Fission-Fusion AI: Concepts of Cognition and Ethics in AI

Wednesday, 19th February 2025 @ 12:30pm

Abstract: This invited talk will explore with participants the ways in which changing understandings of human cognition holds implications for ethics in AI. 'Fission-fusion' describes the merging and diverging of the concepts, entities and processes that together compose our minds, selves and world (Anderson 2015, 2023). What are the implications for AI of insights into the entanglement of our minds and selves with the world? I will outline definitions and debates in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science on 4E Cognition (the embodied, embedded, enacted and extend cognition) on which the fission-fusion framework builds, and analyse their implications for our development of ethical forms of AI. I will argue that research from across the arts and humanities, spanning classical antiquity to our contemporary world, invites a recalibration of our understanding of what composes intelligence, artificial or otherwise. Key concepts I propose and focus on are 'freedom of thought' and 'fission-fusion values' (Anderson 2025).

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About the speaker: Dr Miranda Anderson is a Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Technomoral Futures at Edinburgh Futures Institute, University of Edinburgh. She is a philosopher of the arts and humanities. Her research focuses on cognitive approaches to culture between antiquity and the twenty-first century. Her works demonstrate the mind-expanding value of engagement with the arts and humanities, as well as their relation to science and technology. Her monograph The Renaissance Extended Mind (2015) and four edited volumes (The Edinburgh History ofDistributed Cognition, EUP 2018-20) reveal ideas and practices of distributed cognition between antiquity and the twentieth century (EUP 2018-20). In 2019-20, Dr Anderson curated an art exhibition with Talbot Rice Gallery, The Extended Mind, which included works by thirteen international artists exploring expression of notions of the mind as extended in contemporary art, highlighting their foregrounding of ethical issues. She has several works forthcoming on the 'fission-fusion'framework and its implications for contemporary culture and society.