.e. cognitive capacities supporting mental state attribution. So put simply, the present work aims to provide a plausible solution to (...) the problem of how to establish metacognition as a significant precursor to mindreading. Previous attempts to establish metacognition as an evolutionary precursor to mindreading have struggled to account for the exact relevance that metacognition has for the origin of self-knowledge. This present work analyses this struggle as first having to solve ‘the problem of triviality’, explain how metacognitive mechanisms are more sophisticated than mechanisms enabling basic cognitive feats. Once this problem is solved, however, the problem develops into having to show that the added layers of sophistication warrant construing metacognition as a significant precursor to self-knowledge. This latter problem is analysed as the ultimate problem, referred to here as simply ‘the problem of the origin of self-knowledge’. Thus, the present work seeks to offer a plausible solution to both of these problems. The solution to these problems is argued to be embodied metacognition, cognitive control mechanisms that enable conscious self-control of information-seeking behavior through the production of strongly embodied feedback signals. These feedback signals, often called ‘noetic feelings’, are theorized to motivate, demotivate, and guide cognitive acts to be more accurate. Here it is argued that these signals are strongly embodied, characterizing conscious emotional states constituted by psychological imperatives, states with external manifestations in the form of bodily expressions that can be detected, monitored, and regulated by individuals in the subject’s socio-cultural environment. To argue for this, I augment evaluative metacognition in light of evidence from recent interoception-based research in metacognition which reveals the degree to which noetic feelings are strongly embodied. They are thus argued to be cerebrally generated feedback signals produced by cognitive comparators that become intricately intertwined with bodily processes. Recent evidence suggests these signals come to fulfill their role in cognition through the conscious perception (the interoception) of internal bodily changes, specifically cardiovascular changes, and hence the subtitle of the present work, “How We Feel Our Hearts to Know Our Minds”. Reconceptualizing evaluative metacognition as embodied metacognition provides us with the tools for solving the two problems above. Concerning the first, mechanisms enabling conscious self-control of cognition are clearly more sophisticated than mechanisms that enable basic feats of cognition, such as reinforcement learning. Moreover, appealing to strongly embodied noetic feelings offers the possibility of solving the first problem in such a manner that the second problem is also solved. As conscious expressions of emotions, noetic feelings demand robust information-seeking behaviours and manifest feelings of confidence and uncertainty externally, thus they are well-suited to link metacognition to the social-scaffolding view about the origin of self-knowledge. (shrink)

Many policies and ethical guidelines recommend developing “trustworthy AI”. We argue that developing morally trustworthy AI is not only unethical, as it promotes trust in an entity that cannot be trustworthy, but it is also unnecessary for optimal calibration. Instead, we show that reliability, exclusive of moral trust, entails the appropriate normative constraints that enable optimal calibration and mitigate the vulnerability that arises in high-stakes hybrid decision-making environments, without also demanding, as moral trust would, the anthropomorphization of AI and thus (...) epistemically dubious behavior. The normative demands of reliability for inter-agential action are argued to be met by an analogue to procedural metacognitive competence (i.e., the ability to evaluate the quality of one’s own informational states to regulate subsequent action). Drawing on recent empirical findings that suggest providing reliability scores (e.g., F1-scores) to human decision-makers improves calibration in the AI system, we argue that reliability scores provide a good index of competence and enable humans to determine how much they wish to rely on the system. (shrink)