State-of-the-art Large Language Models have recently exhibited extraordinary linguistic abilities which have surprisingly extended to reasoning. However, responses that are unreliable, false, or invented are still a frequent issue. It has been argued that scaling up strategies, as in increasing model size or hardware power, might not be enough to resolve the issue. Recent research has implemented Type 2 strategies (such as Chain-of-Thought and Tree-of-Thought), as strategies that mimic Type 2 reasoning, from Dual Process Theory, to interact with Large Language Models for improved results. The current paper reviews these strategies in light of the Predicting and Reflecting Framework for understanding Dual Process Theory and suggests what Psychology, drawing from research in executive functions, thinking disposition and creativity, can further contribute to possible implementations that address hallucination and reliability issues.

In a recent remarkable article, Froese (2023) presents his Irruption Theory to explain how motivations can make a behavioral difference in motivated activity. In this opinion article, we review the main tenets of Froese’s theory, and highlight its difficulty in overcoming the randomness challenge it supposedly solves, that is, the issue of how adaptive behavior can arise in the face of material underdetermination. To advance our understanding of motivated behavior in line with Froese’s approach, we recommend that future work should endorse a multilevel pluralistic approach to causation and explanation in which motivations could genuinely play an irreducible role. Additionally, in line with the life-mind continuity thesis, we suggest that the best place to look for the interplay between motivations and nonmotivational physical, biological, and dynamical factors, may be at the level of the continuous feeling of being an embodied, living organism.

Interestingly, the interactions between members of a social group and across people of different social groups often happen through mutual understanding and reciprocate behaviour by means of gestures or eye contact. A controlled laboratory experiment is used to test the effect of interactions between members of a social group and across social groups on the walk dynamics of people. This study tries to discover the trade-off made by people between the need to communicate/interact between group members and the need to avoid collision with opposing pedestrians in a bidirectional flow. Thirty adults participated in a series of controlled experiments. The individuals and group characteristics were compared to study the effect of social groups. Spatial patterns/group formations, average walking speeds, and deviation from the desired direction of motion were assessed. The analysis shows that time to cross the platform is the least when triads adopt the river and inverted V group formations. In contrast, V and line-abreast group formations require slightly more time and are better suited to promote interactions between the group members. Irrespective of the initial formation adopted by participants, there is a higher tendency for the groups to shift to river formation or inverted V formations. This may be a result of the higher group speeds observed in the Inverted V and river formations, which accelerates their progress in the direction of motion. The understanding of walking dynamics of social groups from this study can enable better planning of pedestrian facilities and crowded events.

We organized our reply to the rich set of commentaries on Erik’s inaugural lecture—The affordance of art for making technologies—around the following five themes. (1) The experience of artworks and whether such experiences can be described in terms of the affordances of artworks. (2) The possibility that engagement with artworks offers for the transformation of ourselves and the sociomaterial practices we take part in. (3) The claim that artworks can serve as what Annemarie Mol describes as “material propositions” that can be used to engage philosophical reflection. (4) The temporality of making practices and how art installations can be thought of as places in which past, present, and future meet. (5) How art could potentially enable a better embedding of technologies in society.

Received concepts of neural activity, building on the technical concepts of information processing and coding, do not formulate the problems that an organism must formulate in order to cope with its environment. Specifically, this includes the problems of self-maintenance and adaptation, and how such activities are to be monitored and corrected in case of their (anticipated) deviation from viable norms. In this paper, it is shown how the functional systems theory of P. K. Anokhin formulated key notions of adaptive control, self-monitoring, and self-detectable (“system-detectable”) error that directly anticipate current debates on neural information and representation, and allow to reframe these debates in new empirical and theoretical perspectives. In addition to showing this on the basis of early (less known and untranslated) works, we analyze how functional systems pose new questions for current research. Specifically, recent discoveries in integrative and cellular neuroscience regarding the biophysical limits of signal summation in neural cells directly confirm Anokhin’s analysis of the integrative activities of the neuron. These findings may have wide implications, and call for new and biologically more specific models of the integrative and semiotic closure of nervous activity, in line with the systemic closure of the organismic functions in which they participate.

The Course-of-Experience presents an interesting method for working with others’ experience, drawing on Micro-phenomenology (MP), Enactivism, and Peircean semiotics. It addresses possible applications to cognitive science, answering to a call about how to reliably integrate phenomenological data and experimental methods. I applaud the ambitious framework presented in the target paper, and hope that Poizat and colleagues in response or in later work will address three potential shortcoming: (1) How does the framework fare in comparison to similar methods. (2) Why is Peircean semiotics necessary for the framework? 3) Does it need to copy what seems to be epistemological and metaphysical infelicities concerning pre-reflective experience directly from MP?

The tension between reflection and experience has been highlighted by Buddhism as the origin of human suffering, described as an undercurrent and constant feelings of restlessness, grasping, anxiety, and dissatisfaction or disease. This universal suffering experience called Dukkha refers to the failure to find a Self in reflection or the frustrated desire or craving to have or to be something. For Buddhism, not only the desired object is illusory, but so is the desiring self. Further, Varela et al. (1993) integrate these ideas into the development of cognitive sciences and the understanding of human experience from an embodied and selfless mind perspective. The present article attempts to apply the Buddhist notion of suffering or Dukkha along with Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s contributions to the understanding of the embodied sense of Self that characterizes symptoms of Depression. The expression of the self-grasping suffering experiences and the tension between reflection and experience for depressive patients will be discussed from an enacted and embodied perspective. Further, new research ideas along with possible new psychotherapeutic approaches are discussed.

Agent-based models, with a history reaching back to the 1940s, have been cited as a useful technique for planning economic development and simulating the effect of economic crashes. These models offer an insightful alternative to the traditional techniques of mathematical modelling. Understanding how different designs of agent-based models change simulation outcomes will be useful for modellers of economic and other simulation scenarios. The work presented here examines how a computer simulation of an agent-based model responds to disruptive events, in the context of an economic model. Agents within the model interact by producing, selling and buying goods. A series of experiments compare system stability in two scenarios: one where a top-down rule is applied to the pricing of goods and another where decision-making is at the individual agent level, a bottom-up approach. These two approaches are termed system-adaptive and self-adaptive. Results draw the conclusion that a self-adaptive function can provide greater stability, but this depends on whether the measured variable is a primary or secondary variable to the adaptive function. Considerations are presented for future work which could consider the impact adaptive functions have on secondary variable measurements.

Genetic reductionism is increasingly seen as a severely limited approach to understanding living systems. The Neo-Darwinian explanatory framework tends to overlook the role of the organism for an understanding of development and evolution. In the current fast-changing theoretical landscape, the autopoietic approach provides conceptual distinctions and tools that may contribute to building an alternative framework. In this article, I examine the implications of the theories of autopoiesis and natural drift for an organism-centered view of evolution. By shifting the attention from genes to ontogenetic organism-niche configurations and their transformations over generations, this approach presents a compelling perspective on the role of organismal behavior in guiding phylogenetic drift.