philosophies

Article
Embodiment: The Ecology of Mind
Paul Dumouchel
Graduate School of Core Ethics and Frontier Sciences, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto 603-8577, Japan;
[email protected]




Received: 19 February 2019; Accepted: 22 March 2019; Published: 27 March 2019


Abstract: Following a suggestion from G. Bateson, this article enquires into the consequence of the
idea of embodiment in philosophy of mind, taking seriously the notion of an ecology of mind. In the
first half of this article, after distinguishing between the biological and the systemic approaches to
ecology, I focus on three characteristics of the systemic approach. First, that a system is an abstract
object that is multiply embodied in a collection of physically distinct heterogeneous objects. Second,
that there is a form of circular causality between the level of the elements and that of the system as a
whole, as some characteristics of the elements partake in the explanation of how the system functions,
while the requirement of the system explains why the elements have the characteristics that they do.
The third is the ontological uncertainty that we sometimes find in ecology, where the same term is
used to designate both a central component of the ecological system and the system as a whole. In the
second half, beginning with a critique of the theory of mind approach, I look into the consequences
of conceiving that mind is embodied in a collection of physically distinct heterogeneous objects that
interact as elements of a system, rather than enclosed in an individual body.

Keywords: autonomous system; autopoietis system; Bateson; children; cognitive ecology; ecology;
niche; theory of mind

1. The Ecology of Mind

In 1972, Gregory Bateson published Steps to an Ecology of Mind [1]. “Steps” seems the right title
for a collection of essays written over a period of more than thirty-five years, in which the idea of
an ecology of mind only becomes an explicit theme in the last section of the book. What these steps
recount is how Bateson, who was throughout his life “concerned by four sorts of subject matter:
anthropology, psychiatry, biological evolution and genetics, and the new epistemology which comes
out of systems theory and ecology”, progressively became convinced that ideas and mind cannot be
studied and understood in isolation, but only as part of a larger system. Thus, the idea of an “ecology
of mind”, that there is an ecosystem of mind and ideas. In this contribution, I wish to revisit not so
much Bateson’s text, as the idea of an ecology of mind in relation to the question of embodiment.
The project faces an immediate objection: during the last twenty years or so, the term ecology has
been used in relation to so many different topics that its meaning has become, to say the least, somewhat
unclear. For example, a quick search for the entry “ecology of” in open access website Academia.edu
gives, apart from the ecology of various animals, plants, viruses, and types of environment among
others, the following results: the ecology of tactical overlap [2], the ecology of affect [3], the ecology of
terror defense [4], the dark ecology of elegy, the ecology of religious beliefs, of medieval art, of team
science, of risk taking, of monads, of technology, of recovery, of Victorian fiction, of narratives, and so
on. Given this abundance of associations, it is difficult to understand what the ecology of mind could
mean or how it can be more than just another metaphor.
In biology, ecology is usually defined as the branch which studies how organisms interact with
their environment and with other organisms. Each individual entertains complex relationships with

Philosophies 2019, 4, 12; doi:10.3390/philosophies4020012 www.mdpi.com/journal/philosophies

Philosophies 2019, 4, 12 2 of 9

organisms of both its own and other species, as well as with its abiotic environment. These interactions
constitute selective pressures that lead to the adaptation of individuals and the evolution of species.
Ecology is the study of these complex relationships among different organisms, with non-living factors
of the environment, and the resulting selective pressures [5]1 . Ecology, however, is also understood
as the study of the system formed by the relationships between plants, animals, people, and the
environment, as well as the equilibria or at least the balances between these various elements. The two
meanings, though closely related, are not identical; while ecology in its biological sense focuses on
the relations between an organism or species and its environment, the systemic approach centers
on the complex system that organisms constitute together with their environment. In this second
sense, there is not only the ecology of various organisms, but also of particular places, like Lake
Victoria, or of typical environments, for example the ecology of desert landscapes or of wetlands. In the
systemic sense, organisms and their environment are viewed as one complex system rather than as
two independent objects that interact.
Since Bateson published Steps to an Ecology of Mind, a new discipline, cognitive ecology,
began addressing some of the questions that interested him. Cognitive ecology enquires into the
way the environment shapes an individual organism or species cognitive traits and behavior, including
how selective pressures from the environment mould an organism’s brain. Its approach is mostly
comparative, as this influence of the environment is particularly striking in two types of cases. First,
when closely related species (or different populations of the same species) who inhabit different
ecologies have cognitive abilities that diverge. Second, when distantly related species found in
similar ecologies manifest cognitive convergence [6]. In both cases, the environment’s pressures on
the organisms’ cognitive traits seem evident. Cognitive ecology thus views the cognitive traits of
organisms as adaptations to different environments and seeks to understand the selective pressures
that lead to different adaptations. It is a sub-discipline of biology and clearly belongs to ecology in
the first sense identified above. It extends to brain and cognition the classic adaptationist research
program; inquiring into the way environmental pressures influence the cognitive ability of organisms.
Bateson was, of course, interested in how the mind, for example that of a schizophrenic, becomes
adapted to his or her environment [7]2 , but he also argued that the mind should be seen as a complex
system, rather than treated as a collection of cognitive traits that can be matched to various selective
pressures. Viewing mind as a complex system is different from seeing a mind or the mind as a set of
adaptations to a particular environment, adaptations that are embedded in an individual’s brain or
manifested in his or her behavior. One of the reasons why this is so, is because a system, rather than
a material thing, is an abstract entity that is inevitably ‘embodied’ in a collection of heterogeneous
physically distinct objects. What image of the mind arises if we take seriously the idea of an ecology of
mind in the systemic sense? What are the consequences of such an approach to the idea of embodiment
in philosophy of mind?

2. System and Elements

The ecology of any item x, whatever x may be, a lake, a bat, or mind understood in the systemic
sense assumes as methodological point of departure that the item and its environment form a complex
(eco)system. Of that ecosystem, x itself constitutes, but one element, among others—that is not
independent from the rest of the system and whose properties and characteristics cannot be understood
without taking the whole system into account. In many cases, the ecology of x implies more: that there
is a sense in which x does not exist outside of the system of which it is a part, because the role that x
plays within the system is what explains and determines that its characteristics are what they are.

1 See for example, the entry ecology in the Biology Dictionary https://biologydictionary.net/ecology/.
2 See for example, G. Bateson, D. D. Jackson, J. Haley & J. H. Weakland, “Towards a Theory of Schizophrenia” in Behavioral
Science, 1:4, 1956. Reprinted in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, pp. 201–227.
Philosophies 2019, 4, 12 3 of 9

At first sight, this presents a difficulty. The system as a whole is viewed as explaining the properties
of x, but x is a central element of the system. As such, x’s properties enter into the explanation of
how the system works and is maintained. In consequence, the properties of x become part of the
explanation of the properties of x. This seems like a perfectly vicious circle, but is it? More generally,
the difficulty can be formulated in the following way: Can an element of a system be viewed as the
result, or as an effect of the functioning of the system of which it is a part? To the extent that it is
strictly taken as an element of the system, rather than as this or that object or organism, the answer
is evidently “yes”. Any object has a large number of properties, not all of which may be relevant to
its role as an element of a system; depending on what the system is, the object’s color, its shape or
its chemical composition will or will not be relevant. The system ‘chooses’ in a metaphorical sense,
or focuses on some properties of the object, which are essential to its functional role within the system.
In the case of human made systems, this is obviously true. The (idea of the) system determines it
is the reason why the different elements of the system have the required characteristics to be parts of
the system. Not only is the wheel of a car or the handle of a door only such if there is a car or door of
which it is the wheel or handle, but their particular characteristics are determined by the requirements
of the specific (type of) car or door of which they are part. Something similar is true of some natural
systems: the system itself is responsible for the production and crafting of the elements that ensure its
continued existence. This circular relation of causality constitutes a fixed point in the system’s behavior
and a mechanism that ensures its stability.
For example, organisms interact with their environment; they take energy and resources,
make habitat choices, sometimes construct artifacts, inevitably emit detritus, and die in the
environment. All of these, the actions of organisms and the accidents that befall them, modify the
natural selection pressures in their environment; this in turn adapts the organisms to the environment
which their activity of niche construction transforms [8,9]3 . A circular causal relation between niche
construction and adaptations that leads to a form of equilibrium becomes established. In consequence,
if the environment to which the organisms are adapted and which they partially moulded to suit
themselves is radically changed, the organisms will disappear. They will either die or if they can
adapt to this new environment; they may become quite different, unrecognizable, a new species [10].
Alternatively, eradicate the species, and the environment will be profoundly changed.
This circular causal structure is reminiscent of how Varela and Maturana define an autopoietic
system: as a closed network of processes, which produce through their interactions the elements that
make up the network and the relations that define it [11]. As long as the perturbations to which the
system is subjected remain within a certain range, it will succeed in producing the conditions that
favor its continued existence. As its name indicates, an autopoietic system is a system that produces
itself, that functions in such a way that it generates the various elements that enter into its composition
and maintains among them the relations that define it. In this case, it is not only the characteristics of
the elements, but their very existence that result from the functioning of the system.
According to Varela, an autopoietic system, as opposed to an autonomous system, is characterized
by the fact that the closure of the network of production coincides with a border in physical space,
which separates what is inside from what is outside the system [12]. It is clear that in ecological
systems, this condition is not satisfied; but they may be considered to be autonomous systems to the
extent that they often exhibit a form of circular causality, especially between niche construction and
adaptations, which ensures the stability and permanence of the system. The organisms are adapted to
the characteristics of the ecological niche that, given their adaptations, they reproduce, while selective
pressures in the niche favor individuals who have these very adaptations.

3 F. J. Odling-Smee, K. N. Laland & M. W. Feldman, Niche Construction. The Neglected Process in Evolution, Princeton University
Press, 2003. The importance of this circular relationship between niche construction and adaptation was originally pointed
out by R. Levins & R. Lewontin in their book The Dialectical Biologist, Harvard University Press, 1985.
Philosophies 2019, 4, 12 4 of 9

The failure of autonomous systems to produce a clear border that allows the observer to
distinguish between the system and its outside has an important consequence4 . The ecosystem
tends to be identified through the central item of which it is the ecosystem, because there is no easy
(and no better way) to discover what is and what is not part of the system. In the ecology of a lake for
example, the lake will appear as both an enclosed body of water and as the whole ecological system
of the lake, of which the enclosed body of water constitute but one, albeit fundamental, element.
The ecological system will include apart from the enclosed body of water, things such as the flora and
fauna found there, migrating birds, if its bank are steep or gentle slopes, the number of tourists who
walk on its shores, and so on. This creates an ontological uncertainty that we are usually ready to
accept. We have no qualms in assuming that the lake is both the enclosed body of water and the whole
ecological system, for that whole system is what makes the lake what it is, that which determines its
ipseity. If the ecological system were different, the lake would not be the same. We have no difficulty in
considering that the lake is both an element of the ecosystem and that, in a sense, it is the ecosystem as
a whole. Yet, we do not recognize migrating birds or the surrounding flora as part of the lake, though
they clearly are elements of the ecosystem.
Thus, the idea of an ecology of mind entails three closely related postulates. First, that there is
a form of circular causality between the level of the central component, individual minds, and the
system as a whole, which is responsible for the characteristics of the elements that are indispensable to
the maintenance of the system. Second, that the system is ‘embodied’ through a collection of physically
distinct heterogeneous objects (or bodies). Finally, that there is ontological uncertainty between minds
at the individual level, as an element of the system, and mind at the level of the system as a whole.

3. Ecology and the Theory of the Theory of Mind

The hypothesis that we attribute to others a mind like our own, rather than we discover that
they have a mind is often referred to as the “theory of the theory of mind”. A “theory”, because it is
assumed that we cannot perceive directly the mind of others and therefore this attribution constitutes a
theoretical hypothesis that we make to explain their outward behavior. And this theory may be called a
“theory of mind” since its content is that others have a mind. Though the theory of the theory of mind
is not usually seen as an approach to the question of embodiment, one of its central presupposition is
that the individual’s mind is enclosed in his or her body, perhaps more precisely in the brain of the
agent. Depending on one’s philosophical leaning, the body, as opposed to the brain alone, may also be
seen as more or less important to the agent’s cognitive ability and mind, but in any case, an essential
aspect of all such approaches is that they view the mind as individually embodied.
Any approach that adopts the theory of mind in one form or another assumes, in agreement with
much of philosophy, that the body constitutes some kind of obstacle, which prevents minds from
being in direct contact, a veil behind which the individual’s mind is hidden or a prison that condemns
it to solitary confinement. That is the very reason why seeing others as having a mind must be a
theoretical hypothesis, since this ‘immaterial stuff’ is not something that can be perceived directly.
Whether they like it or not, or are aware of it, advocates of the theory of mind accept a basic premise
of dualism in philosophy of mind. The invisibility and public inaccessibility of mind construed as a
private essentially subjective phenomenon. To the opposite, the idea that mind is not individually,
but multiply embodied suggests that the experience of mind extends beyond the limit of what is
merely subjective and private.
One important question in the theory of the theory of mind is to determine at what point in
development a child becomes able to attribute to others complex mental states, which is to say at

4 It may be that the coincidence of the closure of the system with a clear border in physical space in a physical system, like a
cell, is made possible because in such systems the production of the elements is inseparable from generating the rules of
their interactions since, their interactions, for example in the case of proteins, depend directly on the shape and chemical
reactivity of the molecules produced by the cell.
Philosophies 2019, 4, 12 5 of 9

what stage does he or she develop a theory of mind. There exists a well-established experimental
protocol according to which the ability to attribute false beliefs to others, in order to explain or predict
their behavior, indicates the moment when a child is able to recognize that others also have a mind
just like he or she does, that the other is an agent whose actions are guided by his or her own beliefs
and desires.
Beyond the many critiques of this experimental set up, in particular concerning its ability to
clearly determine that moment, Micheal Tomasello raises a more fundamental problem. In order to
attribute false beliefs to others, a child must already have a concept of false beliefs. In order to develop
a “theory of mind”, a child must already have a concept mind of which the concept of beliefs which
may sometimes be false and sometimes true constitutes a central element. Yet, adds Tomasello, we do
not know how the child comes to acquire this notion of false belief. He suggests that the child develops
this notion through social interactions in which he or she experiences being misunderstood [13]. Thus,
according to Tomasello, this fundamental notion is not originally given to the child in an evident and
immediately transparent way and then attributed to other. Rather, it is something that the child needs
to construct and discover in his or her experience of the world and of others. When talking about
adults, the idea that I have an immediate access to my own mind, and that on the basis of this internal
knowledge I attribute to others a mind which I can never perceive directly, may sound convincing.
However, we cannot assume that the child is born with direct immediate knowledge of his or her own
mind. This is something that must be acquired during development; how does it happen?
When he explicates and tries to demonstrate his hypothesis, Tomasello presents the child as
progressively learning that he or she can be misunderstood and can misunderstand others. In this
learning process, the child is described more or less as what could be called a young “scientific
observer” who tries to understand the world, who makes hypotheses, and attempts to verify them.
The child then, according to this perspective, develops a concept of false beliefs through making
hypotheses, analyzing the behavior of others and attributing them beliefs to finally discover that these
beliefs may also be false. I am quite certain that this constitutes part of the process, but only one part.
Interacting with others is in fact quite different from merely observing them. To use a grammatical
image, interaction takes place at the first and second person, rather than it corresponds to the third
person position as observing does. When we interact with others we do not simply ‘notice’ or ‘discover’
that we were wrong, that others contradict us, that our desire has been frustrated or satisfied; we react
and respond. The child laughs, smiles, cries or throws a fit. Some may want to argue that in order to
react, one first needs to perceive and understand what is going on and therefore that observation and
analysis must come first as necessary conditions.
Is this, however, really the case? Many studies on joint attention and imitation in very young
children have shown that infants require and seek the attention of others to which they react; they enjoy
it. Being attended to by another person is immediately for that child to be in contact and communication
with that other. This contact and communication are not the transfer of information, rather it is for
the child to have its state of being transformed. When, a little later, children become able to notice
more generally where the other’s attention is directed, they imitate them and turn their own attention
towards the same object. It seems clear that very soon, shortly after their birth, children are able to
distinguish between being the target or not being the target of the attention of others. It follows that
their universe rapidly becomes populated by two very different types of entities, some, like humans
and certain animals, that can take them as object of their attention and others, like a chair, a toy or a
piano, that cannot. How does the infant gain that knowledge? By experiencing it, simply by being
taken as the object of the attention of others.
Unlike observing, being taken as the target of the attention of another person is not something
that a child does, it is something that is done to the child. Something of which the child becomes aware
without any action on his or her part, and yet to which the child reacts. The expressions “being the
target of” or “being taken as the object of” the attention of another are sufficiently vague to encompass
what is involved here. They should be understood in a broad sense to include such things as holding
Philosophies 2019, 4, 12 6 of 9

or carrying the child, taking to him or her, making faces, smiling, changing his or her diaper, helping
and at other times preventing the child from doing or reaching something. ‘Paying attention to the
child’ understood in this broad sense corresponds to a wide range of different intentions towards the
child, but does not imply any one in particular. It nonetheless is an action that reveals its author as an
intentional agent or at least as an entity that is radically distinct from many other objects in the world.
In consequence, the child’s world is from the very beginning populated with “minds” that he or
she ‘perceives’ directly whenever the child is taken as the target of the attention of others. Our world,
the world of each one of us is from the origin full of beings that are able to take us as objects of their
attention. Even if the young child does not know what a mind is, he or she is much more aware of
their existence than of anything else in the world. The child’s knowledge of such mindful creatures is
much greater than he or she understands what a pencil or a frying pan is. The mind is not hidden in
the nooks and cranny of the head or brain, but something public and social. Everyone can see it and
all are invited to take part in it.
The individual’s body therefore is not a black box in which the mind’s algorithm, forever invisible
to others, maps inputs onto outputs. It is open to others who act upon it and in doing so act on the
embodied mind that we are. For us humans to be embodied is to be offered to the action and attention
of others, which can not only harm us or satisfy our needs, but which also pleases us, or makes us sad,
instills calm or anxiety, reassures or threatens. The actions of others upon us shape our psychological
states and to do that, the ‘action’ of the other does not necessarily need to be anything in particular.
It does not even need to be properly an action. The mere presence of some others can be enough to
rejoice or make a child cry, and so can it also be with adults, though they may be loath to admit it.

4. Mind and the Open Body

The fact is that our mind is not merely embodied individually, but also commonly. Of course,
our sensations, precepts or thoughts are our own, yet what they are, their content, is partially shaped
by the presence and action of others. This is sometimes literally the case. Researches have shown
that when an animal that has been wounded in an attack by a con-specific is consoled by another,
the attention and caressing touch the chimp receives releases in its brain endorphin, which alleviates
pain [14]. As this example clearly indicates, humans are not the only animals whose internal states are
sensitive to action and presence of others. Members of these other species do not, however, develop a
mind the way human do.
The fundamental question therefore is not “at what point does a child become able to attribute a
mind to others?” but “at what point does a child become able to attribute mind to him or herself?”
How do we come to attribute to ourselves such strange things as beliefs, desires, emotions and
representations? How does a child discover that he or she has mental states that reveal the world,
but always imperfectly; that always fail to some extent to reveal it as it really is. How does the
child succeed to abstract or extract him or herself from the immediate experience of the world?
These questions arise because knowledge and cognition are immediately of the world, rather than
they are knowledge and cognition of one’s own mental states. Knowledge is not primarily reflexive.
As Vytgotsky notes in his research on the language of young children, at first, knowledge of the world
is not distinguished from the world itself. The original experience is not that of one’s mind but of
being in the world [15].
How then do we succeed in taking distance from this primordial experience of the world? Why do
we later come to identify ourselves with this capacity to maintain a distance from the world, come to
consider our ‘self’, the ego, as this very capacity? How does knowledge become reflexive, how does
it become about itself? Why and how does this dimension of knowledge, that it is about itself,
gain precedence over it being about the world?
Descartes in his search for certain, infallible, knowledge imagined an “evil genius”, an all-powerful
being that used all its energy to deceive him. There isn’t an evil genius in the environment of every
child, but nonetheless all harbor at least one “all powerful” being that regularly shows the child to be
Philosophies 2019, 4, 12 7 of 9

wrong in many different ways. He or she tells the child to stop, that no he cannot have anymore, that it
is time to go, don’t touch that, and so on. Progressively the child learns that he or she has internal
states, mental states, desires and beliefs that are different from what the world is, and different from
the beliefs and desires of others. Tomasello is perfectly right. It is through interacting with others
that the child develops a concept of false beliefs. Yet, interacting with others is different from simply
observing them or representing the world. Interaction implies that one is taken as the target of the
action of another person or agent. It is a strange form of action of which one is simultaneously the
agent and the patient. The child does not first discover his or her own mind, become aware of its
central characteristics and then attribute to other mental states similar to his or her. Rather, the child
progressively develops the ability to participate in mind by being taken as the target of the attention of
others and by being made wrong.
This primacy of interaction, that Descartes denied while acknowledging its importance through
the fiction of the evil genius [16], reveals that the subjective experience of “having a mind” does not
reflect the structure of the processes that underlie it. This experience should not be taken as a guide to
understand mind or its embodiment. “Having a mind” in the sense of the subjective experience of
reflexive thinking comes from our common disposition to interact, to act upon each other. It proceeds
from the fact that our body responds, in the sense that it is transformed as a result of being the
patient of the attention of another. Each one directly experiences that action of others upon him or her.
The private and subjective mind is constructed through an ecology of social public interactions with
other mindful creatures. It does not constitute a primary experience or evidence, but is the result of
past interactions and of the multiple embodiment of mind.

5. Conclusions
The next step would be to describe the specific characteristics of the ecology of mind that makes
us, humans, into cognitive systems of a very particular type. What needs to be explained is why some
other highly social primates, for example chimpanzees, fail to be socialized in mind the way human
children are. This is much too ambitious a project to be carried out in one short article. However,
two relatively recent books suggest the direction in which an answer to the last question may be found.
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others. The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding [17] and
Bernard Chapais, Primeval Kinship. How Pair-Bonding Gave Birth to Human Society [18], argue that the
evolutionary trajectory of the human species was profoundly marked by small changes in the relations
between mates (Chapais) and in the relations between parents and offspring (Hrdy) compared to what
is found among our closest relatives.
In closing, two other issues need to be addressed. First, it is important to note that this hypothesis
does not consider that mind is an emergent property of a social or ecological system. At least not in the
sense in which emergent properties are generally understood in natural sciences or in self-organization
explanations of biological phenomena. For example, in the self-organization explanation of termites’
mound building, the ability to build a mound is not something that termites possess individually. It is
only instanced at the system level, and is viewed as emergent, because at the individual level there
is no property of the termite which corresponds to mound building. This property only appears at
the system level as the result of simple rules of individual [19]5 behavior, rules which do not refer to
mound building. Here to the opposite what is involved are characteristics of individuals. Even if it
is the system as a whole that makes possible the existence of the characteristics of mind that in turn
maintain that mindful system in existence, individual minds are not characteristics of the system,

5 Entomologists generally agree that termites do not respond to social messages from other individuals but simply react to the
consequence of the work done by another termite, a behavioral response that is called stigmergy, so that what is involved in
mound building are individual rules of behavior rather than direct communication or coordination between individuals.
See S. Camazine, J.-L. Deneubourg, N.R. Franks, J. Sneyd, G. Theraulaz & E. Bonabeau, Self-Organization in Biological Systems,
Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 23–24.
Philosophies 2019, 4, 12 8 of 9

but of individuals. Therefore, mind should not be seen as an emergent characteristic of the system
because unlike mound building, it exists as a characteristic of individuals rather than only appearing
at the system level while absent at the individual level. Mind is simultaneously embodied at the
individual level and at a collective level. It appears both as a central element of the ecosystem of mind
and as the ecosystem itself.
Second, what are the consequences of such an approach for embodied AI and especially for
social robotics as a form of socially embodied AI? Implicit in the ecological approach, and as clearly
presupposed in the first paragraph of the conclusion, is the idea that there exist different types of
cognitive systems whose characteristics are partially determined not only by the physical embodiment
of individuals, but also by what may be called their ecological embodiment. If this is correct, it follows
that social robotics should not only consider the importance of the physical embodiment of artificial
social minds, but also the ecological dimension of mind. In other words, we need to focus, not only on
the physical characteristics of robots, which has been the dominant approach until now, but also on
their ability and role as part of the ecological system that is constituted of their interactions with their
human partners as well as with each other and with different types of cognitive systems, natural and
artificial. To put it otherwise, the ecological approach adds a dialectical dimension to social robotics,
for it argues that it is not only the particular characteristics of artificial systems that determine social AI,
but also the ecology of such systems and their partners, which determine the particular characteristics
of the artificial systems involved. As Luisa Damiano and I have argued elsewhere, this is an ecology
that is in the process of being built and it is important to understand from the beginning, the way
in which these machines will change the social world and the way in which the social world will
determines what these artificial systems are [20,21].

Funding: This research received no external funding.

Conflicts of Interest: The author declares no conflict of interest.

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