Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Embodied cognition — cognition as embodied, embedded, enacted or extended — enactivism and sense-making, coordination dynamics, situated robotics, and mind as organism–environment coupling (group: philosophy; ADR-025).
59 of 2004 LIT documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIT-097 v4 | The Extended Mind | Clark & Chalmers (1998), DOI-10.1093/analys/58.1.7. The paper argues from a functionalist parity claim that a process or standing state which would count as cognitive if it happened in the head counts as cognitive when an external resource carries it, provided the resource is actively coupled to the organism here and now. Otto’s notebook entry is its example of such a standing belief. From this it infers, in one paragraph, that the self extends too. The four “criteria” for a coupled resource (constancy, direct availability, automatic endorsement, and the admittedly “arguable” past conscious endorsement) are offered as the features that make the paradigm case clear. The paper explicitly says they are not necessary and sufficient conditions. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-180); it is worth reading as the source text of the extended-mind thesis, and it is short. Its constitutive conclusion follows from a role-functionalism about belief and a parity principle that the paper states rather than defends, so a reader should take it as the origin of the debate and not as its settlement. |
| LIT-207 v2 | Talkative AI and the fiction of artificial minds | Roberts (2026), DOI-10.1007/s11098-026-02560-8. If a substantial class of mental states (interoceptive, affective, perceptual, and bodily-agentive states such as effort, trying and ownership) depends on an animate body, then today’s disembodied chatbots lack them, and their many self-ascriptions of such states are “systematically untrue”. Roberts argues that users can nonetheless engage chatbots through make-believe, as a new kind of fictional character that is interactive, co-constructed, self-involving and blended with the real world. He argues that this fictionalist stance escapes the epistemic norms that bind realist belief. | Active — read in full 2026-09-26 (NOTE-157); worth reading as a short, clear statement of chatbot fictionalism. Its anti-realist premise is explicitly conditional and targets only body-dependent states, which leaves belief and reasoning open. |
| LIT-383 | Deciding Advantageously Before Knowing the Advantageous Strategy | Bechara, H. Damasio, Tranel & A. R. Damasio (1997), DOI-10.1126/science.275.5304.1293. In the four-deck gambling task, 10 controls and 6 ventromedial prefrontal patients were tracked on choices, anticipatory skin-conductance responses and verbal reports. All controls and no patients developed anticipatory responses; controls came to prefer the good decks, significantly from the point they reported a hunch; three patients who could state the correct strategy kept choosing the bad decks. The authors conclude that nonconscious biases guide behaviour before conscious knowledge does. The statistics support the group difference more firmly than the “before knowing” timing. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 (NOTE-331); worth reading as the experiment the somatic marker hypothesis is usually cited for, and worth reading with its notes, which are weaker than its abstract. With 10 controls and 6 ventromedial patients, the robust results are that every control and no patient developed anticipatory skin-conductance responses, and that three patients who could state the right strategy still chose badly. The headline that controls chose well and responded to risky decks “before they knew” is only partly carried by the statistics: in the pre-hunch period the controls’ preference for the good decks was not significant (note 9), and the reported SCR effect there is a group-by-period interaction, not a bad-versus-good-deck difference (note 8). Controls chose the good decks significantly only once they reported a hunch. Whether the account is true is not this note’s question. |
| LIT-384 | The somatic marker hypothesis and the possible functions of the prefrontal cortex | Damasio (1996), DOI-10.1098/rstb.1996.0125. States the somatic marker hypothesis: ventromedial prefrontal cortex holds learned links between classes of situation and the body states (emotions) that went with them; when a situation recurs, those states are re-enacted, through the body or through an “as if” loop in somatosensory cortex, and mark imagined option-outcome pairs as good or bad, overtly as a feeling or covertly as a bias, so that reasoning works over a pruned space. Evidence summarised: ventromedial patients with intact intellect decide badly in life, lack skin-conductance responses to emotive pictures, and in the gambling task keep choosing the losing decks and show no anticipatory responses. | Active — read in full 2026-10-01 (NOTE-332); worth reading as the shortest statement of the somatic marker hypothesis by its author, with the evidence it then rested on. It is a hypothesis paper: the mechanism (ventromedial prefrontal linkages that re-enact body states, by a “body loop” or an “as if body loop”, which then mark options good or bad) is stated, not shown, and the evidence it reports is lesion and skin-conductance work summarised from other papers, without numbers. Its strongest piece, that ventromedial patients lack anticipatory skin-conductance responses in the gambling task while responding normally to the losses themselves, is reported here in one paragraph; the 1997 Science report filed alongside it is the place to see that result. Whether the account is true is not this note’s question. |
| LIT-386 v2 | Homeostasis and soft robotics in the design of feeling machines | Man & Damasio (2019), Nature Machine Intelligence 1:446–452. A perspective proposing machines organized around homeostasis: a body that must be kept within viable states gives the machine a goal of its own, and something like feeling as a source of motivation and of evaluation. Soft robotics and multisensory abstraction are named as the means. The claimed payoffs are equivalents of feeling, better function across environments, and a platform for studying consciousness. Unread: placed from the abstract. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-01 at the owner’s request; no full text could be reached, so it is placed from the abstract and figure captions only and no NOTE is filed. Nature’s page is paywalled, there is no arXiv version, Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar list no open copy, and the ResearchGate, Scribd and ProQuest copies did not serve the text. By its abstract it is a design proposal for machines built around homeostasis, not a reported system or result. Flagged anthology-candidate because the anthology’s agents-and-environments topic could hold it; a reading should settle whether it carries an instruction for ML practice. |
| LIT-403 | Intrinsic content, active memory and the extended mind | Clark (2005), DOI-10.1093/analys/65.1.1. Against Adams & Aizawa: the intrinsic-content objection to LIT-097 fails, because the notion is unclear, silicon parts could carry it, and a conventional encoding linked at run-time to intrinsically contentful states can be a belief’s vehicle, inside or outside the head. Against the active-memory objection, the notebook’s passivity is a difference below the functional level that matters. The extended mind is a thesis about vehicles. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-363); worth reading as Clark’s first reply to the critics of LIT-097, and short. It answers Adams and Aizawa’s intrinsic-content objection three ways (the notion is unclear, silicon could carry it, and it would not matter), turning their own concession that not every cognitive state needs non-derived content against them; and it answers the “active memory” objection by conceding the notebook is unlike biological memory and arguing that the differences sit below the level a functionalist should attend to. Its replies are parity arguments with imagined cases; it adds no new evidence. It does not engage Rupert (LIT-422). |
| LIT-412 v2 | Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension | Clark (2008), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195333213.001.0001. Clark’s book-length defence of the extended mind: a tour of embodied, situated and extended cognition, a reply to its critics, and a case for treating “some coalitions of biological and non-biological resources as the extended cognitive circuitry of individual minds”. Unread: filed from the publisher’s description and contents. | Unavailable — searched 2026-10-14 for a lawful full text, none reached, so it is not read and no NOTE is filed. OpenAlex lists the OUP DOI, closed, a CiteSeerX cache and an institutional e-book handle (hdl.handle.net/2078/ebook:67780), which is licensed access, not an open copy; Unpaywall finds no open copy; Oxford Academic returned a Cloudflare 403; the Internet Archive holds the book only as controlled lending and as an ‘opensource’ upload of the in-copyright book, which was not used. The foreword (LIT-421) and the appendix (LIT-097) are read separately. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. |
| LIT-415 | Extended Cognition and Extended Consciousness | Chalmers (2019), DOI-10.1093/oso/9780190662813.003.0002. The 1998 extended-mind thesis as stated is too weak, since opponents accept extension in wired-in “extended circuit” cases. The interesting thesis is that mental states can be partly constituted by external entities in virtue of the subject’s sensorimotor interaction with them. Consciousness does not extend this way, on the proposal that it requires information directly available for global control, and perceptually mediated availability is indirect. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-356); worth reading as Chalmers’s own later statement of what the extended-mind thesis of LIT-097 is and where it stops. It does two things. It replaces the 1998 paper’s implicit thesis, which it concedes is too weak because even the critics accept it for wired-in “extended circuit” cases, with one that requires constitution “in virtue of the subject’s sensorimotor interaction” (§1). And it argues that consciousness does not extend, because consciousness needs information directly available for global control and perception makes availability indirect (§3). Both are proposals, argued in a short chapter: the thesis is offered as “extensionally correct”, and the directness account is offered as an explanation of why there are no plausible cases, not as a knockdown. |
| LIT-421 | Foreword | Chalmers (2008), DOI-10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195333213.002.0007. The co-author’s retrospective on the extended mind: his iPhone is “part of my mind already”. The one principled objection is that perception and action bound the mental. His reply is revisionist and contextualist: whether Otto’s belief counts as extended flips with explanatory purpose. No Otto-style twin case works for consciousness, so he tentatively keeps an internal conscious core. The thesis needs only a weak, parity-style functionalism and is compatible with dualism. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-369); worth reading as the shortest statement of where Chalmers stands on the thesis he co-authored, ten years on. Three things in eight pages: the iPhone as a present-day Otto’s notebook; the perception-action boundary as the one principled objection, answered by explanatory revisionism and a “Necker cube” view on which whether Otto’s belief is extended depends on explanatory purpose; and a tentative internal “conscious core”, resting on the failure of any Otto-style twin case for consciousness. It is a foreword: every position is stated briefly and several are offered as “perhaps”. |
| LIT-422 | Challenges to the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition | Rupert (2004), DOI-10.5840/jphil2004101826. The embedded hypothesis (HEMC: cognition leans heavily on external props, but is the organism’s) competes with the extended one (HEC), and conservatism favours HEMC unless HEC buys explanatory power. It does not. LIT-097’s criteria either make phone directories into beliefs or privilege the organism, and memory research (interference, the generation effect, conversation) shows internal and external storage are different kinds. A generic kind covering both does no work. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-343), in the author’s pre-publication version; worth reading as the case that a conservative “embedded” hypothesis explains everything the extended hypothesis does, and as the empirical version of the critique. Its two arguments: a dilemma on LIT-097’s past-endorsement criterion (keep it and the organism is privileged after all; drop it and directory assistance gives Otto beliefs about every listed phone number), and memory research (interference, the generation effect, conversation) showing internal and external storage behave as different kinds, so that a kind covering both does no explanatory work. Its strength is that it argues from cognitive science rather than intuition; its limit is that the empirical differences are about fine-grained profiles, which a defender can accept and still claim a coarse kind. |
| LIT-436 | Intelligence without representation | Brooks (1991), Artificial Intelligence 47:139–159, written in 1987. Argues that AI should be built incrementally from complete autonomous “Creatures” tested in the real world, and that the system should be decomposed by activity into parallel layers, each connecting sensing to action, not by function into perception, a central reasoner and action. His robots have no central representation and no central control: each layer is a fixed network of simple finite-state machines, and a higher layer subsumes a lower one by suppressing or inhibiting its wires. Coherent behaviour emerges, “in the eye of an observer”, from competing behaviours. Hypothesis: representation is the wrong unit of abstraction for the bulk of intelligence. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-351) from the copy Brooks posts; worth reading as the decomposition side built and run: a robot whose purposive behaviour comes from parallel layers of simple finite-state machines with no central representation and no central control, which Brooks likens to Minsky’s account of human behaviour. The coherence of the whole, he says, exists “in the eye of an observer”. The evidence is three layers on one physical robot, described rather than measured. It makes no claim about minds or experience and disclaims interest in the philosophy. |
| LIT-438 | The bounds of cognition | Adams & Aizawa (2001), DOI-10.1080/09515080120033571. Against LIT-097, Dennett, Donald and Hutchins: cognition has two necessary marks, non-derived content and a kind of causal processing found in brains. Notebooks, screens and tools have only derived content and work by different processes, so actual cognition is brain-bound as a contingent fact. Causal coupling does not extend a process, and brain-plus-tool systems are too motley for a science. They grant the parity principle. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-368); worth reading as the first sustained reply to LIT-097 and the source of the “mark of the cognitive” line of criticism. It grants parity and argues that cognition has two necessary marks, non-derived content and a distinctive kind of causal process, which notebooks, screens and tools lack as a matter of contingent fact; and that brain-plus-tool systems are too motley to support a science. Read it for that structure, not for proofs: both marks are assumed (“we assume without argument”), and the processing differences it lists are asserted from common knowledge, not measured. The phrase “coupling-constitution fallacy” is not in this paper; it comes from the authors’ later work. |
| LIT-455 | Defending the Bounds of Cognition | Adams & Aizawa (2010), DOI-10.7551/mitpress/9780262014038.003.0004, read from the pre-publication draft. A reply to a manuscript of Clark’s “Memento’s Revenge”. It names the “coupling-constitution fallacy”: that X is coupled to a cognitive agent does not make X part of its cognition. It restates the 2001 marks of the cognitive, non-derived content and a distinctive causal process, and defends them: a mental image of Euler circles need not get its content by convention, and a “brain-tool science” would have to cover an open-ended motley of artifacts. | Active — read in full 2026-10-02 (NOTE-380), from a pre-publication draft, not the published chapter; worth reading as the shortest statement of Adams and Aizawa’s case after LIT-438, and as the earliest text the record holds that names the “coupling-constitution fallacy”. It answers a manuscript of Clark’s “Memento’s Revenge” (the chapter before it in the same volume), restating the two marks of the cognitive and defending them against Clark’s Euler-circle and “brain-tool science” objections. It adds no new argument for either mark: the fallacy is shown by one analogy (nerve and muscle), and the intracranial processing differences are asserted from consumer electronics, not measured. |
| LIT-566 | Defining Agency: Individuality, Normativity, Asymmetry, and Spatio-temporality in Action | Barandiaran, Di Paolo & Rohde (2009), Adaptive Behavior 17(5):367–386. Three conditions are jointly necessary and sufficient for minimal agency: the system defines its own individuality, it is the active source of modulations of its coupling with the environment (interactional asymmetry), and it regulates that coupling by norms it generates (normativity). Generatively, an agent is an open autonomous system (a precarious network of mutually enabling processes) that adaptively modulates its coupling so as to maintain some of its constituent processes. Minimal life satisfies this; life is sufficient for agency but not necessary. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-458), from the authors’ own deposit of the accepted text. Worth reading as the standard organizational definition of minimal agency, and as the clearest statement that an agent is not the same thing as an individual. Individuality is one of three conditions, with interactional asymmetry and normativity; it is a precondition for the other two and is not sufficient for agency. The generative definition: an agent is an autonomous organization that adaptively regulates its coupling with its environment and contributes to sustaining itself as a consequence. The paper rejects statistical and energetic measures of asymmetry as sufficient, and says systems optimising an externally fixed function should not be treated as models of agency. |
| LIT-571 | Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition | De Jaegher & Di Paolo (2007), Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6(4):485–507. Coordination between coupled systems is cheap and common. When patterns of coordination and the course of an encounter shape each other, the interaction acquires its own operationally closed, precarious organization. Social interaction is then regulated coupling between autonomous agents that constitutes an autonomous relational organization without destroying the agents’ autonomy. Because sense-making is embodied in movement, interactors can coordinate their sense-making, along a spectrum from modulated individual sense-making to jointly created meaning. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-456), from the published version posted on De Jaegher’s own site. Worth reading as the founding statement of participatory sense-making. A social interaction is defined as regulated coupling between autonomous agents that itself becomes an autonomous organization in the relational domain, without destroying the agents’ autonomy; coordinating sense-making in interaction can generate meanings neither individual had. The argument is conceptual, illustrated by everyday cases and by the perceptual-crossing experiments; nothing is measured in the paper. |
| LIT-578 v2 | Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior | Kelso (1995), Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior, MIT Press, xvii + 334 pp. The book-length statement of coordination dynamics. Unread: registered from catalogue records. What the record knows of its content comes from the works that cite it: the coordination potential of the HKB model (reproduced in Kelso 2021, Box 1), absolute versus relative coordination (De Jaegher & Di Paolo 2007, citing p. 98), a chapter on how HKB arose (ch. 3) and one on brain rhythms (ch. 8), per Kelso 2021. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-03 as a seed, not read. No lawful full text was found: the book has no DOI, is not listed as open access, and MIT Press’s page refused an automated request. Under the owner’s rule for books it is supplanted by a shorter work by the same author, Kelso’s 2021 retrospective on the HKB model (LIT-601), which was read. It is filed because it is the citation others reach for when they mean coordination dynamics, relative coordination or metastability; De Jaegher & Di Paolo (LIT-571) and Raja et al. (LIT-598) both cite it. |
| LIT-588 v3 | A theoretical model of phase transitions in human hand movements | Haken, Kelso & Bunz (1985), Biological Cybernetics 51(5):347–356. Models the involuntary switch from anti-phase to in-phase finger or hand movement as movement frequency rises: relative phase φ is the order parameter, φ̇ = −∂V/∂φ with V = −a cos φ − b cos 2φ, both patterns are stable while |b| > |a|/4 and only in-phase below it, and hysteresis follows. The φ equation is derived from two self-sustained oscillators whose coupling must be nonlinear, with amplitude falling as frequency rises acting as the control. A theory paper: its data are Kelso’s earlier experiments, summarized. | Active — read 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1424) in full, from the publisher’s scan posted on Kelso’s lab page at Florida Atlantic University (https://ccs.fau.edu/hbblab/pdfs/1985_Haken_Kelso_Bunz_Biol_Cyb.pdf); worth reading as the paper that states the HKB model: relative phase as order parameter, the potential V = −a cos φ − b cos 2φ with anti-phase lost when b/a falls below 1/4, and its derivation from two nonlinearly coupled limit-cycle oscillators. Read it knowing that it is a theory paper with one numerical simulation and no new data: the switch and the hysteresis it models are summarized from Kelso’s earlier experiments, and critical fluctuations and critical slowing are named as future work, not reported. |
| LIT-601 | The Haken–Kelso–Bunz (HKB) model: from matter to movement to mind | Kelso (2021), Biological Cybernetics 115(4):305–322, a 60th-anniversary retrospective. HKB models bimanual coordination by the relative phase φ, with dφ/dt = −a sin φ − 2b sin 2φ and potential V = −a cos φ − b cos 2φ: both in-phase and anti-phase are stable for b/a > 1/4, and anti-phase loses stability below it, as observed when movement frequency rises. Noise, symmetry breaking (Δω) and metastability extend it; with Kuramoto’s model it becomes a generalized HKB for many agents. The same dynamics is reported within a body, between people and with machines, and in brain activity. | Active — read in full 2026-10-03 (NOTE-467), from the free-to-read publisher PDF. Filed in place of Kelso’s book Dynamic Patterns (LIT-578) and as the read account of the paywalled Haken–Kelso–Bunz paper (LIT-588), both Deferred. Worth reading as Kelso’s own short statement of coordination dynamics: the HKB order-parameter equation for relative phase, its stochastic and symmetry-breaking extensions, metastability as relative coordination, the generalized HKB–Kuramoto model, and the claim that one coordination dynamics holds within and between people. It is a retrospective by an author of the model, not a review, and it says so. |
| LIT-902 v2 | Functionally specific articulatory cooperation following jaw perturbations during speech: Evidence for coordinative structures | Kelso, Tuller, Vatikiotis-Bateson & Fowler (1984), JEP: Human Perception and Performance 10(6): 812–832. Unexpected loading of the jaw during speech is compensated quickly by remote articulators, and which articulator compensates depends on the sound being produced (the lips for a bilabial, the tongue for a fricative). Compensation follows the task, not the wiring. Unread. | Unavailable — unread, registered 2026-10-11 from Crossref metadata. APA’s copy is closed; a search for a Haskins Laboratories status-report version found none (the DTIC-hosted Haskins reports returned HTML, not PDFs). Filed as the classic demonstration of reciprocal compensation, the signature of a coordinative structure. A reading would confirm what is reported here from general knowledge and from a USC course page’s summary. |
| LIT-904 v2 | Preliminaries to a theory of action with reference to vision | Turvey (1977), in Shaw & Bransford (eds.), Perceiving, Acting and Knowing, Erlbaum; preprint in Haskins SR-41 (1975). An essay in Bernstein’s line: the executive cannot command muscles, so acts are built from relatively autonomous coordinative structures, reflexes and their functional combinations (a term taken from Easton 1972 and widened), controlled by tuning their parameters. Reflex-probe studies show the spinal cord retuned before voluntary movement; that vision sets the tuning directly is argued, not shown. | Active — read 2026-10-14 (NOTE-826) in full, in its 1975 Haskins report form; worth reading as the essay that made the coordinative structure the unit of action control and tuning its means of control: the executive cannot command muscles, so it specifies a ballpark and sets the parameters of relatively autonomous units, as one sets the stiffness and rest length of a spring. Read it knowing that Turvey borrows the term from Easton (1972), that its evidence is reviewed reflex-probe studies of simple single-joint movements, and that its account of vision setting the tuning is speculation. |
| LIT-992 v2 | How the conception of control influences our understanding of actions | Floegel et al. (2023). The Perspective contrasts two ways of modelling human motor control. Plant control treats neural computation as generating commands that move the musculoskeletal plant into a desired state. Perceptual control treats movement as emerging in a coupled agent–environment system from the pursuit of perceptual goals. The paper argues that the choice of perspective shapes how empirical data are modelled and so how actions are understood. Not read. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-12 from the owner’s papers-feed, not read. A lawful full text was sought on 2026-10-14 and not reached. OpenAlex reports it closed and lists a HAL record (hal-04076959), but the HAL API shows it is a notice with no file deposited. Unpaywall reports no open copy. The Nature Reviews Neuroscience page offers only paid access. Europe PMC holds the PubMed record (PMID 36997716) with no full text. Searches for a preprint, an accepted manuscript or a copy on the authors’ pages found none, and Goethe University Frankfurt’s repository search found no deposit. It stays Unavailable until a copy is supplied. The claim in the body, that it sets plant control against coupled-dynamics control at the motor scale for QUESTION-054, is from the abstract. |
| LIT-1017 | Autopoiesis, Adaptivity, Teleology, Agency | Di Paolo (2005), Phenomenol. Cogn. Sci. 4(4): 429–452. Autopoiesis read as conservation gives only an all-or-nothing norm that an observer can see and the system cannot use. Adaptivity, a graded capacity to detect and reverse tendencies toward the boundary of viability, gives good, neutral and bad ways of staying alive, for the system. Behaviour is the regulation of coupling, and agency is behaviour serving viability. | Active — read in full 2026-10-13 (NOTE-719) from the publisher’s typeset PDF that the author posts on his own site (ezequieldipaolo.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/autopoiesis_teleology_2005.pdf); the Sussex figshare record that OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar point to holds no file. Registered at the owner’s request from the survey of the Mathematics of Meaning corpus, for CLAIM-079, CLAIM-099 and CLAIM-075. Worth reading as the source of the robustness/adaptivity distinction and of the enactive definition of agency as regulation of coupling. Its norms are norms for the system, and it agrees with CLAIM-075 that viability alone yields none the system can use; it does not separate adaptivity from the capacity to transform it, so it is not evidence for CLAIM-025. |
| LIT-1018 | Life after Kant: Natural purposes and the autopoietic foundations of biological individuality | Weber & Varela (2002), Phenomenol. Cogn. Sci. 1(2): 97–125. An essay arguing that Kant’s natural purposes, Jonas’s metabolism and autopoiesis converge on an intrinsic teleology: a self-producing system’s maintenance of its identity is its purpose, and gives it a point of view and a world of value for it. Autopoiesis is defined for the cell, whose components “constitute the system as a distinguishable unity”; a multicellular organism is said not to be autopoietic itself. No test tells a produced boundary from an imposed one. | Active — read in full 2026-10-13 (NOTE-720) from the publisher’s PDF posted on the site of the IAS-Research Centre for Life, Mind and Society (ias-research.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Weber_Varela_Life_after_Kant_2002.pdf), a research group’s page at the UPV/EHU; OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar report no open-access copy. Registered at the owner’s request from the survey of the Mathematics of Meaning corpus, for CLAIM-194 and CLAIM-075. Worth citing for the autopoiesis definition, whose second clause has the components constitute the system as a distinguishable unity, and for the cell making its membrane. It gives no test that tells a produced boundary from an imposed one, and it says a multicellular organism is not itself autopoietic. Its intrinsic teleology is value for the organism, though one paragraph runs on to a right to life. |
| LIT-1027 | Genealogies of organizational closure: from logical paradox to mind in life | Rubin, Roli, Stano and Damiano (2026), Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 9. A genealogy of the notions of closure from mathematical logic, cybernetics, systems theory, thermodynamics, relational biology and the biology of cognition, showing that each closes a different thing. It then argues that closure is a circular organization of efficient causes, distinct from feedback, self-organization and catalytic cycles and not exhaustively describable as a state-determined syntactic procedure, and that current AI approximates closure without instantiating it. | Active — read in full 2026-10-13 (NOTE-727) from the publisher’s open-access PDF under CC BY (frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence/articles/10.3389/frai.2026.1806435/pdf). Registered from the 2026-10-13 exchange on meaning operators and selfhood (the workbench entry of 2026-10-13, 21:29). Worth reading as a map of what each notion of closure closes (information, operations, efficient causes, constraints, catalysts) and where each came from. Its thesis, closure as circular production of efficient causes that no state-determined syntactic description captures, supports CLAIM-288 and goes beyond it: a system whose objectives its own processes revise is still, on this account, not closed. It gives no test for QUESTION-086, and its non-computability claim rests on Rosen, unassessed. |
| LIT-1054 | On Distinguishing Epistemic from Pragmatic Action | Kirsh and Maglio (1994), Cognitive Science 18(4). Kirsh and Maglio define an epistemic action as a physical action whose primary function is to reduce the space, time or unreliability of the agent’s own mental computation, and argue from Tetris keystroke data that players rotate and translate pieces for that reason: zoids are rotated more than plan-then-act would need, rotation starts within a few hundred milliseconds of a zoid appearing, and a translate-to-wall check is used more the higher the drop. The computational saving is argued, not measured: physical rotation of 90° takes as little as 100 ms against an estimated 800–1200 ms mentally (a three-player pilot), and fewer attentional probes and less working memory are needed. The trade is physical action in place of internal computation at the moment of use, not precomputation or caching; the paper explicitly sets it against caching and chunking accounts of skill, and mentions amortized complexity only in passing for everyday cases such as sorting bolts before assembly. It says the choice fits a Stigler-style cost–benefit model in outline but that such models fail in detail, because an epistemic action’s value depends on the particular internal computation it serves. | Active — read in full 2026-10-15 from the scan of the published article (Cognitive Science 18(4), pp. 513–549) that David Kirsh posts on his UCSD publications page (adrenaline.ucsd.edu/kirsh/Articles/CogsciJournal/DistinguishingEpi_prag.pdf); the Wiley open-access PDF that OpenAlex lists refused requests from this environment. Worth reading as the founding definition of epistemic action: a physical action whose primary function is to reduce the space, time or unreliability of the agent’s own mental computation, argued from Tetris players’ extra and early rotations (rotation under way by 400–600 ms, physical rotation in as little as 100 ms against an estimated 800–1200 ms mentally) and a translate-to-wall check used more for higher drops. For QUESTION-095 it shows offloading at the moment of use, not precomputation: it sets itself against caching accounts of skill, mentions amortized complexity only in a parenthesis about sorting bolts, gives no formal cost model, and says simple cost–benefit models fail because an epistemic action’s value depends on the computation it serves. For TERM-055 it is a case of raising availability during the deadline, not before the request; for CLAIM-303 it has a single use and no upkeep, so it bears only on the general shape of the trade. |
| LIT-1057 | Adapting the Environment Instead of Oneself | Kirsh (1996), Adaptive Behavior 4(3–4). A conceptual paper. It models a task as a directed graph of states and actions with a cost metric on transitions, and classifies how an agent can improve its payoff by actions external to the task: pruning hard initial states, routine maintenance, scouting ahead, tools (which change the graph), and actions that make a space more “cognitively congenial” (which leave the graph intact and reduce mental operations). It names amortization once, as a parenthetical gloss on chimps leaving nut-cracking stones in place, and gives an investment rule for maintenance (future benefit against present cost times an “interest factor” for risk) in words only. There is no cost model with reuse frequency, retrieval cost or staleness; mental cost lies outside the graph, and the paper says there is “no general theory” of congeniality. The empirical figures are unpublished pilot results. | Active — read in full 2026-10-15 from a scan of the published article (Adaptive Behavior 4(3/4), pp. 415–452) that the author posts on his UCSD laboratory server (interactivity.ucsd.edu/articles/Adaptive/Adapting_env_00.pdf), text by OCR and cross-checked against the author’s HTML version in the same directory; the PhilArchive copy refused automated requests and was not used. Worth reading as the distributed-cognition statement of environment redesign as a change to a task’s state graph or to its “cognitive congeniality”, with routine maintenance (keep things where they are expected so that search is unnecessary, against objects’ tendency to scatter) and an investment rule for doing work before it is needed. For QUESTION-095 it shows that “amortize the cost of search” is a single parenthetical about chimps leaving nut-cracking stones in place, not developed; that the graph prices only physical transitions, so retrieval and mental cost fall outside the formalism by the paper’s own account; and that the nearest thing to a cost model is a verbal “interest factor” whose footnote names the risks that the result will not be used and that the change will not still be present, with no reuse frequency, retrieval cost, staleness of a result or query predictability. Its most usable point is that labour cost varies over time, so work should be done when it is cheap, which is the cockpit’s rationale. It does not cite Tarjan (that is Kirsh 1995, LIT-1076), and its value-of-information example changes outcome probabilities rather than pricing a choice made after looking. For CASE-085 it supports the labelled-compartment and standard-layout counterfactuals and their upkeep by the agent, a mechanism or the group, and says nothing on search cost, deadlines or when to stop searching. |
| LIT-1059 | Cognitive Offloading | Risko and Gilbert (2016), TICS 20(9). A short review that defines cognitive offloading as physical action that changes a task’s information-processing requirements to reduce cognitive demand, splits it into offloading onto the body and into the world, and proposes a metacognitive model: whether people offload is a strategy choice driven by their evaluation of internal versus extended strategies, which tracks objective internal demand but can be wrong, and offloading in turn changes both memory and those evaluations. The evidence is a handful of choice/no-choice studies, summarised qualitatively; the review reports no effect sizes and no formal account of costs. It names costs (memory for offloaded content, GPS-impaired spatial memory, photo-taking impairment, automation complacency and bias, skill decay, inflated self-knowledge, a self-reinforcing drift toward external reliance). It does not frame offloading as computation reused over time, and says nothing about how often an offloaded result is used. | Active — read in full 2026-10-15 from the authors’ manuscript in UCL Discovery (discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1508770/1/gilbert_TiCS_OFFLOADING_RPS.pdf, 37 pp.; the typeset Elsevier version, its Trends box and its Outstanding Questions box were not seen). Worth reading as the standard definition of cognitive offloading (“the use of physical action to alter the information processing requirements of a task in order to reduce cognitive demand”), its split into onto-the-body and into-the-world, and a metacognitive model in which the choice to offload follows beliefs about internal versus extended strategies, tracks objective demand but can be wrong, and feeds back through lost memory and changed confidence into a drift toward external reliance. It reports no effect sizes and gives no cost formalism. For QUESTION-095 it does not supply the retrieval-as-amortized-computation account; it adds that offloading shifts remembering “what” to remembering “where”, that people offload where it gives nothing (about 40% at ceiling load), so when it pays and when people do it come apart, and that automation bias is the nearest thing to the staleness cost. For CLAIM-303 it fits the direction (more is offloaded as the later internal cost rises) but says nothing about reuse count, and shows that offloading itself lowers internal capacity, which the claim’s fixed ledger leaves out. |
| LIT-1060 | Cognition in the Wild | Hutchins (1995), MIT Press. A study of navigation aboard a ship, arguing that cognitive processes are distributed across people, artifacts and their organization, and that the unit of analysis is the functional system. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-15, not read. Registered from the exchange of 2026-10-14 on prompting, epistemic memory and retrieval (the workbench entry of 2026-10-15). No NOTE is filed, and it stays Unavailable until it is read, not on merit. Looked for a lawful full text on 2026-10-15 and found none. Unpaywall and OpenAlex report it open access (green) on the strength of a single repository record at the University of Ljubljana (repozitorij.uni-lj.si/IzpisGradiva.php?id=44611, no PDF URL given); that record returns HTTP 410 with “Gradivo ne obstaja” (the item does not exist), and the Internet Archive has no capture of it, so the OA flag is stale. OpenAlex marks the MIT Press location itself as not open access, Crossref carries no licence for the DOI, and Semantic Scholar reports it closed. MIT Press Direct (direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/4604/Cognition-in-the-Wild, reached through the DOI) and the MIT Press catalogue page both returned 403 behind a Cloudflare challenge, the Internet Archive holds no capture of either, and a web search found only paid editions and library records and no sign that MIT Press has made the title open access. Hutchins’s own UCSD site (pages.ucsd.edu/~ehutchins/citw.html) posts the book’s Introduction in full (about 3,000 words: how the study began, the critique of an ideational, inside-the-head view of culture and cognition, and a chapter-by-chapter outline), but nothing else from the book. hci.ucsd.edu/hutchins/ is a JavaScript shell with no documents. No shadow library, Internet Archive lending copy or third-party upload was used. The Introduction states the move the record cites it for. It does not argue for it. It says Hutchins will “move the boundaries of the cognitive unit of analysis out beyond the skin of the individual person and treat the navigation team as a cognitive and computational system”, that “local functional systems composed of a person in interaction with a tool have cognitive properties that are radically different from the cognitive properties of the person alone” (chapter 3), and that “Depending on their organization, groups must have cognitive properties that are not predictable from a knowledge of the properties of the individuals in the group” (chapter 4 takes the team as a whole). Hutchins’s “How a cockpit remembers its speeds” (Cognitive Science 19(3), 1995, pp. 265–288, DOI 10.1207/s15516709cog1903_1) has lawful copies: the author posts the typeset article (pages.ucsd.edu/~ehutchins/documents/CockpitSpeeds.pdf, 24 pp., fetched 2026-10-15), and Unpaywall, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar list Wiley’s free publisher PDF (bronze; onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1207/s15516709cog1903_1, which returned 403 to this environment). It is not registered, and it is the reading available now for QUESTION-101. |
| LIT-1065 | The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception | Gibson (1979). The ecological account of perception, in which an affordance is a possibility for action that an environment offers an animal, relative to the animal’s capacities. | Unavailable — filed 2026-10-15, not read. Registered from the exchange of 2026-10-14 on prompting, epistemic memory and retrieval (the workbench entry of 2026-10-15). No NOTE is filed, and it stays Unavailable until it is read, not on merit. Looked for a lawful full text of the book, or of Chapter 8 (“The Theory of Affordances”, p. 119 in the classic edition) alone, on 2026-10-15 and found none. Unpaywall and OpenAlex report the 2015 Psychology Press classic edition (10.4324/9781315740218) closed, with no open-access location and no repository full text, and Semantic Scholar gives no openAccessPdf; the publisher’s page (taylorfrancis.com) refused requests from this environment (HTTP 403) and the book is sold, not open access. The 1986 Lawrence Erlbaum edition (10.4324/9780203767764) and the chapter’s reprint in The People, Place, and Space Reader (Routledge 2014, 10.4324/9781315816852-11) are also closed in Unpaywall and OpenAlex. Crossref lists no chapter-level DOI for the classic edition. Web searches found no author-, estate- or publisher-posted copy and no open-access anthology reprint. A scan of part of Chapter 8 was posted on a University of Oslo course page (IN3220, spring 2021, uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/ifi/IN3220/v21/gibson_james_j_1977_1979_the_theory_of_affordances.pdf); it now returns 404 and the course page is unpublished, and a course’s scan of a publisher’s chapter is not the author’s copy, so it was not used. A full PDF of the classic edition on a university library server (library.uniq.edu.iq) is named as a z-lib download and was not used. Secondary summaries (a book report from HVL’s NaChiLit group) were not treated as a reading. None found. |
| LIT-1066 | How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds | Hutchins (1995), Cognitive Science 19(3), 265–288. A task analysis of how a two-pilot airliner cockpit “remembers” approach speeds: computed early from a speed-card booklet indexed by gross weight, passed across speech to bugs on the airspeed indicators, and used minutes later as a judgement of spatial adjacency. The memory is a property of the functional system, “not made primarily of pilot memory”, though pilot memory is involved. Stylized and unmeasured, for an anticipated, invariant task. | Active — read in full 2026-10-15 from the author’s posted copy, a scan of the published article (Cognitive Science 19(3), pp. 265–288) at pages.ucsd.edu/~ehutchins/documents/CockpitSpeeds.pdf. Worth reading as the compact statement of distributed cognition’s method, a cockpit treated as a cognitive system whose representations can be observed, and as the source of the speed-bug argument: setting the day’s speeds as bugs on the airspeed indicator does not improve any pilot’s memory but turns recall and scale-reading into a judgment of spatial proximity, so the memory “has now become a property of a larger system”. For QUESTION-101 and CLAIM-296 it shows, by task analysis and not by measurement, a change of arrangement alone changing what the system can do; the retrieval cue (displayed gross weight, the needle nearing a bug) supplied by the environment; and the work of retrieval moved to a quiet phase 25 to 30 minutes ahead of use, which the record’s deadline does not yet represent. It narrows them: its task is anticipated, mandated and invariant, it analyses only success, and it says nothing about search for one item among many under a deadline, which is CASE-085’s situation. |
| LIT-1075 | Deictic codes for the embodiment of cognition | Ballard, Hayhoe, Pook and Rao (1997), BBS 20(4). At about a third of a second, the time scale of a saccade, the article models fixation as a pointer that binds a variable in a behavioural program to a place in the world, so that what is bound is only the task-relevant feature, fetched just before use. In a block-copying task subjects looked back at the model about 1.3 times per block on average, the commonest cycle being two looks per block (one apparently for colour, one for position), and chose this slowest, lowest-memory strategy (about 3 s a block, against about 1.5 s for copying from memory) though told to be fast; separating model and copy by 70° cut looks to 1.0 per block, and one-colour patterns that could be chunked cut them to 0.7. The authors read this as working memory having a “carrying cost” that exceeds the cost of re-acquiring from the world, but that cost is inferred from the choices and never measured or modelled, and the evidence is one task with small samples (seven subjects for the main data, three for the colour-change experiment) and no statistics reported in the article. What is left in the world is unprocessed input, not a computed result, and the article argues against precomputation where the needed products cannot be foreseen. | Active — read in full 2026-10-15 (the target article, pp. 723–742; the open peer commentaries and the authors’ response, pp. 742–767, not read) from the typeset BBS PDF posted on Dana Ballard’s University of Texas page (www.cs.utexas.edu/~dana/bbs.pdf; the same file is on Rajesh Rao’s University of Washington page). Unpaywall and OpenAlex report the DOI closed. Worth reading as the founding statement of fixation as a pointer that binds a program variable to a place in the world at about a third of a second, and for the block-copying evidence that people re-look rather than memorize: about 1.3 looks at the model per block, the slowest lowest-memory strategy (about 3 s a block, against 1.5 s from memory) chosen most often under instructions to be fast, falling to 1.0 when looking is made dearer (70° separation) and 0.7 when patterns can be chunked. For QUESTION-095 it shows the trade stated as a cost comparison (“carrying cost” of working memory against on-line acquisition) that moves with both costs, but the cost is inferred from choice, not measured or modelled, what is left in the world is raw input rather than a computed result, and the authors argue against precomputing where needs are unpredictable, so it is the deferral policy opposite to the cockpit’s, not amortization; for TERM-055 it shows people choosing between internal and external sources by their relative retrieval cost, and moving retrieval later, not earlier; for CLAIM-298 it offers only an analogy (cue-driven matching, the same image read differently by task step) and no test of framing or judgement. |
| LIT-1076 | The intelligent use of space | Kirsh (1995), Artificial Intelligence 73. A classification, from video of cooks, assemblers and baggers, informal observation and the Tetris studies, of how people arrange things around them to cut the time and memory a task needs: arrangements that simplify choice (hide or highlight affordances, eliminate decisions, offload heuristic properties), arrangements that simplify perception (clustering, regions, marking, the vernier effect), and spatial dynamics that save internal computation (Tetris rotation, self-cueing). It frames the savings in search-complexity terms and links informational structuring to amortized computation in a footnote, but says the savings cannot in general be meaningfully quantified and offers no cost model, no measurements beyond the cited Tetris timings, and no case of an arrangement failing under a deadline. Its agents are experts arranging their own workspace in the medium and short term; long-term, pre-built environments are set aside. | Active — read in full 2026-10-15 from the publisher’s typeset article (Artificial Intelligence 73 (1995) 31–68), scanned and posted by the author on his UCSD pages (adrenaline.ucsd.edu/kirsh/Articles/Space/intelligent_useof_space.pdf), text taken by OCR, with the formulas checked against page images; his HTML pre-publication version on the same site was compared and differs in the footnotes and the Tetris timings. Worth reading as the standard classification of how people arrange their workspace to cut the time and memory a task needs: arrangements that simplify choice (hiding or highlighting affordances, eliminating decisions, heuristic cues), arrangements that simplify perception (clustering, regions, marking, the vernier effect) and spatial dynamics that save internal computation (Tetris rotation). It is drawn from observation and anecdote, with no measurements of its own beyond the Tetris timings it cites, and it declines to quantify the savings. For QUESTION-095 it shows that the link from informational structuring to amortized computation was drawn in 1995, in a footnote to Tarjan and in §3.4’s “set-up costs could be amortized over the whole task”, but as an analogy to self-adjusting structures, not to memoization. It also shows that its third category, just-in-time offloading, is not amortization at all. For CASE-085 and TERM-055 it supports the gap between presence and finding in time: memory for location is “regularly overestimated”, a meaningful pre-existing layout helps recall, and retrieval cost matters “in absolute time” even where it is a constant factor. It does not cover pre-built environments arranged by someone other than the retriever, or failures under a deadline. |
| LIT-1181 v2 | Action and behavior: a free-energy formulation | Friston, Daunizeau, Kilner & Kiebel (2010). If an agent’s existence requires a low-entropy density over its states, an ergodic assumption makes that entropy the time-average of surprise, and the setup stipulates that only action changes the hidden states the agent senses; so action as well as perception must minimize a free-energy bound on surprise. Action is absent from the generative model and descends on sensory prediction error, so motor control is the fulfilment of proprioceptive (and visual) predictions. Simulations of oculomotor stabilization and prior-driven saccades, cued reaching, a mountain car learned passively in a designed environment, and Lorenz trajectories show unexpected perturbations cancelled by action and not perceived. The model is held fixed and the data re-sampled to fit it. | Active — read 2026-10-16 (NOTE-960) in full, from the publisher’s open-access PDF; worth reading as the first full statement that action, like perception, minimizes a free-energy bound on sensory surprise, by fulfilling proprioceptive and visual predictions, with simulations of oculomotor stabilization and saccades, cued reaching, mountain-car and Lorenz trajectories. Read it knowing that the “ergodic arguments” of the abstract only equate entropy with time-averaged surprise, and that action is needed because the setup stipulates that action is the only way the agent changes the hidden states it senses; that action here pulls the sensed world toward a fixed model, sampling “what one expects to experience”, and cancels unexpected perturbations so they are not perceived; and that the paper answers the worry about confirming a wrong model by appeal to existence (“agents who do not have the right priors cannot exist”). It has no mental or covert action. |
| LIT-1263 v2 | Interoceptive inference, emotion, and the embodied self | Seth (2013), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17(11):565–573, an Opinion article. Emotions are “interoceptive inference”: felt states are the content of hierarchical top-down predictions of the causes of interoceptive signals, compared with bottom-up prediction errors in the anterior insula. Prediction errors are also cancelled by action, as descending predictions set the reference points of autonomic reflexes, the visceral counterpart of active inference in motor control. The same scheme is applied to the experience of body ownership. The rubber hand illusion is a revision of the multisensory self-model under precision-weighted error. Low interoceptive sensitivity goes with greater susceptibility to it, and a virtual hand pulsing in time with the heartbeat is owned more. No direct test of the model is claimed. | Active — read in full 2026-10-19 (NOTE-1000); worth reading as the short statement that put emotion and body ownership under one predictive-coding mechanism: felt emotion is the content of top-down predictions of the causes of interoceptive signals, the anterior insula is the comparator, and the experience of body ownership is what the brain infers to be “most likely to be me” from interoceptive and exteroceptive signals together. It is an opinion article with no new data. Its evidence is indirect and cited, and its one figure is a study by the author’s own group, an augmented-reality rubber hand illusion whose virtual hand flashed in or out of time with the heartbeat. The record’s bridge from its interoception cluster to body ownership. |
| LIT-1264 | No specific relationship between hypnotic suggestibility and the rubber hand illusion | Ehrsson, Fotopoulou, Radziun, Longo & Tsakiris (2022), Nat Commun 13:564, a Matters Arising on Lush et al. (2020). Reanalysing the open data of all 353 participants, they find no relationship between hypnotisability and the synchronous-minus-asynchronous difference in illusion ratings (rho = -0.066, BF01 = 5.7) or in proprioceptive drift (rho = 0.047, BF01 = 1.7), a significant synchrony effect in every hypnotisability quartile, and no effect of explicit suggestions about which condition should work. The correlations Lush et al. report hold as much for the asynchronous condition and for an “impossible” visual hallucination item, so they read hypnotisability as a general influence on report, not a driver of the illusion. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-997) in full with its supplementary figure; worth reading as the case for the rubber hand illusion surviving trait suggestibility, made from Lush et al.’s own open data (n = 353): the synchronous-minus-asynchronous difference in illusion ratings does not vary with hypnotisability (Bayes factor 5.7 for the null), is significant in every quartile of it including the least suggestible, and is unmoved by explicit instructions about which condition should work. Read it as a reanalysis and an argument, not new data: it treats the asynchronous condition as a valid control, which is exactly what the reply (Lush & Seth 2022) disputes, and its drift analysis is inconclusive by its own Bayes factor. |
| LIT-1266 | Where exactly am I? Self-location judgements distribute between head and torso | Alsmith & Longo (2014), Consciousness and Cognition 24:70–74. Ten adults set a pointer, rotating in their sagittal plane, to point “directly at you”, by hand while blindfolded or by telling the experimenter when to stop it. Responses clustered on the upper face and the upper torso, and the starting position of the pointer decided which: from above, the face; from below, the torso. Vision and touch gave the same pattern. The authors conclude that the self is judged neither spread over the body nor at one point, and that the concept of the self as a spatial entity is “inherently ambiguous”. Small sample, 20.7% of trials lost, and a reanalysis whose key effect is misreported. | Active — read in full 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1008), from the published article on the second author’s lab site; worth reading as the first study that asks people to point at themselves on their own body, rather than on a drawing or a cartoon, and as a measure of self-location that is neither a questionnaire nor a walking-back drift. Ten adults, standing, set a pointer rotating in front of them so that it pointed “directly at you”, blindfolded by hand or by telling the experimenter when to stop it. Answers fell mostly on two regions, the upper face and the upper torso, and which one depended on where the pointer started: from above, the face; from below, the torso. Seeing and touching gave the same pattern, the touch version less sharply. Read it as a small pilot with a fifth of its trials lost to a camera fault, whose re-analysis without the lower torso misreports a non-significant effect as significant, and whose result may reflect where the pointer reached first as much as where people feel they are. It bears on THEORY-768’s self-location dimension; it bears on none of the rubber hand THEORYs. |
| LIT-1267 | Reply to: No specific relationship between hypnotic suggestibility and the rubber hand illusion | Lush & Seth (2022), Nat Commun 13:563, replying to Ehrsson et al. (2022). They accept the reanalyses and dispute the reading: an asynchronous condition is no control for demand characteristics, because expectancies are higher for the synchronous condition, and in their sample the expectancy difference did not vary with hypnotisability (b = -0.16, P = 0.072, B = 0.07). Highly hypnotisable participants may meet those expectancies by generating the experience, less hypnotisable ones by response bias. Agreement with “I felt as if the rubber hand were my hand” rose with hypnotisability (b = 0.76, rs = 0.27) and averaged 0.7 on a seven-point scale whose maximum is 3. Whether multisensory integration plays a significant role in RHI measures awaits experiments with adequate controls. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1003) in full; worth reading as the clearest short statement of why a synchronous-minus-asynchronous difference cannot by itself show that the rubber hand illusion is multisensory: participants expect more from the synchronous condition, and in Lush et al.’s sample (n = 353) that expectancy difference did not vary with hypnotisability, so a null relation between hypnotisability and the synchrony effect is what demand characteristics predict too. It adds that agreement with the ownership item rises steeply with hypnotisability (b = 0.76 per SWASH point) and reaches minimal agreement only in the top 31%. Read it as a reply: the expectancy and ownership regressions are post hoc, as the authors grant of both sides, and its alternative for low-suggestible participants, response bias, is asserted and not measured. |
| LIT-1268 | No causal link between changes in hand position sense and feeling of limb ownership in the rubber hand illusion | Abdulkarim & Ehrsson (2016; online 2015), Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 78:707–720. During 90 s of synchronous or asynchronous brushing, a motor moved the participant’s hidden hand 8 cm toward or away from the rubber hand at 0.9 mm/s, below the threshold for feeling the movement. Pointing to the hand followed the displacement (drift main effect η² .68 in Experiment 1), but questionnaire ownership depended only on synchrony and did not differ between toward, away or a static hand (n = 18 in each of two experiments). The static condition reproduced the classic synchronous drift and its correlation with the illusion (r = .56). The authors conclude that changing hand position sense does not change ownership, so drift is not a cause of the illusion; whether ownership causes drift is left open. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-992) in full; worth reading as the direct test of whether a change in felt hand position causes the feeling of owning the rubber hand. A motor slid the hidden real hand 8 cm toward or away from the rubber hand during stroking, too slowly to notice; pointing moved with it by about 5–6 cm, and questionnaire ownership did not change, in two experiments of 18. The authors conclude that drift is not a prerequisite of the illusion and is a process distinct from ownership, while still defending drift as a measure when the hand is immobile. Read it as a null result from 18 participants with no equivalence test, within distances (8–24 cm) where the illusion is known to work, and with some statistics that do not agree with their own test values. |
| LIT-1271 | Trait phenomenological control predicts experience of mirror synaesthesia and the rubber hand illusion | Lush, Botan, Scott, Seth, Ward & Dienes (2020), Nature Communications 11:4853. Trait hypnotisability (the Sussex-Waterloo Scale, SWASH), which the authors call phenomenological control, predicted vicarious pain (n = 404) and mirror touch (n = 154), and, in a rubber hand illusion study of 353, agreement with the ownership and location items after both synchronous and asynchronous brushing, a visual control item, and, weakly, synchronous proprioceptive drift. An attempt to manipulate expectations failed, so the evidence is correlational. The authors conclude that the usual asynchrony and control-item checks do not rule out suggestion, and that the illusion as commonly reported may be at least partly an implicit imaginative-suggestion effect. | Active — read in full 2026-10-20 (NOTE-990), with its supplementary information and the peer review file; worth reading as the first large-sample test of whether the rubber hand illusion, as it is usually measured, tracks the trait that hypnosis scales measure. In 353 undergraduates, hypnotisability predicted agreement with the ownership items after synchronous brushing (about half a scale point per SWASH point, rs 0.26), and just as well after asynchronous brushing and for a visual “control” item; it predicted synchronous proprioceptive drift weakly (rs 0.11). In separate samples of 404 and 154 it predicted vicarious pain and mirror touch. The planned manipulation of expectations failed, so nothing here is causal, and the pre-registered test, hypnotisability against the synchronous-minus-asynchronous difference, was inconclusive. Read it as strong evidence that the standard asynchrony and control-item checks do not control for suggestion, and as no evidence on whether the synchrony effect survives such a control. Seth, author of LIT-1263, is a co-author. |
| LIT-1272 | Explaining Away the Body: Experiences of Supernaturally Caused Touch and Touch on Non-Hand Objects within the Rubber Hand Illusion | Hohwy & Paton (2010), PLoS ONE 5:e9416. Through a head-mounted display, a foreign arm (an experimenter’s, then a rubber one) was seen aligned with the participant’s own arm while both were tapped. Synchronous tapping, against asynchronous, raised ratings that the felt touch was produced by the seen finger on the seen arm, and the rating held through pauses of up to a minute (n = 13). After onset, synchrony also raised ratings that a finger hovering 5 cm off the rubber arm caused the touch and that touch was felt on a cardboard box (n = 11 and 10); without prior onset the box gave no synchrony difference (n = 9). The real hand was 0.13 °C cooler under synchrony in one comparison only. The authors read the results as the visual body image being “explained away” by ongoing multisensory inference, and as support for one-deficit theories of delusion. | Active — read in full 2026-10-20 (NOTE-998); worth reading as a philosopher’s small rubber hand experiment that pushes the illusion past where it should break, and as the study Apps & Tsakiris cite for cooling of the real hand. Through a head-mounted display the foreign arm was seen exactly where the participant’s own arm lay. Synchronous tapping made people rate the touch as produced on the seen arm (13 people), and after onset they went on to rate touch as caused by a finger hovering 5 cm off a rubber arm, or felt on a cardboard box (10 and 11 people); some described the hovering finger as magnetism, ESP or black magic. Nine people shown the box without prior onset gave no synchrony difference. The real hand was 0.13 °C cooler under synchrony in one of four comparisons, by what reads as a one-tailed test. Read it as four small samples, single leading questions with no ownership item, no expectation measure, and a temperature result too weak to carry the claim that the real hand loses ownership. |
| LIT-1273 | Moving a Rubber Hand that Feels Like Your Own: A Dissociation of Ownership and Agency | Kalckert & Ehrsson (2012), Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6:40. A moving rubber hand illusion: the participant taps a hidden index finger linked by a rod to the finger of a wooden model hand in view. Synchronous movement gave ownership (mean 1.63 on −3 to +3) and agency (2.44), and a 1.73 cm drift toward the model, where a ~500 ms asynchrony gave neither (n = 20 and 20). In a 2 × 2 design (n = 32 each), passive movement abolished agency (−0.61) but left ownership (1.57) and drift, and a model hand rotated 180° abolished ownership (−0.62) and drift but left agency (2.2): a double dissociation on questionnaires. Agency was higher, and correlated with ownership (r = 0.50), only when the hand was owned. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-993) in full; worth reading as the first experiment to set the sense of ownership and the sense of agency against each other in one rubber hand paradigm. A wooden model hand whose index finger is linked by a rod to the participant’s hidden finger is owned when it moves in time with the real finger, whether the movement is the participant’s own or imposed by the experimenter, and is controlled when the participant moves, whether or not it is owned: passive movement removed agency and left ownership, and rotating the model hand 180° removed ownership and left agency. Read it as 104 participants over four between-group experiments, with named non-parametric tests, means and SDs but no standardised effect sizes, a dissociation shown on questionnaires alone (drift measures ownership only), and no control for what participants expected the conditions to do. It also finds the two not independent: agency was rated higher, and correlated with ownership, only when the hand was owned. |
| LIT-1274 v2 | Full-body illusions and minimal phenomenal selfhood | Blanke & Metzinger (2009), Trends in Cognitive Sciences 13(1):7–13. An opinion piece proposing that research on bodily self-consciousness isolate minimal phenomenal selfhood (MPS), “the conscious experience of being a self”, defined by three dimensions: global self-identification with the body, spatiotemporal self-location, and a weak (geometrical) first-person perspective, claimed jointly necessary and sufficient. The rubber-hand illusion and somatoparaphrenia alter only partial ownership and so do not touch MPS; out-of-body experience, heautoscopy and the full-body illusions of Lenggenhager et al. and Ehrsson (2007) do. Agency is causally enabling for MPS but not constitutive of it. | Active — read 2026-10-19 (NOTE-1002) in full; worth reading as the short programmatic paper that names minimal phenomenal selfhood (MPS), the simplest form of the experience of being a self, and splits it into three dimensions: self-identification with the body as a whole, self-location, and a weak, purely geometrical first-person perspective. Its distinctive move is to set partial ownership (the rubber-hand illusion, somatoparaphrenia) apart from global ownership, and to say only the second reaches MPS, so that full-body illusions and neurological out-of-body phenomena, not the rubber hand, are the entry point. Its most quotable thesis is that bodily agency “is a causally enabling, but not a constitutive condition, for phenomenal selfhood”. An opinion piece: no new data, the evidence cited, and the necessity and sufficiency claims asserted. |
| LIT-1275 | What is embodiment? A psychometric approach | Longo, Schüür, Kammers, Tsakiris & Haggard (2008), Cognition 107:978–998. 131 participants rated 27 statements after synchronous and asynchronous brushing of a rubber hand. Principal components analysis gave four components in both conditions (embodiment of the rubber hand, loss of own hand, movement, affect) and a fifth, deafference, after asynchrony only. A second analysis split embodiment into ownership, location and agency. Ownership and location were positive after synchronous brushing and negative after asynchronous; agency was negative after both. Drift toward the rubber hand was 1.34 cm after synchrony and a non-significant 0.30 cm after asynchrony, and ownership and location each predicted it. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1004) in full, from the published article on the first author’s lab site; worth reading as the first large-sample measurement of what the rubber hand illusion feels like, and as the study that split “embodiment” of a rubber hand into ownership, location and agency. 131 people rated 27 statements after 60 s of synchronous and of asynchronous brushing. A principal components analysis found four components in both conditions (embodiment of the rubber hand, loss of own hand, movement, affect) and a fifth, deafference, only after asynchronous brushing. Ownership and location rose above neutral only after synchrony, agency stayed below it, and ownership and location each predicted proprioceptive drift. Read it knowing that the three subcomponents come from a second varimax rotation of ten items dominated by one component, that there is no control for expectation or suggestion, and that every item is about a hand, none about the whole body. |
| LIT-1276 | Demand Characteristics Confound the Rubber Hand Illusion | Lush (2020), Collabra: Psychology 6(1):22. A pre-registered quasi-experiment on the controls of the rubber hand illusion. Twenty undergraduates (after 12 pre-registered exclusions) who had never taken part in it were shown a text and a video of the procedure and rated how far they expected to feel each of Botvinick & Cohen’s three illusion and six control statements, under synchronous and asynchronous brushing. Expectancy was higher for illusion than control statements under synchrony (M 1.7 against 0.0, t(19) = 6.24, d = 1.40) and for synchronous than asynchronous illusion statements (1.7 against 0.4, t(19) = 4.68, d = 1.05), and nine who had never heard of the illusion showed the same. The controls therefore do not match expectations, and the author concludes the illusion “may be, partially or entirely, a suggestion effect”; he proposes controls matched on expectancy and on suggestion difficulty. | Active — read in full 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1005) from the author’s final manuscript on PsyArXiv; worth reading as the direct test of the assumption behind every standard check on the rubber hand illusion, that expectations are matched between the “illusion” and “control” statements and between synchronous and asynchronous brushing. Twenty people who never underwent the illusion read a description of it, watched a 62-second video and rated, for each of Botvinick & Cohen’s nine statements, how far they expected to feel it. They expected the illusion statements more than the control statements under synchrony (1.7 against 0.0, d = 1.40) and the illusion statements more under synchrony than asynchrony (1.7 against 0.4, d = 1.05): the pattern published reports show. Read it as showing that the usual controls cannot rule out suggestion, not as showing that the illusion is suggestion; the author says so. Small, pre-registered, sequential Bayesian stopping, one online sample of undergraduates, and no illusion or drift measured. |
| LIT-1277 v4 | Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see | Botvinick & Cohen (1998), Nature 391:756. Ten subjects watched a rubber left hand being brushed in synchrony with their own hidden left hand. After ten minutes they affirmed feeling the touch where they saw the rubber hand touched, that the touch was caused by the brush on the rubber hand, and that the rubber hand was theirs. After a 30-minute exposure, blind reaches toward the real hand were displaced toward the rubber hand in proportion to how long the illusion was reported, and an asynchronously brushed control group reported the illusion for 7% of the time against 42% and showed no drift toward it. The authors conclude that intermodal matching “can be sufficient for self-attribution”. | Active — read 2026-10-19 (NOTE-1006) in full; worth reading as the one-page report that founded the rubber hand illusion paradigm: synchronous brushing of a seen rubber hand and the hidden real hand makes touch be felt where the rubber hand is touched and the rubber hand be felt as one’s own, and after 30 minutes the felt position of the real hand drifts toward the rubber hand in proportion to how long the illusion lasted, while asynchronous brushing abolishes both. Read it as a brief communication: ten subjects, no stated control-group size, statistics given only as P-values, and a connectionist model and a premotor-cell analogy mentioned but not shown. Its closing claim, that intermodal matching “can be sufficient for self-attribution”, is the sentence the later literature on body ownership builds on. |
| LIT-1280 | Serious Problems With Interpreting Rubber Hand “Illusion” Experiments | Roseboom & Lush (2022), Collabra: Psychology 8(1):32274. A resampling study of the synchronous-condition reports of 351 participants from Lush et al. 2020, run as 10,000 simulated experiments of 20 participants each. Unselected samples found mean agreement with the three standard statements significantly above zero in 83% of experiments; samples from above the median of hypnotisability (subjective SWASH) in 99%; from below it in 51%. For the ownership statement alone the lower half gave significant agreement in about 4% of experiments, and the upper half in 74% (supplement). The authors argue that the relationship is not too small to matter, that the synchronous–asynchronous difference cannot be interpreted because of Lush (2020), and that implicit, neuroimaging and animal measures are tied to ownership only through these reports. | Active — read in full 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1001) from the accepted manuscript on PsyArXiv, with the authors’ analysis notebooks for 10, 20 and 50 participants; worth reading as the clearest demonstration of what a modest correlation between hypnotisability and rubber hand report does to a field of small studies. Resampling the 351 synchronous-condition reports of Lush et al. 2020 in simulated experiments of 20, samples drawn from the upper half of the hypnotisability scale found significant agreement with the three illusion statements 99% of the time and samples from the lower half 51%; for the one ownership statement, “I felt as if the rubber hand were my hand”, the figures were 74% and 4%. Read it as a reanalysis of one dataset, with no new data and no asynchronous or drift analysis. Its headline numbers depend on n = 20: at n = 50 the lower half finds the averaged illusion statements in 95% of experiments, though the ownership statement still only in 6%. The authors themselves leave open that the same people may have the illusion for other reasons. |
| LIT-1281 | The Rubber Hand Illusion: Feeling of Ownership and Proprioceptive Drift Do Not Go Hand in Hand | Rohde, Di Luca & Ernst (2011), PLoS ONE 6:e21659. Robot arms stroked a rubber hand and the hidden real hand, and felt finger position was probed by a projected dot. Drift toward the rubber hand built up to about 5–6 cm under synchronous stroking, and to the same level when the hand was only seen, unstroked, or when asynchronous stroking was interrupted every 10 s for measurement. Only 120 s of continuous asynchronous stroking held drift near zero (about 1 cm), which reproduces the classic synchronous–asynchronous difference. The questionnaire showed ownership only after synchronous stroking. The authors conclude that drift and ownership come from different integration processes, that asynchrony suppresses drift rather than synchrony causing it, and that drift is not a valid proxy for ownership. Groups were of ten. | Active — read 2026-10-20 (NOTE-1009) in full; worth reading as the study that broke the assumed tie between proprioceptive drift and the feeling of owning the rubber hand. With robot-delivered stroking and a visual probe of felt finger position, drift toward the rubber hand appeared under synchronous stroking, under no stroking at all (only seeing the hand), and under asynchronous stroking interrupted every 10 s, at levels not significantly different from synchronous stroking (about 5–6 cm); only continuous asynchronous stroking kept it near zero. Ownership, by questionnaire, needed synchrony. The authors conclude that drift comes from visuo-proprioceptive integration that asynchrony suppresses, and that “conclusions about feelings of ownership cannot be drawn from measuring proprioceptive drift alone”. Read it as groups of 10, a visual-judgement measure rather than reaching, and an Experiment 2 whose ownership evidence is anecdotal debriefing, not a questionnaire. |
| LIT-1345 v2 | Integrated World Modeling Theory (IWMT) and the Human Consciousness Hypothesis (HCH) | Safron, Klimaj & Sheikhbahaee (2026). Compares the Human Consciousness Hypothesis (genesis, coherence, second-order perception) with Integrated World Modeling Theory, on which phenomenal consciousness is what it feels like to be the coherent functioning of an embodied agent’s probabilistic generative world model, implemented by synchronous neural complexes that infer the states of the embodied sensorium. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1057) from the publisher’s PDF on AAAI’s open journal system; worth reading as a compact current statement of Integrated World Modeling Theory: phenomenal consciousness is the coherent functioning of an embodied agent’s generative world model, run coupled to sense data in perception or decoupled in imagination, and embodied grounding is necessary, so integrated information or a global workspace without it does not suffice. Its main limit is that it argues nothing: a seven-page symposium paper that restates earlier IWMT papers, not read, and aligns them with a Human Consciousness Hypothesis it does not reference. Embodiment is required in “sufficient degrees (and kinds)” with no threshold. |
| LIT-1350 v2 | The explanatory ground of the brainbound view of consciousness: A reply to enactive embodied externalism | Villalobos & Cea (2026). Unread and unchecked: from the title and the exchange’s description only. A reply to enactive embodied externalism: the physiological implausibility of a disembodied brain does not defeat brain-centred explanation of consciousness, because the neuroscientific strategy is contrastive. Villalobos’s 2023 seminar abstract on the same topic argues that brain-bound internalism does not depend on brain and body being separable. | Unavailable — no copy reached, 2026-10-22; failed on availability. Unpaywall and OpenAlex record the article as closed, with no repository copy; Springer’s PDF and article page returned a bot challenge to this client; a web search, PhilPapers and PhilArchive (both 403 to this client) found no preprint or author copy. Not read, so the summary still follows the title and the exchange’s description and is unchecked. The nearest text found is the abstract of a 2023 seminar by Villalobos, “The enactive challenge to traditional neuroscience of consciousness: A critical review” (ArgLab, Lisbon, 29 May 2023), which argues that the enactive argument from the physiological inseparability of brain and body fails because the internalism of traditional neuroscience does not depend on that separability. It is not the article. Registered from the owner’s exchange of 2026-10-21, “Experience and interpretation”. No NOTE is filed. |
| LIT-1356 v2 | What Is Enactivism? | Ward (2026). Treating “enactivism” as an umbrella for any view that stresses sensorimotor loops ignores what sets apart the enactive approach of Varela, Thompson and Rosch: life–mind continuity, the primacy of lived experience, and reciprocity between science and self-understanding. A second axis, organicist against informationalist, runs across the cognitivist–embodied one. Embodied predictive processing, extended functionalism and cybernetics are embodied and informationalist; the enactive approach is organicist. A taxonomy, not an argument that organicism is true. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1065) from the author’s accepted manuscript in the University of Edinburgh repository; worth reading as a short, clear map that separates where a view puts cognition’s processes (skull, or brain–body–world) from what it says meaning depends on (information, or organization distinctive of living things). On that map embodied predictive processing, extended functionalism and cybernetics are embodied but informationalist, and the enactive approach of The Embodied Mind is organicist, further marked by the primacy of lived experience and by reciprocity, in which the vocabularies we understand ourselves with reshape the experience they describe. Its main limit is that it argues for a taxonomy, not for organicism, and gives no criterion for which properties are distinctive of life. It does not discuss brains in vats, development or grounding. |
| LIT-1377 v2 | A Concise Genealogy and Anatomy of Habitus | Wacquant (2016). Traces the concept of habitus from Aristotle to Bourdieu and sets out its anatomy: socially acquired, durable but not fixed dispositions that can be layered and internally discordant, and that must be studied together with the social worlds that form and solicit them. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1074) from the journal’s typeset article deposited in UC Berkeley’s eScholarship collection; worth reading as a seven-page authoritative statement that habitus is layered, revisable, possibly split against itself, able to misfire against its world, shared as a kind and unique as a token, and inert without the positions that trigger it. It is exegesis of Bourdieu with cited, not presented, evidence, and it dismisses Sewell’s critique in a note without argument. |
| LIT-1384 v2 | Walking through Doorways Causes Forgetting: Further Explorations | Radvansky, Krawietz and Tamplin (2011). The location-updating effect appeared with smaller displays and in a real environment, and, against an encoding-specificity account, memory did not improve when people returned to the room where the objects were first encoded; the results are read through the event horizon model. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1082) from the publisher’s PDF as posted on the first author’s laboratory page at Notre Dame; worth holding for the return-to-the-room result and the authors’ account of it: returning to the room where objects were picked up did not help, two new rooms were worse than one, and the authors explain the effect as retrieval interference between event models that both hold the carried object, not as loss of a context or of activation. The real-room experiment changes the task and its effect is p = .02 to .06; the plain shift effect in the return experiment is marginal on errors. No goal or intention is manipulated, so the reading that perspective is a goal-sensitive relation rather than a location is not tested here. |
| LIT-1391 v2 | The Unspoken Whiteness of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: The Gracies versus Luta Livre | Penglase (2025). Argues that Brazilian jiu-jitsu has been positioned as “white” within Brazil’s racial hierarchy, usually implicitly, and that scholars and non-Brazilian practitioners have overlooked this. It focuses on the challenge matches the Gracie family fought against practitioners of luta livre, a Brazilian catch-wrestling style, and shows how those matches located jiu-jitsu in that hierarchy. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1092) from the publisher’s open-access PDF at Cardiff University Press (CC BY-NC-ND); worth reading as a documented history of the Gracie–luta livre rivalry from 1931 to 1997, including the negotiation of the 1931 rules in the Gracies’ favour, and as an argument that the matches placed jiu-jitsu in Brazil’s racial hierarchy as white through class, neighbourhood and employment rather than in words. The racial reading is interpretive and rests on secondary and family sources; the paper also says, in its body, that jiu-jitsu became far more profitable than luta livre and lists class and racial position among the causes, without weighing them. |
| LIT-1392 v2 | Walking through doorways causes forgetting: Situation models and experienced space | Radvansky and Copeland (2006). In a desktop virtual environment, people carried objects from room to room; with distance held equal, walking through a doorway rather than across a large room raised errors and slowed recognition for the object being carried, but not for the object just set down. The authors read it as the updating of situation models at a spatial boundary. | Active — read in full 2026-10-22 (NOTE-1083) from the publisher’s free PDF at Springer (bronze open access); worth holding as the origin of the doorway effect and for what it actually found: a doorway, against walking as far within a room, raised errors and slowed answers for the object being carried, and did not affect the object just set down. The decisive experiment has 5 no-shift trials per condition, and the rooms on either side of a doorway also differed in size and wall pattern. Nothing in it concerns intentions; the explanation offered, the effort of updating a situation model, was later dropped by the same lab for interference. |
| LIT-1424 | The geometry of interpersonal synchrony in human dance | Bigand, Bianco, Abalde and Novembre (2024). Dyads of laypeople danced face to face in a “silent disco” while shared music (same or 8.5% tempo-shifted songs through earphones) and visual contact (a curtain or none) were varied in a 2 × 2 design. Of 15 principal movements from motion capture, four synchronized more with visual contact (lateral and hand movements), five more with shared music (anteroposterior movements such as head bobs) and one, vertical bounce, with both; no movement showed an interaction. The spatial direction of a movement classified which factor drove its synchrony; its periodicity did not. | Active — read in full 2026-10-23 (NOTE-1093) from PubMed Central (PMC11266842), the publisher’s CC BY text, with Figure 2 and the supplementary Document S1; worth reading as the cleanest human instance the record holds of shared drive and coupling manipulated separately in one collective: in 35 dyads dancing face to face, shared music and visual contact each raised synchrony, in different movement components and with no interaction, and the timing of the synchrony could not tell the two kinds apart while its spatial direction could (THEORY-891). Direction of coupling between the partners was not measured. |
| LIT-1851 | Nonequilibrium phase transitions in coordinated biological motion: critical fluctuations | Kelso, Scholz & Schöner (1986), Physics Letters A 118(6):279–284. In bimanual wrist and finger movement paced to rising frequency, the standard deviation of relative phase grows as the anti-phase pattern nears its switch to in-phase and peaks in the transition, while the in-phase pattern shows neither growth nor a switch: the critical fluctuations HKB’s stochastic extension predicts. Critical slowing is predicted, backed only by “very preliminary” spectral evidence, and left to later experiments. | Active — read 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1433) in full, from an offprint scan posted on Kelso’s lab page at Florida Atlantic University (https://ccs.fau.edu/hbblab/pdfs/Kelso_1986_PhysLettersA.pdf), read from the page images; worth reading as the first quantified report of critical fluctuations in human coordination: the standard deviation of relative phase rises before the anti-phase to in-phase switch and peaks in it, in wrist and finger experiments, with no such rise when the same movement starts in-phase. Read it knowing that its figures average a few subjects or show one representative subject, that it gives no statistical test, and that critical slowing and hysteresis are not measured in it. |
| LIT-1873 | Dynamics governs switching among patterns of coordination in biological movement | Kelso, Scholz & Schöner (1988), Physics Letters A 134(1):8–12. When people switch on cue between in-phase and anti-phase finger movement, the switch from in-phase to anti-phase takes about twice as long as the reverse (four subjects, each p < 0.0001), with a longer-tailed distribution. Adding to the stochastic HKB equation a term that pulls relative phase toward the intended pattern reproduces the asymmetry and the distributions’ shapes: intention acts within the pattern dynamics, not over them. | Active — read 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1449) in full, from the publisher’s PDF posted on Kelso’s lab page at Florida Atlantic University (https://ccs.fau.edu/hbblab/pdfs/1988_Kelso_Scholz_Schoner_Dynamics_governs_switching_among_pattern.pdf); worth reading as the experiment showing that an intended switch between bimanual patterns is shaped by their stability: switching from in-phase to anti-phase takes about twice as long as the reverse, with a longer tail, as the HKB dynamics with an added intentional term predicts. Read it knowing that it has four subjects, that the model’s one new parameter was set to match the order of magnitude of the switching times, and that the critical slowing it mentions is cited from an earlier paper, not shown. |
| LIT-1908 | Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance | Manning (2012/2013), Duke University Press. A philosophy of individuation after Simondon, Whitehead and James, developed through movement, art practice and autistic perception: bodies are “always more than one”, never complete individuals, but phases of ongoing individuation in relation. Unread: registered from metadata and the standard citation. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31, not read: no lawful full text was found. Duke’s copy (10.1215/9780822395829) and its De Gruyter and JSTOR copies are closed; OpenAlex reports no open location, and Project MUSE lists it as not open access. A “free download” page in web results was spam and was not used. |
| LIT-1918 | Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation | Massumi (2002), Duke University Press. Essays on movement, affect and sensation, built on “The Autonomy of Affect” (ch. 1), arguing that cultural theory must start from the body in movement and from affect as intensity rather than from positioned subjects and signification. Unread: registered from metadata and the standard citation. | Unavailable — registered 2026-10-31, not read: no lawful full text was found. Duke’s copy (10.1215/9780822383574) and its De Gruyter and JSTOR copies are closed, and OpenAlex reports no open location; the 2021 twentieth-anniversary edition (10.1215/9781478021971) is closed too. Only chapter 1, “The Autonomy of Affect”, sits on a course page, and a single chapter does not count (ADR-053); that essay is filed as LIT-1919. The passage the parent paper quotes (pp. 218–219) is not in that chapter. |